I Quit
Posted on Dec. 2, 2008 at 12:45 a.m. and read 61 times
The last seven days on the Canadian political scene have caused me to lose all faith in every one of our political parties. First, the Conservatives' bright idea of withdrawing public funding from the political parties was simply a low blow. Even if it's in some way a good idea, this is the worst possible time to do it.
Then, the coalition debacle hits. How on earth could the Liberals, NDP and Bloc be doing this in good faith? I feel betrayed.
The only remaining hope I have is that Michaëlle Jean gives Dion and Layton a flat out, "no." If the government fails a confidence motion, we should have an election. As little as any Canadian wants an election at this point, this is the only thing that could happen to restore in me any faith in our political system.
Therefore, I am quitting Canadian politics. That doesn't mean I won't follow it, or comment on it; it means I won't vote -- at least not for any of our current parties. I would potentially consider voting Green, but they'll have to replace Elizabeth May before that becomes a real option for me.
Next time around (be it in a month or three years) I expect I'll have no choice but to write in my vote. The major parties are going to have to do a whole lot of work to regain my trust. Maybe I'll vote for Rex Murphy.
Posted by bradmont in Politics | 4 comments
Lest We Forget
Posted on Nov. 11, 2008 at 11:12 a.m. and read 35 times
May we not forget the sacrifices made by millions that we may live apart from the opression of men.
Posted by bradmont in | 0 comments
The White Book, Chapter 1: The Basis of Society
Posted on Oct. 18, 2008 at 4:58 p.m. and read 72 times
What is the basis of society? What is the purpose for which society exists? To what end should it aim?
It seems to me that the answer to this question is very simple: People are the basis of society. They are why it exists, and they are the end towards which it drives. Ultimately, society exists to benefit the people within the society -- it exists for their good.
The obvious question that arises from this statement is, "What is benefit? What do you mean when you speak of the good of a person?" This is an enormous question, for which I am going to give a simple answer, an answer with which I'm fairly certain the reader will be familiar: "Do to others as you would have them do to you."
You will immediately notice the religious basis to what I have just said, and may be asking, "Does this guy want to make Canada into a theocracy?" Of course the answer is, "No." I fully admit drawing on a religious background, but at this point, I am not going to try to justify doing so. That will come in a future chapter, Society and Religion, but for the moment I simply ask you to bear with me, and trust that there is sense in basing a secular society on a religious principle.
Now I am forced to amend an earlier statement. The principle of "Do unto others" does not allow us to say, "A society exists to benefit the people within the society." No indeed -- in fact, it holds us to a much higher standard than that. We cannot modify the golden rule to say, "Do unto other Canadians..." Our purpose statement must therefore be expanded to say, "A society exists for the sake of the people both within and outside of the society."
It doesn't take much to see that our guiding principle has severe consequences for our political policies, covering everything from economics to the environment to international relations. These will be among the topics touched on in future chapters.
Posted by bradmont in Politics whitebook | 6 comments
The White Book, an Introduction
Posted on Oct. 18, 2008 at 3:56 p.m. and read 41 times
The recent Canadian federal election has got me thinking about my own political views again. In case you weren't already aware, I don't fit nicely into one of Canada's political parties. I hold views that span the spectrum from extreme left to extreme right, which as you might expect, makes it very difficult to choose which party to support.
Because of my inability to choose one of the currently available options, I have from time to time considered starting my own political party. This is more whim and fancy than actual ambition, since I strongly believe that my own personal station in life is elsewhere. To add to that, as I once joked to a friend, "I couldn't run in an election. I'd never get elected, since I'm wrong about everything!" Irony aside, it's true that some of my political opinions lie far outside what is popular. However, I feel that, seen in the context of my larger political framework, these apparently outlandish ideas will make sense.
It is for these reasons that I have decided to start writing what might be called a manifesto. I am, of course, open to comments, critiques, and questions, so please pick this thing apart.
On to: Chapter 1: The Basis of Society
Posted by bradmont in Politics whitebook | 2 comments
Ban ethanol-based biofules
Posted on April 24, 2008 at 11:37 a.m. and read 103 times
Again this morning, another story about rising prices of wheat. As I'm sure most of you already know, the global increase in food prices is being exacerbated by the new market for ethanol-based biofules, which are created from crops like corn and are much more profitable for farmers than food grain production, leading them to switch markets. Yesterday I read that World Vision are going to have to stop feeding 1.5 million people because of rising food prices.
Sure it's a drastic measure, but I vote to ban the growing of crops for biofuel production. Biofuels aren't really much more environmentally friendly than petroleum (if at all), and feeding the world is a whole lot more important than feeding North America's dependence on the automobile.
Posted by bradmont in Morality Politics | 1 comment
Important election issues
Posted on April 22, 2008 at 5:44 p.m. and read 92 times
Finally, the media are taking a look at the important issues in the American presidential election.
Posted by bradmont in Miscelaneous | 1 comment
Internet Archive Movies Mashup
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 8:44 p.m. and read 194 times
So I found out last week that archive.org has over a thousand free/public domain/out of copyright movies available to download. After spending some time browsing the site and downloading the movies, I became a little frustrated at how awkward their interface was, and thought cross-referencing the movies with their IMDB ratings would make things a whole lot nicer. So, I did it.. The list is sorted by IMDB rating (though I'd like to make it sortable by any column).
The list isn't yet perfect: it's ugly, there are some duplicates, and about 300 of the movies have no rating (listed as 0.0), since my automatic script couldn't track down an IMDB page for them (either it doesn't exist or the movie has a non-standard title). However, it's a pretty big improvement over the original...
Posted by bradmont in Movies Coding | 215 comments
Frustrated with Google
Posted on April 14, 2008 at 10:20 p.m. and read 87 times
I'll come right out and say it: I'm a Google fanboy. I love Google, and I use a good number of its products regularly. But right now, I am frustrated with Google.
I spent the whole evening working on a really cool mashup that indexes all of the free movies available on archive.org against their IMDB rankings. It uses google search to accurately track down the IMDB page for a given movie (the built-in IMDB search is much less predictable than google).
After a couple hours of coding, I finally got everything working, and set the script to running, going through the 1200-odd movies on archive.org. However, after about the first 250 movies, the script stopped returning rating values for movies. After some investigation, I discovered that Google had decided that I was a "virus or spyware application" and was not fulfilling my search requests. How incredibly frustrating...
Well, hopefully I'll be able to figure out a way around this soon. Once I do I hope to hook the thing up to my website and make a nice interface for finding high-quality, free, legal movies. In the mean time, I'm annoyed...
Update, April 15, 2pm:
Google has unblocked my web host now, so things are running again. However, I put a whole bunch of sleeps in the script so it won't send a whole bunch of requests all at once, in hopes that it won't get flagged again. So, with about 1000 movies left to go, it should be done by tomorrow.
A preview, from the results so far gathered:
The top film so far is The General (archive.org), #139 on IMDB's all-time top 250.
The bottom is The Beatnicks (archive.org), with a rating of 1.7, though it doesn't have enough votes for the bottom 100.
Posted by bradmont in Movies Coding | 1 comment
Brad: 1, 6' pile of snow: 0
Posted on April 2, 2008 at 8:30 p.m. and read 93 times
I had then unusual good fortune of having the afternoon off today. The weather here is starting to get warmer, at least enough to give hope that spring is on the way. One of the things I love about warm weather is barbecuing. Today I got excited about the prospect of potentially barbecuing at some point in the near future, and maybe even having people over for a barbecue, and I sprung into action.
Given that it was sunny, and a balmy 0 degrees this afternoon, I decided to spend some time outdoors, specifically to get rid of the 6 foot pile of snow that our record-setting winter had left on the balcony. My balcony is large, approximately 5.5x4 meters. I'd estimate the average depth of snow to be around 1.25 meters. Over the course of about 3.5 hours (and almost the entire Lord of the Rings soundtrack), I threw all 27 cubic meters (about 960 cubic feet, or 27 500 liters) of snow over the edge of the balcony. There's still a thin layer of ice remaining, but with the snow gone, it should easily melt before it's warm enough to actually have a barbecue.
Sadly, I forgot to take before and after pictures. After the first hour, it occurred to me that the next time I do something like that, I should set up a laptop with a webcam to take a photo every 30 seconds or so and make a time-lapse video. That would have been incredibly cool... too bad I didn't have the idea earlier.
Oh well... it's done now. And I have a sore everything. I'm going to sleep well tonight.
Posted by bradmont in My Life Québec | 2 comments
French Progress
Posted on Feb. 23, 2008 at 7:51 p.m. and read 163 times
One of my friends remarked yesterday that my French is as good as Stephen Harper's.
I'm not sure if that's a compliment...
Posted by bradmont in Humour My Life Québec | 3 comments