craigsrant.com

I hate summer colds.  They are repulsive and confusing: am I sweating because I have a temp? Or is it because it is 30 odd degrees? Or am I playing Tiger woods Wii too vigorously? (BTW, not a temp, I’m at a balmy 96.9 F…I just can’t be bothered converting it, sorry…).  And there is a tremendous lack of comfort food in summer.  No one eats soups in summer, or casseroles or shepherd’s pie.  Grasping a mug of hot green tea is almost as unpleasant.  And fruit? Who can fill up adequately on fruit?  Impossible. So, I am cranky at this cold, and partially because it is a sneaky summer cold.  One minute I was fine, the next not.  This cold has breached the Geneva convention on colds - “a cold should give it’s intended victim 24 hrs of mild symptoms, thereby alerting the victim to the impending attack and giving them a chance to dose up on whatever folk cures and old wives tails they believe will work.” (Article VIII)

So, I am taking this cold to the ICC (International Cold Court) and charging it with breaching Article VIII and producing far too much mucus. I may also charge it with escalating into a dry rasping cough.

Oh, that’s right, something more important is going on!

We’re in a worldwide recession, and the K-Rudd has come out with his second stimulus package. Now, before I go on, let me declare a conflict of interest here.  I am one of the many who will gain from this package.  Although, that won’t be true if I happen to lose my job or have my hours reduced!

I do like it though (the package, not the thought of un or underemployment).  The building of 20,000 units of public housing is desperately needed.  Looked at your local Primary School lately?  Most of them could do with new facilities.  The insulation initative is good (but could have been better - what about a solar panel or two for every house) and the increase of rebates for solar and for renters trying to make “their” homes environmentally sustainable is a good idea too.  They are steps in the right direction, regardless of whether they have gone far enough.

And I don’t think that you can fault a stimulus package that has an emphasis on nation building.  There are two major problems that I can see with it, however:

a) There is no “saftey net” for those individuals who will make up the jump from 4.5% to 7% unemployment.  That means, I suspect, that come the May budget more packaging and more stimulating will go on (am I sounding like a spam e-mail yet???).

b) For the nation building to occur, the basically incompetent State Governments around this nation will suddenly have to become efficient.  For goodness sakes, some of them can’t even guarantee power supplies, assume that national power grids will work when heatwaves hit more than one State at a time, and whose premier (when asked about the power usage) suggests that “workers stay at home”…I mean, if I had more energy myself at the moment I could work up to a perfectly good rant on why we don’t need State Governments - we’d save billions and have trains that ran when it got above 30 degrees…sheesh…I think my temp has spiked again (yep, 97.7 F)…enough for now.

Oh, and one last thing…if I hear one more time that this is “just another example of the ALP putting us into deficit”, I may scream.  If this were a Coalition government, a Facist one or run by Jehovah Witnesses in a power sharing arrangement with Mormons, we’d still have a deficit.  Go blame the Americans before you blame the K-Rudd.

Tags: colds, politics

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 4:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.