The Thought Salesman

Well, the American Election is tomorrow night, and I thought it would be nice to talk about contemporary trends that I (a layman) see in politics; most notably that red is a colour on the downslope.

Well, the Canadian election turned out a predictable result: Conservative Minority.

Stephane Dion, a Doctor of laws, was made out to be an insane bumbler by the Conservative party, and it worked. Dion’s political career is essentially over, and he is resigning as leader of the party as soon as a new leader is chosen.

This fall Canadians are going to the polls to decide who will run the country. Likely this will play sideshow to the American election, despite the gravity of these times.

Elections should be about one thing, and that’s deciding the way the country should be run. It shouldn’t matter if a candidate is good with children, or eats children; it should be about that candidate’s vision for Canada’s future, and their plans to bring about that future.

John McCain has just shown how cunning he truly is. He has appointed Sarah Palin, the relatively young Governor of Alaska.

Palin, a political unknown, is immune to attacks on her record, as she has a very short record. Similar to how Obama, with his short history is nearly beyond professional suspicion, so his enemies attacked him personally instead.

As Canadians we have a unique position in this upcoming US election. The position that we occupy is that of the observer, not the sort of observer that watches from afar like a person watching the column of smoke from a far off fire, but rather the sort of observer that sees something happening up close, like someone looking through their fenceposts to see a neighbour’s barbeque fire. And like the second observer, we learn important lessons, such as not going overboard on the lighter fluid.

Everyone knows by now that there are problems in Tibet. Whether you heard it on the news, or in the paper, or even if you have family back in China, the message is the same, Tibet is rioting. It is very rare in any struggle for one side to be completely right while the other is completely wrong, and from what we are fed in the west by our news media, this appears to be one of those times. China, a superpower in its own right, is oppressing the people of an alien nation that it has greedily annexed. That is what we are to learn from even the most prominent western news stations.

Please take the time to read (or scan through a couple of) these links:

http://www.doctorspiller.com/nursing_bottle_syndrome.htm
http://ultimateparenting.com/child_behavior_2_6.html
http://www.parenting.com/article/Mom/Health/Eating-Green-1201726268247
http://www.todaysparent.com/lifeasparent/parenting/article.jsp?content=2...
http://www.readersdigest.ca/cms/xcms/why-every-parent-should-be-on-faceb...

What do all of these articles have in common?

1. They are all directed towards parents
2. They are on the internet
3. They all offer advice

I think that it’s safe to say that in Canada, every city has a distinctly different culture. This is due to many things, mainly the distance between major cities, and the relative isolation that exists between every Canadian urban centre.

Toronto is radically different from Ottawa, and Ottawa from Montreal, and Montreal from Halifax, etc.

In 2006 Mayor Larry O’Brien took office in Ottawa, proving that under Ottawa’s unspoken cultural guidelines, a spoiled inexperienced rich-boy could rule the city.

This is just an example of what is being played on American news:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36T1fnIafC0&feature=related

Barrack Obama, who until recently has been criticised for being given an ‘easy time’ by the media, has now come under intense fire for belonging to this man’s church, and considering him his friend.

Well, my blog has been neglected lately, and has seemed to focus on my fight to create a Men’s Resource Centre (which has received negative criticism by the SFUO members, individual sexists, and people who disapprove of me calling out people with sexist attitudes), so today’s blog will focus on the internet’s user-friendliest search engine, Google.