Friday, December 5, 2008

The great ungoverned

So what happens in a country where they decide to just shut down a parliament for a few months? And during the (we hope) steepest part of the slippery slope down into recessiontown, at that.
Will the cabinet be allowed to meet? What sorts of decisions may be taken? Clearly nothing that requires input from the parliament. Is the government also shut down? I must admit to being rather surprised at the actions of the Canadian (acting) head of state, the Governor General, in agreeing to prorogue the parliament (is the definition of "prorogue" something like to "make it more rogue-ish"?)

On our front, here, the state's economy is going downhill fast, yet the governor in his (measurably finite, and possibly negative) wisdom insists that the way out of all our problems is for the state to cut spending. And so jobs are disappearing with the dodos, salaries are being "furloughed" (that is, cut, but the base salary stays the same: we don't lose our raises, just the money), and everyone is worried.
Oh, and we had to spend over two hundred bucks to fix a computer, and today the dishwasher decided that it couldn't face the future in our household and decided to commit suicide. Well, since it was a good one, it would cost us several hundred to fix it, which is more than replacing it with a lesser model.
What to do, what to do, what to do.

Yours, wanting to prorogue the future until this mess is over,
N.

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