12:25 a.m. - 2002-10-11
Scorpions
It snowed last night - more on the way. It's about 0 C/32 F. The temperature is supposed to go back up into the high teens C/ mid to high 60's F. by Saturday, so everything will melt in short order. I don't mind cold weather, especially not when I think about some of the trials people in hot places put up with. One of the e-mail newsletters I receive had a piece on the best way to deal with scorpions in tonight's edition. The writer was quite humorous and I giggled through her descriptions - complete with sound effects - but venomous beasts aren't something I want to deal with. My cousin in Northern Australia regales us with tales of crocs and vipers in his swimming pool and admits his home is up on stilts - to reduce traffic you see. One of my neighbours is from the Philipines. One morning, when it was -30 C, a group of us at the bus stop were bemoaning the cold. He piped up and said he much preferred blizzards to hurricanes. His description of helplessness against Mother Nature (board up your windows, get your rosary and a case of beer and start praying) was enough to make us appreciate our own situation wasn't all that bad. All we have to do to cope is wear about 20 pounds of warm clothing. The bonus being, for four to six months, that there is no such thing as figure/weight problems, since all that can be seen is the tip of one's nose.
Things are getting a little snarly in the city. Cab drivers took over a city council meeting the other night. No violence, just good old civil disobedience - bless Thoreau for the ideas and Gandhi for their application. Can't blame them really. There are three companies that have been given total control of most of the licences that allow someone to drive a taxi in Calgary. The result of the monopoly is that there is poor service and fixed prices for the public. For the drivers, untenable working conditions and exorbitant fees are attached to being "allowed" the use of a licence. This came about nearly 15 years ago, after huge campaign donations to a number of successful candidates to city council. The practice has continued, so even though the highest court in Alberta has upheld rulings made by all the lower courts on the issue over the past five years, the city fathers refuse to comply by creating free market conditions as directed. Instead City Council has appealed it to the Supreme Court of Canada, using hundreds of thousands of taxpayers dollars in the process.
On the ambulance issue: the Premier of our Provincial government stated that he considered ambulances "medical facilities" in their own right, so therefore, no more hospital beds or ambulances were necessary. They are now interchangeable I guess. This is the same politician who had the one hospital that was central enough to serve most of the inner city blown up because there were too many hospital beds in Calgary. At the same time, two other tax-payer owned hospitals in Calgary (that had recently been upgraded with millions of taxpayers dollars) were sold off to colleagues of his government. Now he is musing aloud that perhaps his government should take control over ambulance services in order to "even things out". I wonder if that means he'll sell them off like the hospitals or just fire anyone who raises concerns like the chief medical officer who was let go for supporting the Kyoto Protocol.
A poll run by one of the local television stations asked if Calgarians supported military action against Saddam Hussein. Over 50% said no. The local newspapers have tried to frame this response as anti-Americanism or cowardice but responders don't see it that way.
If saying no really meant "anti" anything, it would also have to include anti-British since our country is also not falling in with their government's choices. If that were the case, Queen Elizabeth, visiting Canada to celebrate her 50 years as our honorary head of state, wouldn't be drawing the huge crowds and daily front page headlines that have been the norm for the past week. As far as cowardice, 10% of all Canadians fought in WW II starting in 1939 - more than two years before the US got involved. We have Korean war vets, and our military has served as peace keepers in some of the most volatile areas of the world such as the Middle East and Bosnia.
Mostly, those voting don't see how targeting one dictator among a dozen equally evil dictators is going to stop the problems with terrorism. The dollars for most of the groups seem to come mostly through Syria - a country never mentioned in the discussion. Most of the leaders in terrorism seem to be coming from Saudi Arabia, if news reports are accurate. Pakistan and India have already demonstrated they have nuclear weapons and that they are itching to use them. Libya's Ghadafi has openly used biological weapons on his own people and has factories manufacturing it. It is believed that Egypt has the same capacity too.
Hussein is definitely an evil man but, then again, he has been that way since his first coup d'etat in 1956. There was even a time when he was presented as the poster boy savior of the western world when the Ayatollah Khomeini was doing his thing in Iran. So which is it and what makes now any different? Until the populations of these countries are brought to understand that their leaders have invested trillions of their country's dollars into armaments while knowingly allowing their populations go hungry, and until their citizens realize that their real exploiters are their own leaders, nothing will change. One dead man will just be made into a martyr so that more men like him will carry on, citing his "martyrdom" as their raison d'etre.
Scorpions and other venomous beasts actually seem rather tame in context don't they?
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