I was texting with a friend yesterday about the dumpster fire which is the end days of the Trump presidency. He’s Canadian, one of the people whom I’ve desperately missed in the last year as the likelihood of an end to the border shutdown continues to recede into the mists of the future, so his perspective is a little different – but he’s an Albertan. Keeping in mind that Alberta is the Texas of Canada, that means he leans a bit to the right in his politics. That’s like saying San Antonio leans a little left in the political spectrum of Texas, though: just like even the Democrats in San Antonio carry concealed sidearms, the Tories in Alberta still love the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Continue reading “Choice”Power failure
It’s been interesting over the past year or so to keep track of what’s going on in Hong Kong. I’ve only been to the Special Administrative Region a few times, and I missed out on going there pre-handover, which will forever haunt me as a regret. The Chinese government has been slowly tightening the screws on local rule, despite – or more likely because of – its agreement during the handover to respect local essentially English law traditions for the first fifty years of post-colonial rule. That’s kind of a powerful slap in the face for a large and lets face it imperial nation like China; once sufficient time had passed, and once it was obviously there was nothing a diminishing second class power like the United Kingdom could really do about it other than marshall “world opinion”, that clause would be ignored. And so it has been: the Communist central government in Beijing has essentially passed a set of laws which eliminate any pretense of “one country, two systems” with respect to the HKSAR. It’s officially one country, one system.
Continue reading “Power failure”Socks and sandals
The inspiration to write hasn’t quite been here lately, as Americans – and probably North Americans more broadly – have been in a kind of limbo, waiting to see how the election will turn out. I’ve been actually a bit blown away at how Matt has been developing The Deckle Edge into an amazing multimedia platform, and how Mark has been expanding on the themes of identity and translation, while in the background I’ve been caught up trying to find a couple cords of firewood for the winter and keeping the boy focused on learning.
Continue reading “Socks and sandals”Guffaw
Laughter isn’t an easy thing to characterise, especially across cultures. I’ve spend enough time in non-English speaking places to realise that I’ll never really understand their humour, but I’ve spent far more time in English speaking places and still even there, I know that I have a different sense of what makes me laugh. Actually the more time I’ve spent in different places, I believe, the less I laugh – I mean an outright guffaw, a good solid belly laugh, an uncontrollable rollicking snort. I still find humour in lots of things – even more than before – but the burst of laughter that I would have served up as a kid no longer comes up.
Continue reading “Guffaw”Dead presidents
The global financial response to the slowdown in economic activity has been nothing short of extraordinary. In the United States, over $3 trillion in money supply has been created, with a further $3 trillion in fiscal activity. Overseas, in China, in the UK, in Canada, in the EU, similar levels of new money have flooded the money system, courtesy of central banking policies tailored to system: quantitative easing in open monetary systems, reduced capital requirements and increased access to money creation programs for banks in closed systems paired with aggressive foreign exchange management. There is a lot more money in the system, but the implications of that are diverse, more so than the commentary one reads on Bloomberg or in the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal.
Continue reading “Dead presidents”