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musings of mark since 2001

Gave the “old” theme a re-work from the inside out and it’s all xhtml strict now, the css file is much smaller and completely redone in my own optimized style as well. Ditto with the xhtml, very few indentation or tab spaces in the markup - just enough to delineate where the content area starts for example. There is still a div or two I can get rid of, along with their “class-itus”, but it’s much more my style now.

Comments are on, didn’t like the way the existing Captcha plug-ins for WP work and nothing but spam filters running for now. Have started writing my own plug-in with a simple Captcha, no spam yet anyways.

Yesterday the Finance Minister released the latest budget; the Main Stream Media and their talking heads on Global TV dutifully repeated exactly what they government wants them to say and simply repeated the words the government wrote without a word of question. Independent media paints a very different picture of the budget, and to me the govt. sounds like they are laying the groundwork for the the next election in 2009 and winter Olympics in 2010. Got to keep those ugly pictures of homeless people away from the international media eh.

The numbers sound big when repeated verbatim by the talking heads, but a closer inspection reveals a further placement of blame on the poor and middle class, and expectations that they fix things themselves with a few hundred dollars extra in their pockets. The richest get the biggest breaks too of course, for example the 10% income tax cut is not actually 10% for anyone as the talking heads would have you believe. In reality it works out that those with incomes of under 50K/year getting a little over a 3% tax cut while those above get a little over an 8% tax cut, so they can come up with a combined figure of about a 10% cut “for all individuals”, which of course sounds much better on TV than 3%. The talking heads don’t mention that with the cuts and/or shorted budgets to other programs in the end it will cost more, not less to live in this Province.

Meanwhile down south there are still a few honest people left trying to make a difference in their government with Ron Paul stating the facts about the privately owned “Federal” Reserve taking their dollar that was worth a dollar in 1913 to about 4 cents today. The Representative from that enlightened state called Oregon, is calling the nut bars in power the “Klingon’s in the Whitehouse” and is now available not only from C-Span but also the internet and You Tube.

Further afield, it appears that everything is in place for the next war and the attack on Iran is but a small intentional mistake (it’s like the Gulf of Tonkin all over again) to start killing yet more innocent people in a country far away and diplomacy and common sense is no where to be found. Strange things abound everywhere here, the new Red Cross billboards and web site are a fear monger’s wet dream with actual dates of disasters on them, you’ve got to keep the public scared after all if you want to be able to control them.

One cold night an exhausted mother with two suitcases tied together with rope shows up at the front desk and says, “I am here for my son.” And so it begins.

Well, sort of fails - all seems to be well following exactly the information from their upgrade page. Only the header shows up though, so a good place to check is that my theme isn’t compatible with the upgrade. Will try later today using the default theme, then change over to mine and see what happens.

Tomorrow we will once again get treated to the manure that passes for our Provincial govt., in the form of a budget handed down from on high from the Finance Minister - wearing her $600 red Gucci shoes which she proudly proclaimed on TV tonight were recycled from last year. Aw, poor thing, she has to wear last years shoes with her long string of pearls and expensively stylish glasses.

No doubt there will be platitudes towards the elite class in the form of yet more cuts to the Health Care system which in the past 25 years or so has been cut across the country year after year. The Health Care portion of the budget has been in such a decline, our Children’s Hospital has regular lotteries to help pay operating expenses. Never thought I’d see the day when gambling was required to help the sick and injured children in this Province but here we are today in just that position.

And we can’t forget to cut Social programs as well: the media controlled by the elite reports the number of people on welfare is steadily declining in this Province, when in fact the number of people that need it has gone up and the real reason the number of people collecting is that it is almost impossible to get when you really need it. If there comes a time when you do swallow your pride and the stigma of “being on the dole”, and jump through the myriad of hoops they place in front of you in order to collect the meager amount, it falls well short of what one needs to survive. They may even garnish your wages when you go back to work to claw back what was a temporary safety net, even while they wonder why there is such a large mass of people wandering the streets of downtown Vancouver. Those that are drug addicted, the homeless, mentally in need of help, or just plain down and out are pointed at by the media and blamed for the “failure” of the Downtown East Side.

Tonight our independent news outlet, The Tyee has for the front page an article titled: The real story is a provincial budget skewed by deep cuts to welfare, local government and transportation. And it’s not only a Provincial phenomenon, the power elite and their neocon friends have been hammering away in the press claiming the whole country is in a Health Care “crises”, when in fact the expenditures for Health Care as a percentage of the GDP has gone down year after year, not up. Just one more way for the rich to get richer and if you can afford it private health care is already here for you in Canada with the poor paying the tab for them, some of them gambling in the lottery to do it.

Please don’t get me started about parents both working to simply own a home and paying for the things kids need for school under our “free” education system, enough atrocities on our own back door for one day.