No. Some mathematician has said that the enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in the finding it. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part Two, Section Fourteen, Constance Garnett translation
One thing that the Oracle of Ottawa is most certain of is that Canada has a lot of rocks. We have more rocks than oil, more rocks then the Arabs have sand, and more rocks then the Asians have rice. We have white rocks, black rocks and rocks in between that are every shade, hue, and pattern. We have hot rocks and cold rocks, soft rocks and hard rocks. Come to think of it we have more rocks than trees and Canada has trees up the ass.
Geothermal - The Next Big Thing?
It is most ironical that the line that the 'Harper Government' mocked the young Justin Trudeau the most over was his promise for a carbon tax and credit system if he ever formed government in October 2015. Well here we are only a few short months away and oil has tanked to under fifty dollars a barrel. And if the Americans cut a deal with the Iranians, all bets will be off, oil could scrape under ten dollars a barrel! Well so much for peak production and that it is all down hill from here...
It seems that it is even catching on out west. The oil industry is begging for a carbon tax and credit system. It is most likely that someone actually checked out the facts and rediscovered that Canada is a potential geothermal powerhouse of the world. And they know that this is a good ride of business, just ask anyone from Iceland! Those oil wildcatters never throw anything away, and that includes the memories of those many hot holes that never finished out to oil producers. Why sometimes the temperatures were in the hundreds of degrees.
When you come to think of it, geothermal and oil would go great together as a concurrent ongoing business model. When the oil price tanks, you could just go and work those hot holes, and it would be a great way to us up some of that stranded gas. You know a cogen turbine with geothermal assist. Plus the carbon credits of carbon free geothermal would certainly please the unit holders at dividend payout days! There could be a whole new industrial paradigm in the creation here...
I'm beginning to weary of fruitlessly championing the truth, and sometimes I am quite unhinged by it. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 1, Section Thirty Two, Constance Garnett Translation.
It doesn't happen often in Ottawa that an issue arises where every level of government rises up in an uproar, but that is exactly what happened when the 'Harper Government' announced the building of the Victims of Communism monument, at a site that was reserved for the new Supreme Court Building, located at the most prime location in downtown Ottawa. This was no doubt done to celebrate the 'Harper Government's many successes pleading before this august body.
proposed victims of communism monument...
The local burg(h)ers of Ottawa would be even more alarmed if they did their research a little deeper and discovered that the said monument stands to raise a ton of cash far in excess of its initial costs. There has been no report from the 'Harper Government' where the said hoped for excesses are going to go.. As always in Ottawa if there is even the semblance of smoke you can be utterly certain that at some point there will be fire. You see Dear Reader, if you are so inclined to celebrate the memory of a long gone "loved ones" misfortune of running into communism, you can have the loved ones name inscribed on the above mentioned monster, or rather monument, for a very small fee, not un-adjacent to one thousand dollars! Why just do the math! The sky is the limit!
Now in Canada there has been very many social systems in vogue over the many years that Canada has been a Colony and later as a nation state. The first system that was found in use by Native Canadians was the tribal system. Then the French brought feudalism, that had a hell of a run from 1600 until well into the beginning of the 20th century! Along the way we also experimented with indentured labor and even slavery, just like in the United States! But the hands down winner was of course the best worst system of good old capitalism. And in the early days it was rabid tooth and claw, right out of Das Kapital as written by Karl Marx.
You had the lumber barons, the rail barrens, the press barons, and of course you had the mighty banking barons. And they have nearly all carried on into the kinder and gentler world of today, many of them such as say the Bank of Nova Scotia in there unbroken histories... But we never tried communism in Canada at all, not even once, that the Oracle of Ottawa is aware of. So The Oracle of Ottawa thought that it would be probably much more fitting to have a monument to The Victims Of Capitalism.
It as all tentative so far, but I have some basic ideas for the monuments basic design. In the center would be a huge hand cast in Pyrex Glass holding a very real steel double edge dagger! The glass hand would signify Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, but the real reality would be the 100 foot long dagger! Get it? When you play around in capitalism the invisible hand is bound to get you right in the back, even if you do every thing right...
Then, of course, we must high light the wonderful upside of capitalism in its unregulated glory, just like the 'Harper Government' pushes. How about this? We would have cast in bronze two young girls sorting medical linen waste, just like in the 19th century. Of course these children never got to be teenagers, let alone get into the ages of the double digits. Isn't the invisible hand awesome?
Then to one side we could have the tribute to the great bankers of the world. Such as that one old house in Europe that used to loan money to one country and with their underwriting fees would make a loan to the enemy of the first customer! Why, the first classic two fer! Then with the profits from the gouging interest rates of all the customers, you could sell both sides arms and create a virtuous cycle of misery and death. Yes Sir! Capitalism, how awesome is that? The 'Harper Government' should know this story very well, They are very close friends with the bankers that bought their own state in the Middle East....
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 1, Section Eleven. Constance Garnett Translation (of course..)
At the time of this writing, the 'umble blog has over 116,000 hits, my G+ page has 1,268,461 hits, and a new blog that I have started recently entitled The Progress Impaired Cosmologist has the awesome number of 156 hits! People are not very interested in life, the universe, and everything...
Justin Trudeau whips out his cowboy...
The last posting of Sunday October 26, 2014 left me very depressed, in that the level of public discourse had reached all time lows in Canada. And then there was the realization, later, that as I contemplated posting again, that all my original intentions at the beginning of The Economy Of Media have been realized! Sun News Network is long gone, off the air, all my favorite members of the 'Harper Government' are dead or gone back to the rocks that they crawled out from under. And it looks like the young Justin Trudeau is going to peak last, and indeed be the next Canadian Prime Minister. And of course when that happens the economy and the budget will take care of itself, just like the young Justin said.
I have spent the rest time wisely, and the Oracle of Ottawa has learned many valuable and deep things. The main one being that the writing is never over, the work is never done, and if it is, death or something worse is soon to come. As the Oracle of Ottawa sat awe struck by the news that Albertan's voted in an NDP government, and the latest announcement of the bailing of yet another high profile minion of the 'Harper Government', the Oracle of Ottawa has come to realize the utter and extreme power of the blog, and the powerful concept of the quietly planted meme. It is not about the hits, it is about who reads.
The fact of the realization of the passing of Bill C-51 certainly frightened the Oracle of Ottawa, for about five seconds, until it quickly dawned upon the Oracle of Ottawa that you can have all the laws of the Universe on the books, but if you keep cutting all the security budgets, there is at the end of the last days of the 'Harper Government' not much chance that there will be anyone left to pay me a visit..., let alone monitor my awesome missives.
There will be many interesting issues that will be brought under the close scrutiny of the Oracle of Ottawa in this next wave, stay tuned to one of the "vehicles".
