November 9, 2009 by The Right Coast
These two quotes by Edmund Burke (1970) remind me of a large, but particular group of people. When one simply replaces “They” with “The Liberals and the NDP” or “The American Democrats”, it suddenly becomes a paragraph that could have been written by a number of conservative bloggers – provided they have a thing for 18th century english.
They see no merit or demerit in any man, or any action, or any political principle, any further than as they may forward or retard their design of change: they therefore take up, one day, the most violent and stretched prerogative, and another time the wildest democratic ideas of freedom, and pass from the one to the other without any sort of regard to cause, to person, or to party.
…
This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.
One has to wonder if his words will ever die out against the test of time.
Posted in Musings, burke, conservatism, edmund burke, politics | Leave a Comment »
November 8, 2009 by The Right Coast
This is part one of a series of photographs taken by me of the obscure, overlooked parts of my city. Like all cities, when you look closely at aspects of urban life there is often beauty in things normally considered ugly: graffiti, street art, urban decay, etc. A lot of the time these things are not even pretty, but rather interesting or weird. This series focuses on the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. I hope you enjoy and I welcome comments!
Posted in Photography | 5 Comments »
November 2, 2009 by The Right Coast
Wait till Pamela Anderson and Perez Hilton find out about this…
A Colchester County councillor believes Nova Scotia should completely “exterminate” its coyote population.
“Bounties don’t work,” Coun. Mike Cooper said during a council session last week. “You might as well get rid of them. They’re hunting in packs now.”
Cooper initiated discussion on the issue following the death last Tuesday of 19-year-old Taylor Mitchell, a Toronto singer killed by coyotes while walking alone in the Skyline Trail of the Cape Breton Highlands.
…
As of Friday, Armed Parks Canada officials were continuing to search for the coyotes responsible for the attack, but an official said a widespread kill of the animals wouldn’t occur.
Oh, darn it!
Posted in Musings | 2 Comments »
November 2, 2009 by The Right Coast
In the latest issue of Saint Mary’s University student newspaper The Journal, the age old feel-good issue of sending aid to Africa appears to be alive and well:
So what should Canada be doing to keep its promise? … to increase and provide more effective aid to developing countries, implement debt relief, and fairer trade rules in advance of 2015… In order for Canada to do its part and provide effective foreign aid, the government must reach the UN target of giving 0.7% of the national income (GNI) to foreign aid, and enact BillC-293 to make ending poverty the exclusive goal of Canadian foreign aid.
The issue normally brought up is whether or not this aid will actually work. According to some, aid sent to Africa will not only fail to work, but will actually make things worse:
[E]vidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment.
Government corruption and the existence of totalitarian regimes in Africa are the root cause:
The most obvious criticism of aid is its links to rampant corruption. Aid flows destined to help the average African end up supporting bloated bureaucracies in the form of the poor-country governments and donor-funded non-governmental organizations.
The article lists many disturbing examples of corruption and failure, and I urge everybody to read them all. Unfortunately there are too many to list without copy-and-pasting the entire article.
On a side note, does anyone remember the One Laptop Per Child campaign? Yuck. The Dalhousie University student newspaper The Gazette recently had an opinion editorial on the campaign and its failure:
I imagine that brightly coloured laptops sit in a small closet in rural Africa and slowly collect dust as the days pass. The school that owns them cannot secure power to recharge their batteries, the broken dreams of a grand philanthropist idea that was supposed to revolutionize the world.
Posted in Social Issues | 2 Comments »
