Briana and I have started with the gardening. We have long wanted to take an active interest in growing our own food and we did grow a passel of herbs in the old condo but there was no space and when the real-estate bug hit, the nascent flora hit the bricks.

I our new place, in the West End of New Westminster, we have more space and we have tried some first steps. We aim for a true Victory Garden and we plan to be exemplars of sub-urban self sufficiency in some way or other. So far we have some kitchen herbs, tomatoes planted, squashes and zucchini, onions and chives and a few other tid-bits. There seems to be a massive movement gaining speed towards self sufficient urban farming but it could be the “hey, there sure are a lot of Honda Odysseys on the road” phenomenon, they day after you buy one.

So I have been reading some cool blogs and other blogs and wikipedias. And Briana has read a slew of super books including The 20 Minute Vegetable Gardener and Michail Pollan’s In Defence of Food.

Recently we attended a meeting with the New Westminster Parks horticulturalist and management staff and a super group of interested gardeners with the aim of establishing a community garden in the city for the benefit of all city gardeners. My first plan is to use the two vacant lost close to my house. In the satellite photo below, the houses still exist but the two houses closest to the south-east corner of Grimston Park.

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The space is not really suitable for much other than a parking lot or a community garden, and we all know what Joni Mitchel thinks about parking lots.

More to come.

An interesting vid . This is based on a series of advertisements from apple based on “I switch” (from PC to MAC). This presenter switched to Canada.

“Shakespeare is buried
in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in his hometown of Stratford,
Warwickshire. His gravestone bears an epitaph which Shakespeare himself
supposedly wrote. It warns:”

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Well sort of..

While I started thinking about the United Independents in 2002, I did absolutely nothing about it. Daniel Rosen is doing it, right now, in Nevada. I caught word of this in the November issue of Wired Magazine. I could not find the article online so the link is just to the Wired homepage. In the hard copy, the article reads in part,

…But did the founding fathers really mean for America to operate like ancient Greece? Doesn’t representative
democracy mean placing trust in, well, representitatives, who read the fine print for us? “No one in congress ever reads the bills their voting on, ” says Rosen, who trails badly in the polls…” how can you read a bill if you are busy meeting with lobbyists to raise money for your next campaign?

I honestly wish him success. If that good fortune can not happen to him in his bid to win a seat in the US House of Representitives, then I wish him well anyway.

Hey,

Thanks Joss for that last comment. I too am stunned by the small amount of people that are willing to get informed and participate - or even form opinions- on political issues and current events. I can’t help but think however that a riding represented by a “mercenary MP” would get supercharged with participation. Not all issues are important to all people, like stem cell research; maybe a hard core environmentalist or tax reform person would not really care, but those who did care would be way more likely to make their voices heard. And for once, their voices would matter.

Under the circumstances, lets say only 5% or registered voters cared enough to make their views heard on an important issue. With a riding office making information known and urging people to register their opinions, this rises to, lets say 10%. Add those who then “vote” just because they know others with opposing views will (15%) and another portion just for sugar and giggles and you have 20%.

Some issues will not have a big turnout, some will have more. Lots of people may have views or not but the willingness to register one’s views is a low enough bar to determine who is and who is not a stakeholder in any particular issue. If it meant that much to them, they would have given their opinion. I think the kind of turn out you would get with this process would be enough to form a sample of the ridings electorate as a whole. I do stand behind the sampling idea on this. But it is not just about the sampling. It is more like saying “60% of the riding’s voters who were informed and gave a damn, would vote XYZ.”

As for the lack of telephones and other statistical hurdles, while it is a problem for social research, it is not a problem for excercising franchise. The participation is from registered voters. There is a list and the list is verifiable and updatable. Where the list is a bad list, ths process would clean it up. Voters could “vote” via phone, internet, inperson, mail and each vote would be manually and electronically verified to the voter.

On the subject of the Tyranny of the Majority (thank you John Stewart….Mill) I have to say that our system of government already provides it’s citizens with a social contract that makes the Tyranny of the Majority idea impossible. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms means if a riding votes 100% to bar Athiests or Japanese people or Baptists from public office (or etc) it simply does not have the power to override the charter.

The more I talk about it the more I like it. Check out the next post…

In response to my post on introducing a political party whose only platform plank is to deliver representation for the riding’s voters, we had insightful comments from both Jocelyn and POW Paul. Paul writes speaks for our favorite Scottish Religious leader: Edmund Burke:

“Your representative owes you not only his industry but his judgment. He betrays rather than serving you if he sacrifices his judgment to your opinion.”

Paul then chimed in with a keen identification of one of the main issues:

One of the finest benefits of the admittedly imperfect system we call representative democracy is that, at its best, it allows us to select people who are smarter than us to create innovative solutions that we might not have thought of…..Do we really want Joe Schmo to decide our positions on medical research, greenhouse gases, and war policy - if he’s not an expert in any of these fields himself?

Jocelyn agrees with Paul, and not just because he is dreamy. She too thinks the MP has an independent role to play:

“I think what Paul thinks too…Particularly when it comes to delicate matters that are contentious, such as assisted suicide or gay marriage or when life is really alive, I think it pays to have people with some expertise behind the votes.”

I have considered the viewpoints you express. We currently do not elect MPS that can boast any particular aptitude in any policy area. At best we vote for MPS for their affiliation to a party leader we think represents our views or have a good bunch of advisers.

This United Independents is essentially a work-around. The current system is build for representative democracy but the views of the people are never expressed. What you may like on social policy in one party, may be balanced against a foreign policy you hold as repugnant.

Each riding office could publish the running poll status on an issue. Those registered to vote in the riding would all have a chance to vote and I believe many would if the process was made easy and multiple voting platforms were made available (Internet, mail, phone, in person). The goal is not “perfect government policy” the goal is accurately representing the views of the constituents.

I hope I can make a post out of these comments alone. Keep em coming!

My Cool Sister J-girl, who has a lot in common with Lisa Loeb in my opinion (funky glasses, smart, realistic view of the world, quirky, artistic, sensitive to emotions) should also get be on the show Number One Single. Lisa L probably woudn’t stand for it. Sis is just too cool.

You see I have refrained from using a glam shot of her here as she herself would prefer to be thought of by her deeds ad actions rater than mascara choice. My Sister rocks and if the Christian Boys she knows could get over the massive guilt they have been indoctrinated with, they too could be exposed to this coolness. I am told that a lot of Xian girls are in the same problem. Wierd.

For at least ten years, a community of people have been using False Creek, a former industrial sewer and more recently a focal point for a rapidly expanding civic rehabilitation zone, as a permanent anchoring site for their boats. The interesting twist is that the boats are inhabited, each a one or two bedroom apartment floating on the inlet.

As the surrounding neighborhood beautified and the average income of its residents skyrocketed, more and more complaints about the boat dwellers made it to city hall. Some of the boats are perfectly tidy boats but some are, ahem, creatively maintained. Many of the boats are commercial fishing craft converted to be ‘liveaboards’. There owners row back and fourth to their jobs and city activities, confident that the heavily integrated community that has been forged among the boaters of False Creek will keep their possessions safe and also comforted by the fact that the ebb and tide of parochial NIMBY-ism sometimes prevalent in city politics will not impact their way of life as False Creek is under the jurisdiction of a Federal government that, for the most part, has forgotten we exist and only speaks French anyway.

Until recently. Boaters, out! Find a new home or sell your boats! The boaters of False Creek must leave immediately now that the city has successfully lobbied Ottawa to change the navigation act to make False Creek a regulated anchorage area. The salty nonconformists must weigh anchor and move on.

I don’t know how I feel about this actually. I often liked the thought of having them there. It was quirky and community making and a good story to tell. I sometimes feel that governments can push for a civic state of being that is too sanitized and not folksy enough to represent an “organically cohesive” society and the result is social alienation. (eat that Emile Durkheim). It s true that new sewage regulation would have made the squatters (ha-ha) illegal anyway as it is now prohibited to discharge waste closer than 2 miles from land. (This regulation does not apply to the city of Victoria apparently, who dumps the contents of its citizen’s bowels into the Straight of Georgia. It also would require the building of a few hundred more pump-out stations), but considering that the Creek has not fully recovered from being a 70 year old industrial waste pool, 100 boaters seems less important.

Still, some of the boats looked kind of ratty. The Olympics are coming up (but should we remove a charming quirk?) and given the rudimentary nature of marine showers, these people probably smell.

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Here in Coquitlam Center, Suburban mall of note East of Vancouver BC, the assembled gather in communion for a Fifa administered dose of global community. The serving is especially felt in multi-culti Greater-Van.

GOAL!