Shakey Math
from BS Bill

//

Bullshit Bill the only way he
should be allowed out in public

Back in June of this year, BullShit Bill Bennett the redneck asshole from Cranbrook manages to offend at least fifty percent of civilized folks he addresses said that a 26% rate hike for BC Hydro was unacceptable. In papers that used to be Canned Waste properties the headline read.......

Energy Minister Bill Bennett says efforts are underway to reduce potential 26-per-cent hike

Thus I found it cute this morning when Bluster Bill announced that the rates would be rising 25.5%, talk about finessing the  numbers rather than just outright lying, which is also a common BC LIEberal tactic.

Now when I went back to see what Crusty Clark and Boorish Bill were saying this spring and summer, I realized that initially the secret/confidential leaked paper from BC Hydro wanted the whole 26% in two years, I have to admit that this is a reduction after all, even though the quoted 25.5% is still really too cute for words. 

However, Bill's math still isn't all that good, because actually the percentage raise in each of five years comes out more like 28%, but hey, let's not quibble over a measly 3.5%, after all, I guess I'll also be having a $35 per month surcharge added next month because I don't want an effing dumb meter. I still don't understand how Ontario, a province that managed to lose a billion dollars on failed gas generating plants, managed to get three times as many dumb meters as we did for the same price. When you look at it that way the Ontario version of Libs is still over a billion dollars ahead of our business wizards.  

Just think how low our rates could be if we didn't have to buy Rape of the River IPP power and sell it for half or a third or less of what we buy it for. Or even better, if we didn't have to build an eight billiion (probably 30 billion by the time it is built) Site C dam so we can subsidize private energy companies to give away natural gas and maybe blow up Prince Rupert or Kitimat.  

I also found it interesting to learn that PEI built the Confederation Bridge, which traverses thirteen kilometers of sometimes pretty violent ocean that also freezes, for a quarter or so of the price of our ice bomb bridge over the Fraser and the Golden Ears white elephant bridge. I even watched a Frontiers of Construction documentary about the construction of that bridge and it was a colossal and challenging project (which apparently also works very well in most conditions other than hurricanes). 

Gawd almighty I hate the stooopid, greedy and slimey BC government...........

Hello Silence
My 'New' Friend*
 

Black Friday, Indeed

In thr fall of 1963 I was a freshman at the University of California at Santa Barbara, living on campus in Las Casitas dorms which were recycled from once was WW2 era officer's barracks (soon to be torn down). My custom in those days was to get up early and check Campus Cove for waves before breakfast at the Dining Commons across campus and catch a few glassy early morning waves if there was a good swell running. As a result of this it was common for me to have a nap between my morning and afternoon classes, if I had any afternoon classes.

On Friday, November 22 I was asleep in my room when my roomie Jack, always a joker, woke me and said the President had been shot in Dallas. Of course I didn't believe him no matter how much he professed he was telling the truth. Of course before long everybody else, including the radio was backing up Jack's story and it was like I grew up that afternoon. A few weeks before I had, as required, registered for the draft, little realizing how that would become a real issue involving an 11 year legal battle with the US Department of Justice (that I won in the end) and my dissallusion with my country when I found out things like US Attorneys would perjure themselves in court and the guarantee of a phone call if arrested wasn't necessarily so, among many other disappointments that would follow clear through to the state of politics in both Canada and the USA today.

The walk to dinner across campus that evening was dark and quiet as was dinner. Indeed the entire next few days were like a dark period while time stood still until sometime later the next week classes started and weekends became a time to party rather than mourn.

A stramge little example of ironic serendipity occurred years later. It was sometime in the mid-seventies an I was with my musical group playing in a coffee house in a small town in the Kootenays. I bought something that evening and among my change, even though I was in Canada, I received a Kennedy half-dollar. I hadn't realized until I was looking at the surprising coin in my hand that indeed that Friday or Saturday was actually November 22. It seemed almost spooky when I realized what day it was.......I mean JFK fifty cent pieces weren't all that common even in the USA, much less a little mountain Kootenay village.

* I used this title because just this morning, after fifty years, I learned (or maybe relearned) that Paul Simon wrote The Sounds of Silence on this day after he learned of the murder of JFK.