Friday 16 December 2011

Grandpa Daniel

Hi everyone,

Shortly after 10 PM, December 15, BC time Christine gave birth to a beautiful baby boy!

Ethan Daniel is my new grandson's name.

Christine, Ryan and new son are doing fine.  I even got a chance to hear a very squawky baby over the phone, simply adorable.

--
Grandpa Daniel

Thursday 15 December 2011

Working in Ottawa Today --Waitin' on The Lil' Lwowski

Good morning citizens, I will be working in Ottawa today.
I have two topics today, the Mission is over in Iraq news from Obama over the last few days, and the resistance to arrive of my grandchild.
First things first the Lil' Lwowski is on his or her own schedule and will exit the comfort of mommy's womb when the moment is right.  I must say it is very odd for me to think of my little girl having a child of her own, but just before too many eyebrows raise and lips ask, "just how old is your daughter?", she is certainly past the age of majority, a few years older than her sister and been married for a couple years.  Yes, the time is right for her and Ryan (the Big Lwowski?).
Nevertheless, it is still odd for me.  I still remember the day that Christine emerged into this world, a magical moment indeed, all in one moment, a brand new person here and all of the wonder, awe, worry, anticipation, self doubt, hope, happiness and the glad-to-carry responsibility that a young father can hold.  I must say, other than those evil teenage years, I have always enjoyed being Dad to Christine and Jennifer and although right now Christine believes that she will be pregnant forever, before she knows it, she will be a Mom and I will be a GrandFather.
Hang in the sweetheart, just another day or so.
In the meantime, here are a few quips for you and Ryan (other can read and enjoy too).
(There is a rather large BCC list to my morning emails composed of non-Distributel staff email addresses.  Friends, family, legal counsel, etc)
-I heard of your newest development, congratulations on being creative!
-Sit down, I think it's time we had a talk, babies don't actually get delivered by a stork.
-If you think you are ready for a baby, try putting a pair of underwear on a cranky kangaroo.  In the dark.
-In a few short years you'll be saying, "because I said so!".
There are probably more gems, but you two will discover them on your own.
----------------------------------------
And then there is Iraq.
And then there is democracy.
Now that the Iraq war is over, I imagine that means that objectives of the war have been satisfied and Iraq is settling in to it's new found democracy.  First, how about a quick review of the Bush regime's reasons for the war and how we scored.
The number one reason was of course Regime Change. Because,
Saddam was evil, like Dr. Evil. Killed his own people, gassed them, violated their rights.
Saddam ignored UN resolutions calling for disarming and inspections of..
Weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda and had something to do with 9/11.
Iraq was buying aluminum tubes.
We couldn't wait for a mushroom cloud.
Well let's do a really quick analysis of the reasons.  Yep, a son of a bitch, but he always was, and the CIA and Cheney were his buddies and they supplied him with gas and tactical advice on how to deal with Kurd uprisings.
The whole WEAPONS OF DOOM thing was always bullshit. So reasons 2, 3, 5, and 6 are of the same animal excrement.  The Yellow Cake Uranium story was a nice bit of fiction too. How did that one play out?  Some used car dealer in Africa reported that his cousin that runs a scrapyard had a friend that was at a poker table with the guy that cleaned Saddam's chemical lab that heard a guy that traded his name for a number on the phone pretending to order a pizza and asked for extra anchovies.  The code word for Yellow Cake Uranium!  Oh yeah, Yellow Cake is lousy for use in a bomb.  You'll actually want U235 enriched plutonium and some TNT and a stainless steel ball about 3 feet in diameter and one about 6 inches, but you didn't hear that from me.
And number 4.. Nope, there were no ties to AQ, and no involvement in 9/11.  Even Cheney confirmed that in a CNN interview prior to the war, and even claimed that there was no reports of ties, yet we all heard both him and his lap dog George blame Saddam for it.  We knew right away that those responsible were from Saudi Arabia.
So why?
Well it gave Bush something to do, much too much of a pussy to pull US troops out of SA, America industry would have crucified him, as it needs SA oil more than Iraq oil.  Yeah baby, Bush was a war president -taking care of business, bring it on!
It was a good distraction too from a tanked economy, and the corporate horrors of Enron, Harken, Halliburton and Worldcom.  And a very strong reason for the US was to maintain the strength of the Saudis.  This can only be done by ensuring a permanent US military presence in the middle east, esp. in Saudi Arabia.  The Saudi royals are hated by the people and the Saudi Gov't will fail without US military support.
Bush 41 used the Kuwait invasion as a foothold, King Saud was convinced by George that Saddam had amassed troops on the Saudi border ready for invasion, of course Russian satellite images showed only empty desert and now since the Iraq warm the US has permanent military bases in SA.
Mission accomplished!
-----------------------------
A few closers on democracy, these of course can only be learned on the road to developing democracy.
A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough 
to take everything you have.
-- Thomas Jefferson
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people
 may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by 
the corrupt few.
-- George Bernard Shaw
They derive consolation from being supervised by thinking they have chosen their own supervisors. Every individual tolerates being tied down because  he sees that it is not another man nor a class of people holding the end of the chain, but society itself...
-- Tocqueville
At the present time, many people fall in with this type of compromise between a despotic administration and the sovereignty of the people and they think they have sufficiently safeguarded individual freedom when they surrendered it to a national authority. That is not good enough for me. The character of the master is much less important to me than the fact of obedience.
-- Tocqueville


Have a good day.

Friday 9 December 2011

Working in Toronto today --Who was worse, McCarthy, Wakefield or Midgley?

Good morning folks,
I did not travel yesterday, hence no email alerting all where I was.  I had travelled to Ottawa earlier in the week and left myself open to the option of traveling to BC should my daughter and her husband notify me that I am a grampa.  The call has not come yet, so here I am at my desk.
This thought of new babies did have me start thinking about the environment that a new baby comes into and then I started thinking about the question,  "who has been worse for our children, Andrew Wakefield,  or Thomas Midgley Jr.?".  Unlike my usual morning emails which are written in their entirety during flight, this one was actually written last night, except for this intro.  I have just been too busy this A.M. to send it out.
I could include Jenny McCarthy in the question for variety and after all, she was a Playboy Playmate, but she is small spuds compared to Wakefield and Midgley.

Let's start with Midgley.  This is the guy that put lead in gasoline for several decades.  The reason for the additive was to prevent early ignition of the fuel-air mixture as it enters the hot upper cylinder on a vehicle engine.  The lead made the mixture a bit less volatile, just enough to stop pre-ignition 'ping'.  Of course a bit of alcohol would do the exact same thing.  The difference is that alcohol is made of the elements Hydrogen, Carbon and Oxygen.  When you burn it in an internal combustion engine you get water and carbon dioxide.  The lead additive, Tertaethyllead, on the other hand is made of the elements Carbon, Hydrogen and Lead.  When you burn it, the lead remains.  Lead in the air, lead in our water, lead on sidewalks, lampposts, the crap gets everywhere.  We continue to enjoy high atmospheric lead levels thanks to Midgley and the associated health problems including slow talking southerners.
Oh, but that's not all.  Midgley also brought us synthesized Dichlorofluoromethane /Die-Kloro-Floro-Methane/ to work as a refrigerant or more precisely a phase change gas suitable to transport heat.  Now granted that this first CFC (chlorofluorocarbon) was safer from an explosion than early refrigerator usage of ammonia, propane and sulpher dioxide, this and other CFCs did find their way into our high atmosphere and destroyed large parts of our protective ozone layer resulting in serious health problems.
Midgley may have had the greatest (worst) impact on the earth and atmosphere than any other single organism.  Go Midgley!
And then there is Wakefield.  You likely don't know of this *sswipe either.  Wakefield is a former surgeon and medical researcher.  He was the author of a 1998 fraudulent research paper that claimed a link between childhood vaccinations and Autism.
Yep, this is the guy that started the whole goddamned scare.  That much since discredited paper used as its test subjects, 12 children that were recruited by a UK lawyer that was preparing a lawsuit against a vaccine manufacturer and Wakefield himself was poised to start a business of medical testing and 'litigation driven testing'.  The tests were found by the British General Medical Council review board to contain falsehoods, that Wakefield failed in his duties and he was struck from the Medical Register.
His report effects linger on however, the anti-vaccine movement which is not based on real science but rather the spirited personal accounts of the likes of Jenny McCarthy that still spouts on about the discredited link between Autism and the MMR vaccine; and that wrestler turned governor turned conspiracy nut Jesse Ventura that would have us convinced that the gov't wants to thin out the human heard by way of Trojan Horse vaccines has convinced otherwise well meaning parents to not vaccinate.
Trust me, failing to vaccinate our children is extremely dangerous, Measles, Pertussis, Rubella, Polio, Tetanus, all kill children or leave them crippled.  My friend Doug was born in 1951, he contracted Polio and was very lucky to survive, he does however have a left leg that has severely reduced muscle development.  Jonas Salk developed the Polio vaccine in 1952.  If you contract Tetanus even with modern treatment, I'll bet $20 against your $100 that you will die.  Oh, and die in a really painful way.  Last year there was a breakout of Whooping Cough (Pertussis) in Washington state in non-vaccinated children, that is what happens when we fail to vaccinate, children die.

Have a good day, vaccinate your children.


P.S.


Jenny McCarthy was awarded the James Randi Educational Foundation Pigasus Award (a pseudoscience  contribution award) for 'The performer that fooled the greatest number of people with the least effort'.  Go Jenny!  With her appearances on TV shows d'jour she has convinced millions to forgo vaccinations without ANY scientific evidence.

Tuesday 6 December 2011

Working in Ottawa today --War on Children

Good morning folks,
More shaking up of my tried and true schedule.  Heading off to the Ottawa office for the day.
So now that Toronto's war on the automobile is over, Mayor Rob "F*cking" Ford..
--The mayor renamed himself recently during a call to 911.  I believe it was, "Don't you know who I am?  I am Rob "F*cking" Ford, the Mayor of this city!". Prior, he was known as Rob "Fat F*ck" Ford--
..but I digress, Mayor Ford has launch the new WAR ON CHILDREN.
If my column was on CNN, I would have special graphics floating across the screen.  WAR ON CHILDREN.  
That's right kids, the Mayor himself has set target on you.  Starting this summer if you want to go swimming at the outdoor wading and swimming pools, you'll need to pay $2.  This will be interesting economics, as most of the outdoor wading and swimming pools have no staff to collect the $2, just some staff to come by and check the water chemistry.  Perhaps one of the newly unemployed city staff can volunteer?
Next, if you kids think you can just hang out at the library and sign out documentaries, learning material and other non-feature DVDs, think again.. The libraries will adopt a new BlockBuster video style DVD rental business, this comes at a great time as the BlockBuster store near Etobicoke's Burnhamthorpe Road library has just closed, I'm sure the library can hire the unemployed manager on the cheap!
Oh yes, in an odd bit of twisty logic,  Budget Chief Michael Del Grande notes that we are primarily English speaking in Toronto, and so he logically questions why the libraries should be spending money on ESL programs. "We're spending tons of money on ESL, should we not have a discussion on spending money on non-English resources?".  Perhaps he doesn't know what ESL means.  I can't make this stuff up.
And lastly, ambulances will get [to their destinations] slower. They are already 3 minutes longer than their target, and with the budget reductions they can only get slower.
On wait, that's a war on us all.
Have a good day.