Friday, June 29, 2012

Sack PSAC

PSAC can blow me. You can put that on a button.

I could care less what PSAC thinks about the Prime Minister. They can display thier stupidity as much as they want on thier own time.

I prefer it actually. The beauty of free speech is that somebody that says something wrong or stupid is immediatly outed by thier own words. Tell me what you think. I want to know. Tell me if you are an idiot leftist.

If you wear that button on the public dime, I agree with Sandy Crux, you should be considered as part of the cutbacks.

Firing a civil servant for political demonstration after a warning is fair game. There isn't even a risk of losing a voter. It's win/ win. PASC does't win of course. They are the problem. If you let the problem win then you havn't solved it.

There is a lesson for the government in this story. You can't please the left. You can't. Don't even try. They will fight against you no matter what you do.

Even if you borrow and spend billions. Even when you grow the size of government. They will never be pleased with a Conservative. They will always be the enemy.

So pretty please, with sugar on top, this voter asks you to shrink the defecit and PSAC. They are complimentary goals where everyone wins. Cut PSAC now.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

RIP Ray Bradbury

Everyone who knows Ray Bradbury has their favorite works of his.  He was one of the fathers of Science Fiction along with Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Hienlein and others.

My Favorite was a 1950 short story "August 2026: There will come soft rains."  I first read it in grade school.  I still think about this story.  It stayed fresh in my mind all that time. 

I have one of those iRobot cleaning droids in my house.  It is set to clean the ground floor every morning at 3 am.  It always reminds me of this very story.  All the gadgets in my house from the dishwasher to the iPad makes me think we are almost there.  Another 14 years and fully automated houses could really be a possibility.    Its too bad the threat of nuclear war is still here and in the hands of maniacs.

RIP Ray Bradbury.  May his forsight be averted.

Here is the entire story.  4 pages.  Enjoy.













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"August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950) 1

Ray Bradbury

In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to
get up, seven o'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The
clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time,
seven-nine!

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior
eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two
coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

"Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of
Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr.
Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are
the water, gas, and light bills."

Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But
no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The
weather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…"
And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.

Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait
the door swung down again.

At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge
scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and
flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and
emerged twinkling dry.

Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.

Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small
cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached
runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they
popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of
rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a
radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air
with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west
side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the
house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here,
as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood
in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball,
and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest
was a thin charcoaled layer.

The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.

1 Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1985), 166-172.


2


Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "Who
goes there? What's the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it
had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old maidenly preoccupation with self-protection
which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade
snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in
choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

Twelve noon.

A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.

The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but
now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind
it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the
copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel
jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped
into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.

The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house
realized, that only silence was here.

It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making
pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.

The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran
wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

Two o'clock, sang a voice.

Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray
leaves in an electrical wind.

Two-fifteen.

The dog was gone.

In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.

Two thirty-five.

Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of
pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.

But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.

At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.

Four-thirty.

The nursery walls glowed.

Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in
crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films
docked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven to
resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot
still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! There
was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a
purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like
other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of


3


parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and
water holes.

It was the children's hour.

Five o'clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.

Six, seven, eight o'clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study
a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped
out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.

Nine o'clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.

Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:

"Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?"

The house was silent.

The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random."
Quiet music rose to back the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite….

"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
if mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone."


The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its
tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.

At ten o'clock the house began to die.

The wind blew. A failing tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning
solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!

"Fire!" screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the
ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the
voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"

The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by
the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.

The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease
from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls,
pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.

But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased.
The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like
delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!


4


And then, reinforcements.

From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green
chemical.

The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were
twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.

But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the
pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze
shrapnel on the beams.

The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.

The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its
wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries
quiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winter
ice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high,
low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their
sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.

In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The
panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished
off toward a distant steaming river....

Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses,
oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control
mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a
thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or
after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning
mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard
for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the
wires withered and the circuits cracked.

The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.

In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making
breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips,
which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!

The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into
sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a
cluttered mound deep under.

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall,
a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped
rubble and steam:

"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…"


Governor Scott Walker's Enhanced Mandate

Wisconsin has voted to keep Governor Scott Walker.  Congratulations Wisconsin!  He not only has an electoral mandate, he now has an enhanced super mandate.

Governor Walker famously removed collective bargaining from public sector employees.  We all know that government jobs (excluding armed services) are filled with gravy and perks that folks in the private sector only dream about.  Those same private sector workers are the ones forced to pay for all these perks.  This is not fair.  I envy Wisconsin and their brave leader Scott Walker.


Not only did he free the tax payer from unlimited theft by these unions, he also balanced the budget.  It's not impossible, even in this economy.  He has turned a $3.6 billion deficit into a 154.5 million surplus without raising taxes one penny.  Unemployment in Wisconsin is 6.7% against the US average of 8.2%. Even average income is higher in Walker's Wisconsin beating the US national average by 0.5%.

The single most informing statistic about the Wisconsin recall is this one:

Wisconsin membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees-the state's second-largest public-sector union after the National Education Association, which represents teachers-fell to 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March 2011 (via American Thinker)
That is just over a 54% drop.  Public Sector Union members in Wisconsin were given the choice to be a member or nonmember.  Amazing.  The clear majority of unionized employees were involuntary members.  If you've been in a unionized environment in Canada, you know that union membership is forced on all employees whether you want it or not.  It is a clear sign that Unions are parasites on the workers they purport to represent.  This is why Unions must have the dictatorial privilege to force entire shops and job sites into membership.  The involuntary membership privilege is a key existential factor to the way unions operate around the world.  Imagine if unions had to win the trust and cooperation of their membership to gather and keep members?  Imagine how they would change for the better?

This is the reason that the big unions tried to recall Governor Walker.  Wisconsin is the example that could not be allowed to stand.  900,000 signatures were collected over 2 months by the big unions to force the recall. 

The union sponsored recall attempt not only failed, it has given Governor Scott Walker a resounding democratic mandate to keep doing what he is doing.  Walker has won the recall by 8 points, more than he won the original election.  The people want more! 



Sunday, June 3, 2012

No Mulcair "Attack" Ads

A few weeks ago some of the people in the opinion business were wondering aloud why the CPC wasn't running ads about Mulcair. 

I had a theory but I didn't want to spoil it.  The NDP sure delivered though.

The Beard has come out hard against western provinces and Alberta's Oil Sands in particular.  He intends to wade into Bank of Canada territory and start managing fiscal policy.  Its a bad and stupid idea for government to directly intervene in monetary policy to begin with.  The NDP's best idea is to devalue the currency (didn't Glenn Beck say this was coming?). 

Mulcair and the NDP actually believe that a strong Canadian dollar killed manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec.  They must have missed the fact that manufacturing on both sides of the border went to China and other cheaper places.  President Obama and the Fed have done as much to inflate the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar as anything else.  This only proves that left wing ideology is entirely capable of making good things worthless. They should also have to prove that destroying the part of the economy that works, will somehow force the part that doesn't to burst into activity.

Has anyone asked The Beard what happens to his plan of attack on the west if the Eurozone starts to default?  The NDP may find their monetary policies difficult to enforce if the Euro beats them to it.

There are so many holes in NDP goals that you have to conclude they nuts or they think their supporters are nuts.  This is why no ads are needed for Mulcair.  He's doing a fantastic job on his own!   

The NDP want your money to be worth less on purpose.  I don't suppose employers will raise wages nor will merchants ignore inflation in any part of the country.  This is right up the NDP alley actually.  You can see why they would want to tip this country into turmoil.  The employers of the east won't raise wages and won't go on hiring sprees to restore times gone by.  An NDP regime would then declare war on employers, foisting unrestricted union mayhem and wage controls on a reeling economy.  Inflation will go through the ceiling as our wealth plummets.  The NDP (and Soros) will achieve their objective in spades.  Next they would turn to price controls causing shortages and spawning black markets. 

The only western democracy to remain relatively unscathed by the great recession would succumb entirely on purpose.  The stages of terminal socialism are well documented.  I don't doubt that the collapsing dominoes of the PIIGS defaulting on their sovereign debt would trigger a second recession.  But I expect that losing a pillar of stability like Canada to the same sort of ignorant insanity touted by the NDP could also trigger a world wide recession or depression. 

Mulcair and the NDP aren't just dangerous to Albertans or Westerners or every Canadian.  The damage they intend to cause could harm the whole world.  The rich will be poor and the poor will be dead.  Thanks Tommy!  Who needs "Attack" ads when the real thing is bad enough?