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Can you imagine if we had the sort of hand grenade type budgeting for the social services of Canada? It would be like OH!, nationalized day care??? we thought it was like only 5 billion, but it turned out to be 7 billion, damn I guess that’s just ‘mission creep’. Or, hey we are not going to rely on wisdom from the dark ages and build more prisons but rather, front-load the services that keep people above water and obeying the law instead. OH no, oh no no no.! The only area where we have the flexible budgets and creative accounting seems to be military, and all they seem to do is buy shiny new murder vehicles designed to kill poor coloured people in far away lands.
Woo! Canada F-Yeah!
Our job, fostering democracy and stability in the Middle East, doesn’t come cheap, or even measurable when it comes to budgeting.
“Defence Minister Peter MacKay is defending the government’s accounting of the costs of Canada’s military mission in Libya, following the release of new figures by the Department of National Defence that lay out the final cost of the deployment.
And the total cost of the operation — a figure that includes everything from jet fuel to pilot salaries, including the salaries of military personnel — comes in at $347 million.
Last October, MacKay told CBC Radio’s The House the Libyan mission had cost taxpayers less than $50 million.
“As of Oct. 13, the figures that I’ve received have us well below that, somewhere under $50 million,” MacKay said.
“And that’s the all-up costs of the equipment that we have in the theatre, the transportation to get there, those that have been carrying out this critical mission.”
Well thanks Peter, you missed it only by about 300 million. In the war department, that must be what they call a “slight oversight” or an accounting irregularity. 
“The director of the military’s strategic joint staff was called on to explain duelling figures at a hastily-assembled news conference at National Defence headquarters on Friday afternoon.
Maj.-Gen. Jon Vance said MacKay did not mislead the public and pointed out senior military leaders referenced the figures publicly during Senate committee hearings.
But he concedes the minister would have known the estimated cost at the time and did not speculate on why MacKay chose to go with the lower figures exclusively.”
What? Conservatives lying to the Canadian public? I am completely shocked, especially over war spending and democracy promotion.
“Peter’s got problems with his math yet again and this government’s got problems with trying to figure out how to cost things,” said NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar. “I suppose he just thinks that if he can lowball it, people won’t be concerned about the costs. But, you know, in the end, the costs add up and it caught up to Mr. MacKay.”
The solution is just to get Mackay into the right portfolio. With his math skillz we should be able to rejuvenate the social democratic fabric that makes Canada such a fantastic place to live.
Not too long ago Mystro wrote a persuasive piece about how horrible the ramifications are of being tormented for eternity and the loopy logic involved therein. Today’s Disservice will revisit that topic, only now in a helpful youtube video format to illustrate the machinations of a loving and just god.
Sometimes the related videos that show up in youtube are useful. This gem of a video from the call in show The Atheist Experience is almost like a for – dummies guide on how to discuss with Christians the paucity of truth in their sad fairy tale and the immorality of their so called ‘moral teachings’. Rather than having any actual proof that their delusion of choice is good for society and as a guide for life, the best argument they can offer goes something likes this: “this is my story and it makes me feel fuzzy on the inside and that’s good enough for me, truth be damned.”
That kind of insular thinking does not belong in the 21st century.
As if you need another reason to hate the rotten edifice of christian religion…
Almost posted the 9th again. Whoops. :)
The concerto is divided into three movements:
- Allegro in E-flat major
- Adagio un poco mosso in B major
- Rondo: Allegro ma non troppo in E-flat major
As with Beethoven’s other concertos from this time period, this work has a relatively long first movement. (At twenty-five minutes, the Violin Concerto has the longest; Piano Concerto Nos. 4 and 5 each have opening movements of about twenty minutes.)
I. Allegro
The main theme of the first movement.
The piece begins with three full orchestra chords, each followed by a short cadenza, improvisatory in nature but written out in the score. These short cadenzas recur intermittently throughout the piece.
As music’s Classical era gave way to its Romantic era, composers began experimenting with the manner in which one or more solo instruments introduced music. Beethoven had already explored such possibilities in his Piano Concerto No. 4, but the monumental piano introduction in Piano Concerto No. 5 – it lasts for nearly two minutes – foreshadowed future concertos such as Mendelssohn‘s Violin Concerto or Tchaikovsky‘s Piano Concerto in B-flat minor.
The first movement is deceptively complex. Despite its use of simple chords, including a second theme constructed almost entirely out of tonic and dominant notes and chords, it is full of complex thematic transformations. The complexity is intensified once the piano enters with the first theme, as the expository material is repeated with far more complex variations, virtuoso figurations, and complex modified chords. The second theme enters in the surprising key of B minor before moving to B major and at last the expected key of B-flat major several bars later.
Aside from the opening cadenzas, the movement follows Beethoven’s trademark three-theme sonata structure for a concerto. The orchestral exposition is a typical two-theme sonata exposition, but the second exposition with the piano has a triumphant virtuoso third theme at the end that belongs solely to the solo instrument. Beethoven does this in many of his concertos. The coda at the end of the movement is quite long, and, again typical of Beethoven, uses the open-ended first theme and gives it closure to create a satisfying conclusion.
II. Adagio un poco mosso
The second movement in B major is, in standard contrast to the first, calm and reflective. It moves into the third movement without interruption when a lone bassoon note B drops a semitone to B-flat, the dominant note to the tonic key E-flat. According to Alex Ross, this movement supplied the melody for Bernstein‘s “Somewhere” from West Side Story.[2]
III. Rondo: Allegro ma non troppo
The main theme of the third movement.
The final movement of the concerto is a seven-part rondo form (ABACABA), a typical concerto finale form. The piano begins the movement by playing its main theme, then followed by the full orchestra. The rondo’s B-section begins with piano scales, before the orchestra again responds. The C-section is much longer, presenting the theme from the A-section in three different keys before the piano performs a cadenza. Rather than finishing with a strong entrance from the orchestra, however, the trill ending the cadenza dies away until the introductory theme reappears, played first by the piano and then the orchestra. In the last section, the theme undergoes variation before the concerto ends with a short cadenza and robust orchestral response.
Prominent recordings
Shut up you pinko bastards. Calling for the twinning of a perfectly fine road that will cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The nanny state can’t take care you and all of your damn problems. It’s a free country if you don’t like driving highway 63 to Fort McMurray then take an alternate route, or drive extra defensively, be responsible for yourself for once.
Now breathe, the above is only a hyperbolic example of the amazing thinking that goes on in liberturdian and conservative minds when it comes to many issues that face society. Replace twinning the road with funding health care, or housing for the poor and you can see how particularly despicable this line of thinking actually is, because it happens all the time. “Oh no”, sayeth our right-wing friends, “It isn’t like that at all, we just want smaller government and more freedom to pursue profits, we certainly do not want people dying on our account.”
Bullshite. Actually you do. The aptly named ‘Highway of Death‘ has been a concern for years and private industry has done nothing to alleviate the situation. Twinning the highways is strictly an externality for them, or the government’s problem. Certainly not a project worth the change on the bottom line of the ledger. One common tawdry verse I here from the right is how responsive private industry is to the ever changing needs of people and the market… what they don’t add is “as long as it profitable” to their sage pronouncements. Clearly, worker safety is of little concern to the oil companies otherwise the highway would been completed a long time ago.
The people of Alberta should be represented by the government, their interests should be protected first over the interests of private industry. Denying the government the money it needs to protect the people of Alberta is criminal. If we had anything even resembling reasonable royalty rates, Highway 63 would have been twinned years ago, heck we probably could have rail service by now. But, we here in Alberta seem to think that the freedom to plunder and profit comes ahead of the freedom to live safely and securely(most firmly in Southern Alberta where they heartily endorse the Wild Fascist Rose Party).
Hey folks, I’m getting older. The grand experience has been going on for 38 glorious years. I’m not melancholy today, just sorta reflective. This song by Mike and the Mechanics has stuck with me through the years, it has wisdom and a story to learn from. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Take care everyone :)
I remember when we were only talking a paltry 9 billion dollars on new fighter jets (powered by the tears of Canadian children with no access to nationalized day-care). I though wow, this is a real super hyped up plus sell hunk of bullshite being foisted on Canadians. Apparently, Harper and his braintrust of strategists have managed to come up with the cluster-bomb grade version of stupidity things to endorse. Brian Stewart from the CBC illustrates the madness of the CPC:
“The who-knew-what about the real costs of the F-35 fighter jet Canada wants to purchase is worrisome enough. But at the heart of the fiasco is a far more serious concern about what public honesty means to this government.
It’s a sad state that few Canadians appear surprised by the auditor general’s findings that Parliament was kept in the dark over the real costs of this program and what looks to be a $10-billion overrun.
Many seem to assume that misleading and denying whenever it suits is a government’s normal default position. After all, this government seems to have done it for years on Afghanistan and with its other problems in national defence.
In my own attempts to unravel the F-35’s real costs I never once met a single soul outside government and knowledgeable about defence purchases who believed the prime minister’s promise that the planes could be delivered for a bargain-rate $75 million each.
I never met anyone inside the Canadian military who thought so either.”
It’s like watching a child caught in a obvious lie slowly admit guilt –
“But the amount of money that is in the pot is still substantial. The 19 F-35As that the U.S. will acquire in fiscal year 2013 will cost $197 million each. In 2001, the projected cost for these jets was $69 million.
The cost per plane is expected to drop later in the production cycle, assuming the order numbers do not.
Over the course of the U.S. program, the “average” cost of acquiring each F-35 should be about $162 million each, according to Pentagon figures.
The Canadian government has estimated its 65 F-35s will cost just $75 million each to acquire. But the parliamentary budget officer pegs that number at $148 million.”
Err… Almost double of what was told to the Canadian people? Hmm. The ‘open and transparent’ Harper government once again proves its true colours. Oversights of this magnitude are like slapping the Canadian people in the face with a bag full of rotten fish, for about 2 years now and counting.
We need to wake up and demand a responsible government because it seems as of late a lot of crappy things are being done in my name without my knowledge, and I for one, do not like it one bit.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…