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I’m glad I don’t live in Canada.  The health care is free, which means that it is worthless. Patients leaving the country, doctors leaving the country.  The only people left will be the government administrators.

And the speech is not free, which means it is costly. If you say something in Canada and someone complains about you, you could face legal fees of tens of thousands of dollars to defend yourself. And the complainer? No fees. In fact, the government, meaning the taxpayer, pays the legal fees of the complainer. How stacked is that deck?

At least they have hockey.  Don Cherry can still say what he wants.  And CBC’s coverage of the Olympics is usually better than what’s offered in the US.

It’s nice of Canada to try some things so that we in the US don’t have to make the same mistakes.  Anytime someone proposes changes here in the US, we can just look at how it worked in Canada.  It’s one thing to be advanced – if you’re the first one down the right path.  But if you’re the first one down a bad path, that’s not a good thing.  How do you know it’s a bad path?  If a bunch of other people are coming back out of it saying it’s bad, that’s usually a decent indicator.

I hope people in America learn the right lessons from others’ mistakes.

The new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace is set to open later this week.  The last one, Casino Royale, was good, but it had two problems.  The first was that it was a Sony Picture movie displaying Sony shots of Sony products.  Some parts seemed more like Sony ads than a real movie, such as when he is viewing the Sony security camera footage on Sony TVs using Sony players, or when he is sailing on his Sony boat and he looks at his Sony laptop.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t a Sony boat.  But if Sony had made boats, I’m sure they would have been featured prominently.  The other problem is a smaller one, but one from which Tomorrow Never Dies suffered badly: explaining too much to the audience.  In that one, the actors explained what they were doing as they did things.  Very annoying.  At least Casino Royale had a secondary actor “narrating” to help out the audience.  Something like whispering “He has the 5 and 7.  He needs the 6 to win.” to someone else while Bond is playing poker.  But enough with the trivial complaints.

According to one interview I read, Barbara Broccoli, the producer of the Bond movies, has said that Quantum is the name of the Sinister Organization that Bond is fighting.  Quantum is really QUANTUM, an acronym in the tradition of SPECTRE, but QUANTUM is so secret that not even she knows what it means.  So, to help her out, I have some suggestions of what it could mean.

What does Quantum stand for?  Try …

• Quit Using Acronym Names To seem Ultra-Mysterious
• Quest to Undertake Another National Target by a Universal Mob
• Quintessential Underworldly Archenemy, Needed To Upset MI6
• Quarrelsome Underground Association of Nuclear Threats and Undermining Morale
• Quiet, Unassuming Agent Negotiates The Ultimate Movie
• Quipping, Urbane Agent Neutralizes The Underling’s Moves

The last two apply more to Bond than to QUANTUM, but I liked them so I included them.  If you have any more suggestions, please add them in a comment.  Thanks.

“For nothing is hidden, except to be revealed; nor has anything been secret, but that it would come to light.”
– Mark 4:22

My earlier post had been about how sports seasons need to be distinct seasons and not last the whole year.  This post applies that same idea to holidays, mainly Christmas.

What prompted this was the local radio station‘s switching to the all-Christmas-music format on November 1st.  At least they waited until after Halloween.  But I’m still boycotting them temporarily.  Until Thanksgiving, I am skipping right past them (and any other Christmas-music stations) during my normal station-flipping during my drive home each day.

My favorite line from The Incredibles is something like “When everyone’s special, the no one is.” For the record, that line appears twice, but in two different forms.  The first one is by Dash, who says, in response to being told that everyone is special, “Which is another way of saying no one is. ”  The second one is by Syndrome, who says “And when everyone’s super, no one will be.”

That line, combined with the example of Marie Antoinette, gives a good idea of why seasons need to be short.  The longer they’re drawn-out, the more diluted they become.  Marie Antoinette, for those who don’t know, is attributed with having everything she wanted, so she was quite bored (“nothing tastes“).  Life was not enjoyable for her, because nothing was special.

Keep Christmas (and other holidays) special: don’t start anything Christmas-y  until after Thanksgiving.  I know some of you may think this post violates that principle.  I’m not saying don’t mention Christmas until then, just don’t promote it or start celebrating until then.

“But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.”
– Romans 8:25

Keep the electoral vote.  It’s the vote for the president of the United States, not a vote for the president of the people.

I don’t want to live in the People’s Republic of America – I like the idea of separate States.  The current system has worked for quite some time, and I think eliminating the electoral college, whether by actually removing it or by awarding electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, will have some unforeseen negative consequences.  I know, I know, some people don’t like the record of the electoral college.  But remember, the states elected the president – the people didn’t elect him.  The popular vote doesn’t matter.  The United States is not a democracy; it is a representative democracy (AKA republic).  Those who don’t like the electoral college want to tinker with how the country was setup.

The problem is that the movement to mess with the electoral college system is calling itself the National Popular Vote something.  How can you oppose something that’s so popular?  What would the opposing movement be called: the Unpopular Vote?  That would never fly.

Keep states’ rights as more important than the federal government – keep the electoral system intact.  Don’t move toward one big federal government.  On the other hand, the states do have a right to send their electoral delegates however they want.  So wouldn’t allowing the states to send mixed delegates also be supporting states rights?

Most of the arguments for the change are to have every vote count and to convince presidential candidates to spend time and, here’s the key, money in their state.  Hey, if you want candidates to campaign in your state, maybe you should use some sort of incentive (tax breaks, subsidies, etc.) to attract the non-dominant party’s voters to live in your state!  That way your state could be more competitive in the presidential campaigns and we wouldn’t have to mess with the proven record of the electoral college.

Or you could make your state more appealing to businesses in general so that more of them would setup operations in your state.  That way, you wouldn’t care so much that presidential politicians weren’t spending time and money in your state – you would be getting money from businesses that are productive and useful (as opposed to political campaigns, which are counter-productive and mostly useless).

The part I was wondering about was the re-count.  If there is a close presidential election, say a difference of a few thousand, then where will the re-count occur?  If there is a contested state in the current electoral system, then the recount can be limited to that state or a certain county.  But if the loser of the election wants to challenge a close national vote, wouldn’t the whole country have to be re-counted?  You don’t want the individual candidate to be hand-picking a state or county to re-count.

Why was baseball playing so late in the year?  Their schedule is too long, so they get what they deserve by having a game canceled by snow.  The 2008 baseball season started in late March.  The playoffs started in October, which means they had 6 over full months of regular season.  At least they kept the playoffs and championship to under a month.

The baseball season is way too long; baseball is being selfish by hogging half the year.  Here are my proposed rule changes, to be enacted by the Secretary of Sports (a new bureaucracy to be imposed by the new administration in Washington) – each sport gets 4 months, plus an extra month for playoffs and 2 weeks for the championship.

We’ll start with football, since it’s the best sport.

• Football gets fall, which is September, October, November, and December for regular games.
• Hockey gets winter, which is January, February, March, and April.
• Basketball has to share with hockey, but I think that the fan bases of each are okay with that.
• And baseball gets summer, which is May, June, July, and August.

Initially I was going to give each sport 3 months, so that the 4 major sports are evenly divided throughout the year.  But 3 months isn’t quite long enough, plus the playoffs would go into the next sport’s season anyway, so I settled on 4 months.

• Football stays the same – 4 months of regular season plus one month of playoffs and one week of championship.
• Hockey loses a month and a half, at the beginning of the season, plus May for playoffs and June for the championship.  So the last part stays the same.  That may need adjusting, because ice hockey should not be played in June.
• Basketball is in the same boat as hockey, which is fine, because they each had eight months of regular season plus championship stuff.  If you add in pre-season, it gets even worse.  A sports season should not take up the majority of the year – it needs to be but a season.
• Baseball loses the most, because it is the most bloated.  It started in late March and went through all of October.  If you add in the pre-season (late February for baseball), there are only 3 months of the year without baseball.

Since baseball uses about a month for the playoffs and championship, they would be done by the end of September.  Much better.

“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven”
– Ecclesiastes 3:1