Februrary 2014: I Will Not Miss You

Jay Leno left the Tonight Show earlier this week. Could've been yesterday but I have been inundated with reports about Sochi 2014 - most of them concerning a little thing called the Winter Olympic Games. Already, the biggest opponents have attempted to hijack a plane in order to put some heat on the organizers... the odds of some kind of crazy shit happening in the open (let alone the stories we won't hear till March or later) are high enough to keep everyone placing money on the most outrageous tragedies, disruptions, and events. The Vancouver 2010 luge death might end up looking like a mild sprain, when all is said and done in Sochi.

An entire unit of the Russian Army is patrolling the Georgia/Russia border, and the stuff those guys are getting up to is no doubt quite interesting and compelling, but their opponents have sworn to engage in the sort of chaos-terrorism that military action has not yet been able to completely prevent. I am not reporting this to be gleeful or glib, but dozens of years of military retribution have only managed to stoke the flames of resentment. Even the Cossacks have been called in. While the hijacker/bomb-threat guy is getting beaten up by security personnel and interrogated to within an inch of his life, and incarcerated in a post-gulag gulag, the games must go on. Bookies are refusing to take bets on terrorist activity, citing a worldwide surveillance apparatus and generally bad odds of anything major going wrong (the latter excuse seems questionable to me).

Surely they will, but there is more trouble than just the threat of violence and bomb blasts. There is also bad press, blistering social media output, and international confrontation. A major ideological schism has haunted the Sochi Olympics since last year, and that is the spectre of Russian homophobia, which is not quite so much a regional thing in Sochi. For a while, in late 2013, it seemed as if a few countries might boycott the games, but abandoning the athletes on human rights principles was ultimately considered unthinkable. I am not an expert and I have not been following the issue closely, but I don't think a single country ended up boycotting the games for the beaten and dead gays of Russia.

The Debate is On!

Moderated by the unparalleled Steve Paikin, the Canadian debate is happening right now, and it is a little rude. I'll be quick about it so I can get back to watching: everything has been rough, nobody's been excessively rude, but there is some frank backbiting. Harper has been calm thus far, not even breaking a sweat as the other politicians condemn him soundly. Layton and Duceppe are definite secondaries as Ignatieff and Harper go at it. Let me paraphrase an injunction by Iggy:  "This isn't bickering, Mr. Harper, this is debate. This is democracy."

Harper's weakness is foreign policy, the G20 is a definite black eye, but Ignatieff and Layton have a lot to prove, and Duceppe has to reach out to angophones. Where is Elizabeth May? The consortium vetoed her away. Is that fair play? I say, "No way." Shame, shame, shame.

Talks of coalitions, party brandings, closed door meetings, and all that other good stuff abound. Watch. Consider. Vote.  Laugh, because some of the bickering is relatively petty.

Oh and the other big news is that humanity gained space 50 years ago, via Mr. Yuri Gagarin, cosmonaut, lately of Russia. Props to him and Russia for winning the first leg of the space race. (Lets also remember the many people who died, laboured, and sacrificed so that we could fire unreliable columns of machined steel out of Earth's atmosphere.)