The Oppenheimer Report - 4/29/13

Flooding has been the big story up here in the Great White North this past week. A fast thaw coupled with a lot of rain has put some people in cottage country under water. Our property is fairly well drained and runoff is diverted to the perimeters of the property, but this was a large volume of water in a short period of time and we live at the bottom of a hill. We had some flooding, largely because our sump in the basement failed, but there were quite a few people locally who had it much worse than we did. Our local marina, which lies on the Magnetawan River, is also our post office, and when I went over to pick up our mail the other day, I saw that the river had swollen well beyond its banks. All the docks are ruined, and depending on how bad this turns out, their boat ramp may be damaged as well. Large debris floating down river might catch on the ramp and undermine it. As I write this I can see out on the recently thawed lake that there are some big dock parts floating around out there, and all sorts of flotsam is floating down the Magnetawan right now. Nearby Huntsville and Bracebridge had a lot of washed out roads and on the local news it was estimated that in Huntsville alone the damage was up over $1Million. We were in Huntsville today for a doctors appointment and it is obvious from all the heavy equipment driving around town that Huntsville is in the middle of a big cleanup. Many of the stores were closed, including my beloved dollar store. They are calling this a hundred year flood, after which the term “hundred year flood plain” was derived for planning purposes, and most of the locals say they don’t ever remember the water getting this high. Rain is in the forecast, so this is not over yet. Our lake level is at least four feet above normal, and I’m just hoping that all this water flows down to Georgian Bay without decimating all the communities downstream. Last week I was in a terrible mood , because after the tease of spring, I was pumping water out of our basement, and to rub salt into the wound, we had two nights of heavy, wet snow. I was watching a couple of Canadian geese out on the lake last week, and it was almost as if they were complaining. Wife to husband: “You just HAD to be home for the first day of spring … we couldn’t have stayed in Florida for two more weeks, you schmuck!!”

Near the capital of Bangladesh the Rana Plaza building collapsed killing a lot of the most underpaid garment workers in the world. In all, there were five separate factories in the building which employed about 3000 workers. At least 400 are reportedly dead with many more still missing, and it is being called one of the worst garment industry accidents ever. The real tragedy is that many of these workers knew the building was structurally unsound but did not protest for fear of losing their jobs. Cheap labor attracts the business of Western retail companies like J.C. Penny and Loblaws. When you see those Joe Fresh polo shirts for ten bucks, chances are they’re made by workers who get paid pennies an hour and work in sweat shop conditions reminiscent of turn of the century America. While the events in Boston and West, Texas last week pretty much dominated the news, one needs look no further than page three (of that soon-to-be-obsolete newspaper) to find some international tragedy that puts all other tragedies into perspective. There was a massacre last week in civil war torn Syria in which hundreds were killed execution style.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher passed away not too long ago, and I never knew much about her until well after she served as Prime Minister. The other night we watched The Iron Lady in which Meryl Streep played the controversial leader, and I was impressed by Streep’s award-winning performance. I never realized that Thatcher was so hated by many of the British. I suppose like some other myopic Americans, I was generally uninformed about the politics of other countries. What particularly interested me was the dementia aspect of her story. No matter how important a person may be during their illustrious life, dementia robs them of the ability to reflect upon that life. I read an article today about a book Thatcher’s daughter has written, and in the article was a discussion about our perceptions of the dementia “sufferer”. The article suggests that we don’t really know anything about what the sufferer feels, and have only our own perceptions with which to torture ourselves. And what is this about the CIA providing bags full of money to Afghanistan President Karzai “to pay off warlords” -- about $36 million over the past ten years, or, as the CIA refers to it “chump change.”

Final note. I watched Jon Stewart’s Daily Show tonight and he made me laugh with one of his rants on Congress. He coined a new word while suggesting that Congressmen seem to spend more time watching internet porn than representing their constituents. The word is procrasturbating: “using masturbation to otherwise occupy yourself while pressing matters await.” Hee hee.

　

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED