Change the electoral system!

We're being governed (dictated) by a party that was elected by 22.24% of the electorate. This is unacceptable and the conservatives cannot claim to have any "mandate."

That's all I have to say about this fucking election. Proportional representation now!

Morbid Fascination is a Sideshow

In the last week, plane wreckage now acknowledged to be adventurer Steve Fossets plane was found, ending the exhaustive search for his remains.

Since he disappeared a year ago, the story has popped up in the media from time to time. The comment sections are always in the high numbers, and the stories receive lots of hits.

When the wreckage was found, it was a top 10 news item. Subsequent coverage focused heavily on speculation about his body, then about the tiny amounts of bone fragments found in the wreckage, and now the story is about the testing of the remains for his DNA.

The curious part is that earlier this year, he was declared legally dead, which should by all counts have ended the story. It blows my mind that so much coverage has been focused on this story. Is it not enough that they found the plane? Of course he’s not out in the wilderness, using his supposed Survivorman abilities. The man clearly crashed into a mountain, his plane exploded on impact like planes are apt to do in such conditions, and he’s dead. DNA testing is not required, unless the family wants it for closure, which makes it a private affair that shouldn’t make it onto the international news wire.

This whole story should have been the last paragraph of his obituary, and not what it has become. I don’t hold much stock in the adventurers of our day – it’s simply not that inspiring when climbing Mount Everest is a every day occurrences. Man’s dominance of the planet and our ability to “defeat” mountains, break arcane extreme records and fly in ballons aren’t the issue, nor are they appropriate in our world today. A bit of humility will go a long way to fixing the disparage in our relationship with the planet and it’s systems. The man had a good life, and if those who wish to honor him should do so by acknowledging what he did in life, that would be appropriate. This is not.

Bailout Sours

As much of a disaster this will turn out to be for ordinary folk, I have to say that the failure of the bailout is the proper response to the whole ludicrous plan. With Henry Paulson and Co. admitting that the number was decided upon it's largesse, I have visions 0f the man getting his head chromed as he strokes a cat in a bunker, going "and in exchange for your planet's safety, I demand $700 BILLION dollars! muhahaha!"

It's been said 700 billion times throughout the 'sphere that this money could have been used for more constructive, main street orientated purposes, and I couldn't agree more. Not that it will ever happen. But there is some justice in knowing that if we're all going down, the golden parachute has just unravelled right before the plane's bailout.

If anyone needs proof that this was all just a ruse, look no further than Wall Street itself. Within moments of learning the bailout had failed, the stock market plunged, losing approximately $1.5 trillion(trillion! trillion for christssake!) in value. Now, I'm no mathematician, but according to every single mathematician I contacted for analysis on the topic, 1,500,000,000,000 is bigger than 700,000,000,000. If this truly was about releasing "dangerous" debt from the super/mega/ultra/bemothic banks, then I'm guessing the damage would have been significantly less. This debt has been as "dangerous" as it was when they issued it or bought it from the issuers, and it only "explodes" when Wall Street finds out that there's nothing left in the honey pot for them.

This is 100% the fault of greedy people who couldn't say no to a lucrative deal, even if it was rotten, and then demanded absolution from having to pay for the mess they created. Under no circumstance can I agree to behaviour like this. You lay in your pile of shit, so this way you find out that your shit stinks, too.

Being told that this money would be paid back, at least in part, is cold comfort at best, and most likely a lie. Cold comfort because the American public has been told time and again that there is no money for universal health care, climate change action, infrastructure development, schools and help for the poor, many of which would have cost less than this bailout. Most likely a lie because this would have continued. Henry Paulson went on one knee for this money, but when this explodes into a consumer debt/credit card crisis, well, that's what the other knee was for.

I have to tip my hat to House Republicans who voted this down: at least you showed that you can stick to your guns, as wrong as they may be at times. This time, showing adherence to the free market, even if it means dooming us all to the apocalypse, shows some guts. Though not strategy: this was largely a play by the Bush White House to gain control of the nation's purse strings, which rest largely with Congress, and if Republicans were still organized enough to realize that this bailout could have helped John McCain, and if he won, the powers of his presidency would have been unpresedented.

The biggest tip of my hat has to go to Obama. When this failed, John McCain sent out a memo blaming Barack, while Barack sent out a campaign message trying to calm the markets.

As an entrepreneur, this is good news for me. My ventures rest on upsetting the balance, not wading into it and becoming a clone of every suit who has walked a similar path. I can build better businesses out of rubble than I can by taking corporate templates whose values I don't share. A full fledged Wall Street crash will dangle a big carrot that I can nibble on: the best opportunity for our planet and it's economy in the coming decades is the advancement of renewable energy. Thousands of jobs can be created, pollution through energy creation can be halted, while we create a smart grid based off of energy diversification and localization.

Let the days of giant corporations without a conscious worshipped in steel towers come to an end, and long live the small, flexible, local corporation with a heart.

FYI, I am retro-suspending my campaign of following the Canadian campaign for 24 hours, to work on the U.S. bailout. Now that I've horribly, horribly failed and made most of the things I touched worse, I'm reactivating my campaign

My traffic

It appears that traffic to my site has tripled since the beginning of the election. Unfortunately, that means it's still at approximately close to nothing.

Encouraging nonetheless. For the first time ever, my blog appears first in Yahoo's search engine under the term "Shayn." It was on page 5 on Google under the same term, but has since reached page 4.

The goal is to reorganize the blog a little bit, get more active in the 'sphere in order to drive traffic and find cool people to talk with, and follow the list of ways to get my blog noticed, talked about and linked to.

$700,000,000,000.00

is a BIG number. That's a number so big, I don't even believe in it. It's not a real number.

I don't think I'm speaking hyperbole when I say that if this bill gets passed, we're fucked. There's nothing you can do to a bunch of guys who you've just given that much money to. Don't get me wrong. I like bankers. They help make the world go round, and there's nothing wrong with that. But they've acted like a bunch of idiots. Their job is to be conservative, so guys like me can have access to capital to create jobs, diversify our economy (personally, into green energy), all the while having a stable economic platform in which to borrow said money. I like to know that the bank I work with will be around tomorrow.

I live in Canada, so I'm not affected. Yet.

It's simple, folk. To screw up this royally means to concede defeat. We've had enough measures to ensure that the next depression is avoided, and all those fail-safes have been shunted aside in the name of greed. If you fail a second time, I'd have to say that we, as a civilization, have to rethink capitalism. I don't think we have the capability to do so anymore (thank you, tv), therefore my "head for the goddamn hills!" sentiment.

My business is nearly unaffected by this. What I trade in is the future, and our ability to have a civilization in said future. My business is designed to work, regardless of stable banks or not. Like Saskboy, I too am a green who is in favor of electricity and all things that can cleanly keep the wheels a'turnin'. I don't know if this whole mess will lead to a depression, because I'm no economist, but I do know that we're turning a page in history, a not so pretty one.

But this has been predicted, again and again, mostly by the green movement. At this pivotal moment, when we're losing the tide against climate change, economic conditions are worsening by the day. Does this not have anything to do with the fact that huge parts of the economy are being affected negatively due to storms, warming temperatures, desertification, immense flooding, flora and fauna eradication and pollution? If the farmers can't farm, the fishermen can't fish, the logger can't log, the dams have no more water to produce electricity, the oilmen can't rip oil out of the ground and Jane Consumer is being uprooted from house and home every other week, then the bankers lose the vault and the accountants get laid off.

It is not an irrational fear to believe that if we give these people our $700,000,000,000.00 that it will disappear into the same rabbit hole as the rest, but good god do I wish it was.