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musings of mark since 2001

Gov’t Won’t Order Public Terasen Hearings
Sep, 23 2005 - 3:50 PM

VICTORIA(CKNWAM980) - Energy Minister Richard Neufeld will not order expanded hearings into the proposed sale of Terasen gas.

The Opposition wants Neufeld to order the BC Utilities Commission to include public meetings as part of its review of the proposal, but Neufeld won’t do that. “We will see and they will monitor — the BC Utilities Commission — the amount of letters and e-mails that come in … and they’ll judge from that … whether there should be public hearings or not.”

Texas-based Kinder-Morgan wants to purchase Terasen for about $7-billion (Canadian). The current review process allows for written comments until Oct. 21. CKNW doesn’t help the citizens with any information or links, you can email commission.secretary@bcuc.com to register your views. I’ve started going through the comments submitted, and haven’t seen a positive one yet.

There was an interview along with a speech given in the past few days that probably won’t make the MSM, (Main Stream Media), as the first is from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the second was given by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. The differences between the President of Venezuela and the USA are striking. Watching the video of Chavez being interviewed for Democracy Now, during the breaks it seems that this is a leader that is well liked by his constituents and the elections were fairly held. Contrasted that to the USA where the voters are not allowed to see the tabulation, and outside scrutinizers to ascertain the fairness of the election are strictly verboten.

While the northern President was spending the first couple days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall eating cake and strumming a guitar, Chavez talks about being glued to the TV coverage of the disaster unfolding. While Vice-President Cheney was shopping for a new house and the poor were drowning in their, (rental), homes, Chavez filled two cargo planes with 18 generators for electricity, two mobile medical units, and tons of food and water. They are still sitting on the tarmac at the airport in Caracas, refused by the US govt. along with tons of food that actually landed in the States from Britain. That food was incinerated, burned to ash unused.

In step with Kennedy’s speech, Chavez nails the US for it’s waste and ecologically disastrous overtaking of the government by big corporations and neocons. He also invokes the Kennedy name along with Noam Chomsky and along the way offers hope that the public will one day control it’s own destiny.

It should be obvious why Hugo Chavez’s interview won’t make the MSM, would be simply explosive, as in it he talks about “The Miracle Project” created with the help of Fidel Castro of Cuban fame. This project is ready today, and at the disposal of the USA if it so desires:

“If you know someone - tomorrow when you show this broadcast this show and you have people who have eye problems and they cannot afford an eye surgery, please, go to the Venezuelan Consulate in the U.S. Go to the U.S. Embassy in Washington. Go to CITGO. We can guarantee the transportation of these people to Caracas and Havana free, totally free of charge.”

Well, might be difficult to get a plane out of the USA to Havana, but pretty sure they can make it to Caracas. The logistics of such an undertaking are mind boggling, but even if not a single person is able to take him up on the offer it must be remembered that there is nothing even remotely being offered by the US govt. of the same value to it’s poor.

The latest Google bombing is for Bush, google the single word: failure, and you get George Bush’s official White House biography page. It’s not going too well on any front for that administration, and going Back to Iraq again, our favourite reporter says it’s only getting worse. For the second year in a row, it’s the most dangerous place in the world to work as a journalist. Sixty-seven journalists have been killed there since March 2003, according to Reporters without Borders.

Summer is done for another year, the mornings have got that crisp air to them with dew soaking the lawns and watering not needed once more. The physical part of my day has kind of morphed over the summer from being the lead maintenance person at the marina to landscaper. The change is mainly due to a new employee that’s a real keener on fixing things and is quite talented at it too. Good with electronics and, (at first anyways, like anyone, we all tend to avoid the kitchen’s grease-out), doesn’t mind getting a little work done.

For most of the summer, outside work was a mix of fixing and doing the lawn mowing thing, but in the last while the English Gardener hasn’t been around and doing more of that sort of work myself. With winter coming on, there’s plenty to do with the cottages to get them ready, no one else likes to go on the roofs much and heights have never bothered me. Hot on the restaurant roof this summer though, as a couple years of ivy got trimmed off by moi as part of the landscaping improvements.

More work coming in on the web development front as well, have been answering some ads on the local Craig’s List and things are starting to percolate. With summer over, everyone is getting back in to the work frame of mind as well so expect the back ground work I did this summer to pan out into a few things. It’s becoming more common knowledge know I think amongst the business community as a whole, that xhtml and css layouts are the way to go for those that have a heavy bandwidth bill.

There are a heck of a lot of web sites and CMS systems that need to be converted out there. I don’t think for myself I will worry too much anymore in the near future about which CMS to use for clients requesting them, the selection available now is a good mix from dead simple to massively complex and all of them are going to be blown out of the water as soon as PHP 5 starts being available from most hosts.

MG Web Services is still in the holding pattern with PHP5 for now, waiting for just a bit more of a gold release for production servers before upgrading everyone. On the development servers the change over is a breeze code-wise, and unlike the change-over from php3 to 4, there doesn’t seem like a need this time around to have that number at the end of the extension so people don’t mess up - imho they did a very good job of redoing PHP in C with good OOP support this time around. Not an expert, but their methodology makes sense to those that aren’t experts, and that can’t be anything but a good thing.

Not sure how over the top this is, but certainly an odd location for putting refugees in, and the language reminds us of the prejudices that exist to this day down south.

And things aren’t going any better over at the dome either according to this post at the Liberty Forum. Some are talking directly back to the interlopers as Chaney gets told to go f*ck himself on this viral video.

Even the staid folks over at the Washington Post are jumping on the bandwagon with the headline: U.S. Censoring Katrina Coverage. Not so with our local rag, ever in lock step with the aggrandizement of corporations even on the backs of a disaster as Michael Fellman points out.