What Was Andrea Horwath On?

Far from the state playing the role of emancipator, protective knight or umpire in the face of conflicting interests, the state is enmeshed in civil society.
David Held, Models Of Democracy, Third Edition, p. 108

It all seems so long ago already. But in reality, it was just last Wednesday when the Ontario Liberal Minority Government tabled their budget. Of course there were the required media "leaks" to trial balloon everything and all, as per standard routine. The Oracle of Ottawa was mighty impressed. It seemed clear to the Oracle of Ottawa that the NDP under the steady hand of Andrea Horwath had all but written in the major points, such as making the rich pay, in that everyone earning over $150,000 in taxable income would pay a mere $500 more.

Oracle calls a majority Wynne government...

Then there was the astounding news of the Ontario Pension Plan that the Feds of the 'Harper Government' have refused, with the Province of Ontario going it's own way. After pondering all the leaks the Oracle of Ottawa could only conclude that the NDP wrote the budget! Make the rich pay, take care of the poor, and provide money to build what the people of Ontario were capable of building. Even the honking large and powerful Union bosses that still exist in Ontario were mighty impressed and stood to and said so right out loud. The Oracle of Ottawa suspected that it was all a slam dunk.

Andrea Horwath - Fatal error?

It was just after the market close in Toronto on Wednesday that Kathleen Wynne stood to her place at let the Finance Minister off his leash, and get it off. Then the first news come out on Power and Politics that Andrea Horwath was not in the House! Somehow it was nicely explained that the Orange Andrea had some how got her thong in a knot, and did not appear in the House in the Chair as the Leader of the Third Party. The Oracle of Ottawa could not think of another example where this has ever happened before in the Ontario Legislature.

'Chain Gang' Tim Hudak - Last time out?

As the week progressed, starting at the NDP news conference on Thursday morning, the imperious Andrea stated that she was miffed about something and that she would not or maybe would not support the Wynne Government on the May eighth budget vote. Needless to say the Oracle of Ottawa became somewhat alarmed. Is this NDP thingy going to risk the introduction of chain gangs in to Ontario? Is she willing to risk Ontario becoming a "right to work" province? Cause these things would surely happen if 'Chain Gang' Tim Hudak had a lucky day at the poles.     

Then it all donned on the Oracle of Ottawa. This is the process of democracy in action. It is an ugly process. It finds weakness and exposes it naked right away. It has to be that way, there is a lot at stake (steak?). It also shows great hidden strengths of character, as it did when Kathleen Wynne just walked down the Hall and went to see the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and had the government dissolved! The election day is to be June 12, 2014. The Oracle of Ottawa strongly suspects a Liberal majority.

Rogers Communications - Twilight Of A Titan?

A man of parts would often be at loss without the company of fools.
Francois duc de La Rocheffoucauld, Maxims, No. 140

It is hard to believe that once upon a time in Canada Rogers Communications was one of the most loved companies in Canada. If memory serves, it always made the top 100 Canadian Employers List. If you had a tech or billing problem there was no long aggravating voice mail tree, someone actually answered the damn phone and took care of you right away. And back in the days when Ted Rogers ran it all, you hardly ever had to call.   

Ted Rogers - Spinning in his grave?

Now all telecom companies in Canada are totally despised and dreaded. Rogers doesn't seem to have any real employees any more, but rather an army of minimum wage contractors and temporary foreign workers, that know nothing about your problem and couldn't care less. But you can be sure the marketing never stops. As the price keeps creeping up on your cable package the quality of the content seems to slipping the other way in rather perfect proportion. A thousand channels and nothing on.

It was just before the last Labour Day weekend that the Oracle of Ottawa noticed that his Cisco cable box had been re-programed with what appears to be software for the new Rogers PVR, version 3.0, that can tape 8 shows at once! (Who wants that??) The Oracle of Ottawa was not amused, but there was no way you could do anything about it. There was a two hour wait time to talk to a tech rep that weekend. Which makes perfect sense. Force crap on the customer and then send all the tech reps home for the long weekend so you won't have to pay for overtime. Meanwhile, we are stuck with cable boxes that are as slow as a fat pig in thick shit.   

Meanwhile there is no baseball on due to faggot tennis, again! There is no one to call on this either. The Oracle of Ottawa tried one night recently, and was told by a thick East Indian accent, that; "Sir, you cannot complain"!! You can't make this stuff up. When my cable box was re-programed, the Oracle waited a very long time again to find out that I couldn't complain, but while I was waiting the Oracle heard that stupid PVR pitched endlessly. 

Rogers Communications has a lot of serious problems. The first and largest, is poor management. The second is that they are in too many business's that they don't know anything about, such as production and content creation. This goes equally for all the giant telco's in Canada at the time of this writing. Have you ever tried to watch the Discovery Channel lately? And where did all the baseball games go that the Oracle always used to enjoy? Note to executive suite: Yachting is not a sport!

But the lads at Rogers have a monopoly. Where else are the proles going to go? Well, would you be surprised if the Oracle of Ottawa told you Dear Reader that it is quiet possible that the whole business model of the Rogers monopoly could be shortly just a bad memory? The Oracle of Ottawa has noticed the marketing of the first HD TV wireless TV boxes by Bell at his local mall. Hmmm... a wide area network otherwise known as a WAN. No infrastructure to maintain. No large barriers to entry. How long will it be before someone simply sets up a dish and just re-brodcasts what is in the clear on the aether? The Oracle of Ottawa can see very much inexpensive choice on the very near horizon. Think about it...

The Oracle of Ottawa certainly does not own Rogers stock. And if you happen to be an owner or a manager of a very large holding in a portfolio, the Oracle of Ottawa strongly recommends that you start getting rid of it all in the very near future. With the advent of the wireless HDTV box and very many providers Rogers, Shaw, Telus, and Bell are shortly going to be Titans without a business.... Like video rentals, remember that?

Could it soon all be gone, like it never existed? Good riddance!!!

'Harper Government' - A Verizon Of Choice

Perhaps the most obvious feature of the use of symbols to represent things, events, or processes is the economy of representation. 
Marx W. Wartofsky, Conceptual Foundations Of Scientific Thought, p.37

You know it is a terrible idea when the beached whales (i.e. James Moore) of the dying 'Harper Government' are dumping their latest right wing Bilderberg Group ordered directive in the deepest dog days of summer on hapless Canadians. Now the brainwave is that the way to get cheaper cellphone rates in Canada is to invite Verizon, the Wall-Mart of communication companies, into Canada and in turn destroy the whole industry. I guess the punks in short pants at the Prime Ministers Office thought this this would be a great idea.

'Harper Government' gets the call...

But the Oracle of Ottawa has to admit it is just music to his ears to hear the scum at Rogers, Bell and Telus  complain for a change! Recently when the Oracle of Ottawa called Rogers to bitch about the lack of Major League Baseball, he was told that he couldn't complain! Oh the Oracle got to complain all right, and it is a terrible thing to make a temporary foreign worker cry.

Of course if Verizon is allowed into Canada there will be thousands of lost Canadian jobs. As a matter of fact the Oracle of Ottawa is quite surprised that no one has figured out the real reason that wee Jimmy Moore is rolling out the Red and White carpet to Verizon. The Oracle of Ottawa has it on good authority that it is really about the creation of that new labour union that is going to called UNIFOR, which is going to take place on this coming Labour Day. The Oracle of Ottawa is really going to enjoy it when the NDP start pumping this rude fact out to the Canadian public during the fall sitting of the House.

 And it is all really just another sign of the failed ideology of the 'Harper Government'. By failing to do their job and stepping in to protect the Canadian consumer as it is the job of a real government to do, they are now in desperation, going to contract out their responsibilities to Verizon, with hopefully a cell phone price war just in time for the next Federal Election.

New Money - Is Margrit Kennedy Right?

The monetary system we have inherited is more than 2,000 years old.
Margrit Kennedy, Interest and Inflation Free Money, p. 89

At the end of the day it all comes down to symmetry folks! The Oracle of Ottawa continues with the "Thinking About Thinking" project unabated. The revelations and epiphany's various are now occurring at a rather frightening rate. One of the minor developments is that all intelligent life in the universe could quiet possibly be the universe's way of dealing with failure. Think about it...

Same old..same old?

The richest veins in my recent ongoing search for enlightenment was my lifetime goal of reading all the major economists in their full and unabridged texts. I started with Capital by Karl Marx, then moved right on and through Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, then John Maynard Keyne's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Well, then it all got out of hand. I read the work of Ricardo, Say, and Jevons! And for then for total coverage I read volumes II and III of Das Kapital! Volume II damn near killed me, but Volume III was like it was written last year.

Once dear reader, the Oracle of Ottawa was a real little cheer leader for capitalism. I read all the works of Ayn Rand when I was a mere teenager. I have owned a stock or two in my own name, well okay, a couple of hundred actually, most (all), that I still own. Somehow the Oracle of Ottawa has nerves of steel and didn't bail in the crisis of 2008. As a matter of fact, the Oracle of Ottawa kept buying all the way through and ended
up with a wicked pile of good companies bought for a mere song.Well I realized recently that I am in reality a wee little rentier! But the whole experience left me troubled deep inside. Why did the whole system just about go down the tubes? How did the people that were supposed to protect us, fail us?

Then the Oracle of Ottawa realized that it was all a lie in reality. The whole problem presented itself in naked singularity. You can not expect an exponential interest growth economy to continue smoothly, or for long, when it is grafted to a finite, linear base, other wise known as the planet Earth. Now you can begin to understand why the novel Frankenstein was so popular when it came out in the 19th century! And why it is still so popular today.  

Now if you want to get a real handle on this problem you should read Margrit Kennedy's book Interest and Inflation Free Money. It is a small book, but all the really dangerous ones are, aren't they? The Oracle of Ottawa read it through very carefully, and could find no real points of disagreement. She totally hit it out of the park. The real fascinating bits were about the effects of compound interest on societies and in turn, its effect on human history. Now I don't want to give anymore away. If you want to read a more "rigorous" version of her ideas the Oracle of Ottawa has to guide you to the work of Didier Sornette and his wonderful book entitled "Why Stock Markets Crash". The end conclusions are pretty much in agreement as to the causes of the turbulence that is embedded in a capitalist exponential growth economy.

It all about the symmetry, and in the case of capitalism, inertia goes along way to grease the skids so to speak. The greatest power of capitalism is that it unbridles creative forces. Infra structures are created and go until there capacities are fully reached and / or exceeded. Think of the inertia part as the disc-jockey at the drunken rave. The party just keeps going, until it stops. The symmetry breaks. The ensuing depression is just that period of time where the symmetry is painfully and randomly recreated. Then we are off to the race to the top (bottom?)  yet again.

The only problem here is that we are achieving levels of ever more perfect information and it is global. This means that it is quiet possible that the symmetry of the worlds various market economies are becoming weaker instead of stronger as we progress into the future. Have a nice day.

At some point in the near future, we are going to have to deal with the reality and effects of these tired, ancient economic issues.

RIM - Asleep At The Switch?

Impressions are naturally the most vivid perceptions of the mind; and this quality is in part convey'd by the relation to every connected idea.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 208

The Oracle of Ottawa is grateful that he is somewhat phone adverse. I have always detested the telephone. Even from childhood, although I could understand how important it was for the whole world, just as long as someone else answered the damn thing. As a matter of fact I feel the same away about all change in general, it is just great, as long as some else does it for me or rather instead of me. Now I imagine this must sound strange since the Oracle of Ottawa is a Canadian and everyone knows that as a people and a nation we are always at the forefront of the whole communications thing. Well there you go, go figure!

Pick up your receiver...

 Yes the Oracle of Ottawa does own and carry a cell phone, but, I always turn the damn thing off! Since I am rich and have totally dropped out of society for all intents and purposes I can get away with it. What I find really alarming about this connected modern world is what appears as the totally hopeless addiction that people have for these stupid things! Just walking in my local shopping mall I am floored at the intent concentration of the unwashed as they peer intently into their stupid little screens. Geez, if they paid the same attention to social issues and who they voted for, we would well on our way to much better world! But no, we seem to be more interested in what our significant "others" are wearing at the present moment. Can you imagine some of the pictures that must be sent? Perhaps it is better not to!   

This is Canada calling...

I ponder on the fact that the generations of my parents and grandparents spent billions of dollars to make a seamless international phone system, with "pin drop" clarity available at a very reasonable rate, only to see my nephews and nieces sending each other telegrams! The Oracle of Ottawa does not see the progress here. Perhaps, forsooth, I am missing something aloft? Now I am picturing my favorite writer of all time with a Blackberry, some how I don't think it would have taken with Hunter S. Thompson! Why that screen and keyboard would start getting pretty small after six hits of acid, three green pills and two yellow ones!
 

A surreal wave is washing upon me... Do you think if you heated two Blackberrys on the stove, you could do "hot blackberrys" with them? Damn, that was good. It must be the old Genesis playlist just blasting into my old hippy head that is working the free association thing. "This is the world we live in" ," These are the hands we are given..." If you don't like it well er, text me...

Do you get it now?