Driving... Me crazy...

This morning I left for school at 7:23am I know this for a fact because that is the time my cellphone read when I started my car. In Canada in December it snows, this week it happened to snow LOTS. Almost 10cm in under 24 hours. Naturally, this lead to some of the worst traffic jams of the year. So as per my usual routine I took out my blackberry to surf the internet while the car gleefully whirred away thankful for a chance to get warm, charge its battery and lubricate its various parts. By 7:31am I was "on the road" that is to say, slowly backing out of my parking spot. At 9:07am I was at my estimation, 50% completed my journey to school. The freeway all 4 lanes heading northbound was in fact, a parking lot. I'm a patient person and for all intents and purposes (ignoring the title of this blog) a very calm and level headed type of person, you know, the kind of guy that uses logical thought to work through arguments and the like. But even at 9:24am I still wasn't at school. That's a bit excessive don't you think? Considering on a summer day the drive would take me the shorter end of 20 minutes. By the time 9:32am rolled around I was pretty much getting used to the fact that a major bout of Road Rage was about to spill forth that would make even Gordon Ramsey from Kitchen Nightmares blush. At 9:40 I pulled into the school parking lot with a great sigh of relief. Crisis averted I managed to not kill anyone in a blind rage on the way to school. Its been a good day.

Seriously tho, wanna solve most your city's traffic jam problems without spending a a dime? Simple solution.

BIG GAPS

Yeah for real! BIG GAPS, it will work. Think about it for a second, if everyone on the road gave a 40 or 50 foot gap between them and the car in front of them, people would be free to change lanes, merge and exit in a safe and easy manner. 90% of the problems that cause traffic jams can be eliminated in this manner. I've been driving now for almost 10 years and even back when I was 15 I could see that the most congested places on a major road were on and off ramps. Why? Because there were always droves of people waiting to get on or off. However most driving styles you see are all about "getting there first" meaning people ignore signal lights of other motorists, follow to close and generally act like they are the only car on the road. This in turns makes other drivers slow to a crawl to wait for a chance to sneak in, which now creates more problems because the road with a speed limit of 100 just got slowed down to 25 while the motorist that had to crawl tries to gain his/her speed back and resume normal flow, of course this has consequences in the form of a chain reaction that slows down 50 other motorists behind the original person trying to crawl their way onto a fast moving freeway.

This of course is not a end all solution but it would greatly help speed up roads during peak periods. Just a thought, maybe we should all try it out!

-Sencha

The Art of Politics

Start here: BBC World News
So in Canada we have 4 major political parties that share the federal pie (The fifth being Independents that do not support any of the 4 major parties). Obviously its not split 4 ways. From most to least powerful (based off current election results);

Progressive Conservative (143)
The Liberal Party (77)
Bloc Québécois (49)
New Democratic Party (37)
Independents (2)

Now first just let me state for the record that I realize there is no perfect system and every system will have its flaws. But our current Canadian system is broken and for modern times it is creating more problems than it solves. Firstly, 2 months ago Canada voted and although our Prime Minister did not receive a majority in the House of Commons he won more than enough votes to take leadership. See here in Canada our leaders win by gaining "seats" in the House of Commons. The House has 308 seats assigned to the provinces based on their populations. However, the "senatorial clause" guarantees each province at least as many Members of Parliament as senators. Furthermore, the "grandfather clause" guarantees each province at least as many Members of Parliament as it had in 1976 or in 1985. Because of these two clauses, the size of the House of Commons exceeds the minimum (282). At present, the House includes 308 members. Each member represents a single electoral district (or "riding"), and is elected in that district by the simple plurality voting system. Members must be Canadian citizens and at least 18 years old. They hold office until they resign or Parliament is dissolved, and can be reelected any number of times. For example our Canadian Prime Minister lives about 4 houses away from me. Since he holds a seat in the house I have the option to vote for him (Conservative) or for any of the other people running for his seat, be it Liberal, Democrat or Independent. This is how I vote for Prime Minister. Elsewhere in the country your vote for your local MP is the exact same but since you don't live in the Prime Minister's riding like I do, you vote for your choice of person and his party will be the party you wish to lead the country. Think of it as voting for teams and the team's leader that wins the most seats gets to be Prime Minister.

Out of those 308 seats they are NOT split evenly thought out Canada there are more or less seats in each province based on population. Since eastern Canada is the more densely populated area there are more seats out east than there are in the west (where I live) and generally the east and west are divided;

West: Conservative
East: Liberal
Quebec: Bloc Québécois (We are gonna come back to this)

So one half the country votes Con. and the other half votes Lib. and who do you thinks wins (most 95% or more) of the time? The Liberals. There are simply more people out east so they pretty much always get what they want. Except this time. and this is where the problems are coming in. The Liberals and Democrats have formed a coalition (alliance) against the Conservatives and it is backed by the Bloc Québécois. They have based this on the current world economic crisis and have said the Conservatives have not provided viable options to this crisis. Its not enough for them that they are working on it shortly after a federal election. So their whole idea is to gain support to call a vote of no confidence for the Prime Minister. This has happened twice before. Once in 1979 (Joe Clark) and again in 2005 (Paul Martin). If this vote gets passed Stephen Harper will be forced to step down and the next powerful party will be granted control. In this case, the liberals.

Now that you know a little bit about the situation and how it works. Here is my huge problem with the way its happening.

The Bloc Québécois. What can I say about these separatist fuck sticks? I know! How about, lay down and die. You are no longer wanted or needed in federal government. As a matter of fact I think its highly suspect that you even get federal seats in a country that you want to separate from. In federal democratic politics the voice of the people vote in the best interests of the country as a whole, not one province, in this case Quebec. I think that this party should be forced to disband and a law should be introduced banning the formation of federal political parties that only support one province. I honestly don't give a flying fuck if you are French or not and for that matter I don't even care if you are English, Spanish, Indian, Asian or Martian. Vote for the good of the country as a whole or fuck right off. The 49 seats the Bloc hold should be emptied and they should be redistributed and voted for Canada wide.

As for the Liberals and the NDP I think most of these coalition ideas are fronted by Liberals and I think it has more to do about being sore losers than it does about our budget.

This post was gonna dive into American politics and why we should adopt a new style government based on a new modern era and blah blah blah, but honestly I could go on about it for days and days and probably write a book on the subject. Not only that but I'm in class and I'm starting to get some weird looks because I've been madly typing for the last 25 minutes.

Happy hump day.

-Sencha