“ If a man is right, he can’t be too radical; if he is wrong, he can’t be too conservative.” ... American Humourist Henry Wheeler Shaw

Good hearts and gentle people, we will get to the serious side of this week’s rant in due course, but first (as they say on the TV), an item of more than passing significance which I wish to bring to your attention.
This weekly exercise, as you may know, attempts to keep you on top of events affecting us in our small corner of the world, and in the world at large, in the finest traditions of muck-raking yellow journalism.
Now, in the midst of the plethora of events herebouts and elsewhere, the misadventures of governments at all levels, and the non-stop comedy show known as the Republican Party Primaries, I bring you news from the world of science, as reported by Science Daily, that surmounts all else on the hot news agenda.
I tremble at the momentous quality of what I am about to disclose, but here it is - in the country of Australia, there is now a horse fly named Beyonce.
Now I do not mean a single horse fly, kept as a pet by some Aussie looney or other.
We are talking here about a species of horse fly with “a glamorous golden lower abdomen”, now officially designated with the scientific moniker, Scaptia (Plinthina) beyonceae.
We do not know just what familiarity Mr Bryan Lessard might actually enjoy with the lower abdomen of the real life Miss Beyonce (unrequited dreams of mad passion perhaps), but he says it was “ ... the unique dense golden hairs on the fly’s abdomen that led me to name this fly in honour of the performer Beyonce.”
Well, you gotta admit that as an honour, that elevates Mr Lessard’s choice right up there as a sort of Grammy of flydom.
Unfortunately I cannot at this time report to y’all on Miss Beyonce’s reaction to this signal honour.
I am sure, however, that the lovely golden hued lady would be gracious in the extreme. After all, there are 4,400 different species of horse flies extant around the globe, and she is the only human named after one of them.
Moving right along in our parade of silly stuff, may we contemplate the accusation by a politician who thereby last week qualified himself suitable to represent the hind end of a horse.
We nominate the Conservative government’s Minister of Energy Tom Oliver for his remarkable grasp of logic in charging that naysayers to a pipeline that would bisect British Columbia to deliver dirty oil from the Alberta tar sands to waiting tankers at the coast - are the tools of unamed foreigners.
Even worse, good heavens Aunt Martha, they are, dare I say it, “radicals.”
That’s what Joe says anyway. And so does the Boss of him, one Stephen Harper.
They won’t name names, but they are talking about dudes like Gerald Butts, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Wildlife Federation in Canada, the people at the Sierra Club, David Suzuki’s Foundation, and every other well respected environmental group in Canada.
See, according to conservative ideology, it’s perfectly alright for the Americans, the Chinese, the Albanians or anybody else in the world to buy up Canadian resources or take a controlling interest in so-called Canadian resource industries.
That’s a good thing.
But it’s a bad thing for any of the above groups to accept donations and financing from parent offices located outside the country, to help finance briefs and ask questions which might embarrass the government.
The aforementioned Mr Butts, for instance, is known to have issued media releases defining the underlying issue at the hearings designed to allow the pipeline, as follows, “whether and under what conditions we should permit supertankers and a bitumen pipeline in one of the last intact temperate coastal rain forests on Earth.”
Now, right away, gentle reader, I am sure you can detect the absolutely inflammatory tone and the outlandish language in M Butts’ “radical” pronouncement.
Clearly, it is not the role of a Canadian to set forth the stakes so clearly for other Canadians to comprehend, when their “strong, stable, majority Conservative government” is doing its level best to befuddle and obfuscate that very clarity.
It is distinctly un-Canadian.
By the way, it is also a lie that environmental organizations like the Sierra Fund, the WWF, the Suzuki Foundation and others get the majority of their funds from foreign sources.
In any case, current day “radicals” are in good company. In the USA, the FBI kept close watch on John Kennedy and that “radical” Martin Luther King, and in this country Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Bob Rae both had open files at the RCMP.
In any case, the “radicals” the government fears most, are those spokespeople from First Nations whose traditional lands must be transgressed by pipeline operators in order to get that tar sands oil to customers like China. It is their land, by treaty or tradition. It is their right as Canadians to negotiate terms, or ban the pipeline proposal altogether. Which is exactly what 61 first nations have joined forces to do, radicals all, no doubt.
They do certainly sound determined, when they issue a statement that they “ ... will not allow the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines, or similar tar sands projects cross our lands, territories and watersheds, or the ocean migration routes of the Fraser River salmon.”
Then there were the 400,000 or so radicals out there bitching because our “strong, stable Conservative majority government” was too cheap to hire enough workers to process their unemployment insurance claims.
Good heavens people, what are we coming to, when a bunch of whiners harass Mr Harper just because they have to wait four months or so to get back their own money they have invested in unemployment insurance.
Ingrates all, and obviously raging socialistic radicals.
Minister of Human Resources Diane Finley first claimed there were sufficient people to process the claims, but when 2,500 employees filed a grievance over that contention, there suddenly was a re-organization designed to put more people working on the outstanding files.
And just to finish up the week, there was the snafu over same sex marriages, begun when a lawyer representing the “strong, stable Conservative majority government” made the government case in a court proceedings that thousands of civil same sex marriages performed over the past few years - were invalid.
If the participants were domiciled in foreign countries, they were never, and are not now, legally married under Canadian law.
That’s what the government said.
The uproar was immediate and international in scope.
“Blame the Liberals,” said spokespersons for our “strong, stable majority Conservative government,” and never mind a prime minister disavowing any part in the government position.
And then that same government reversed itself.
“I want to make it clear that, in the government’s view, those marriages are legal,” said Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson.
That is not just a flip-flop, it is an enormous belly-flop.
Which takes us back to Ms Beyonce and the golden hairs on her nether parts.
And you know you are in trouble when the naming of a bug makes more sense than the government of a country once perceived as a place perhaps boring, but always decent and civil in its discourse.
That’s the view from here.