27 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. EBD
    YES it is, and I’ll be on that flight in a couple of weeks, could have done without the the “music” back ground, at least I won’t have to listen to that.

  3. Thanks for this–I’m writing a young adult fantasy series, The Shards of Excalibur, published by Coteau Gooks, that starts in Regina (and has, in the second book, the only scene that will EVER appear in a fantasy novel set in Bennett’s Gas in Chamberlin, Saskatchewan), and in the third book, The Lake in the Clouds, which I JUST turned in, my Saskatchewan kids end up in Queenstown, flying in to that very airport. Nice bit of synchronicity!

  4. Re: Bennett’s Gas
    I was a Ford salesman for many years. I remember that place so well! I used to stop there on my way to car auctions in S’toon. It was like going back in the early 40’s!!

  6. If any of you were born in Saskatchewan, you’re all familiar with the sandpipers that nest beside sloughs and lakes. The shorebird can feign injury so well, hobbling along as if it has a broken leg or wing, diverting foxes and coyotes away from their nest.
    In the last two weeks, the Liberals and the NDP needed a diversion to sway our focus on the one big story in Ottawa. Liberal MPs who (allegedly) have sexually harassed NDP MPs.
    Thus with the help of the CBC, they pounced on the fact that the auditor general stated in his report that our veterans, (allegedly) were in dire need of financial support for mental health issues. In reality, the report said that about 20% of vets had to wait 8 months for assistance. I haven’t read the report–however in a medicare setting–that’s quite normal!! Now the National Post has joined the carnage.
    http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/11/30/how-julian-fantino-went-from-star-mp-to-political-liability-he-has-not-heard-the-pleas-of-our-veterans/
    PS: Interestingly enough–the NP didn’t allow comments on the story.

  9. Attention all vapers! Call for presenters for Bill 45 the omnibus health bill. It goes to second reading today (Dec 1). Make a call to show your opposition.
    http://goo.gl/IorkE4
    Link to The End Vaper Shop video with information and what to expect. They are based in Nova Scotia and did battle against their provinces Bill 60.

  10. Toronto Star, Friday, Nov. 28. Columnist Joe Fiorito doesn’t like voluntary charity but has no qualms about the involuntary:
    http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/11/27/dare_to_give_me_a_break_fiorito.html
    He objects to a campaign by Governor-General David Johnston to encourage more charitable donations and volunteerism by Canadians. He wonders whether future G-Gs will “be required to assume office with some particular hobby horse or special interest in hand”.
    Yet it has become somewhat routine for Ontario’s Lieutenant-Governor; the past few have been involved in various charitable causes such as disability (a fact he touches on in the column, without really noting the parallel).
    JF: “I’d prefer it if the GG dared the PM to end child poverty. Truth is, I dislike most charity; we did not take it when I was growing up, but in memory we were almost always an inch away.”
    And: “To live on the edge of poverty is to be aware that need is a sign of failure; the acceptance of charity would have been a cruel admission of defeat.”
    Then: “Stephen Harper prefers this sort of giving [referring to the likes of food banks]; it allows him to cut taxes. But I remember a time when governments of all stripes and at all levels understood that the role of the state was, among other things, to care for the neediest among us, primarily through the wise use of taxes spent on social programs.”
    And: “We have now reached a point, thanks to the Harper brand of Thatcherism, where tax is a dirty word; thus, we have left the care of the hungry and the homeless to organized charities, and also to the churches.”
    Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s a “cruel admission of defeat” to accept voluntary charity, yet it’s not utterly reprehensible to accept it when it’s collected at gunpoint? This is the upside-down morality of the leftist in full view.
    There has been poverty throughout the history of the world; only in recent decades, thanks to the spread of capitalism, have large numbers of people been able to escape it. The numbers of those still poor today would continue to decline if capitalism were allowed to operate unimpeded, but sadly the leftists have increasingly hindered it. It’s the depredations of the professional malcontents who think ‘tax’ is not a dirty word who are entirely responsible for the slowing down or even the reversal of the decline of poverty. By interventionist measures like minimum wages and excessive power of labour unions, they cause high unemployment, thus sending thousands onto social assistance who should be (and in most cases would almost certainly prefer to be) working productively. Through taxation and wasteful government spending, they eat away at capital investment so that innovation and scientific advances go undiscovered, and the standard of living fails to rise. Then, of course, they rail about “consumerism”.
    As Ayn Rand said, “The socialists used to claim that when their system took over, everyone would have shoes. When they discovered the truth, they declared that it was preferable to go barefoot”.
    JF: “Harper punishes the charitable organizations he does not like by lashing them with the whip of the Canada Revenue Agency.”
    This is completely unproven, and as such might well be libelous. Just because the professional malcontent leftists believe it, doesn’t mean it’s true. This kind of trash shows up almost every day in one or another letter to the editor of the Toronto Star, plus the occasional column such as the above. Stephen Harper could become rich if he chose to take action against them. Perhaps the only thing standing in the way is that politicians should develop a thick skin and be considered fair game for public discourse, even when it veers into this hostile territory, true or not.

  11. Mr. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for uncovering the double helix structure of DNA, sparked an outcry in 2007 when he suggested that people of African descent were inherently less intelligent than white people.
    …the differential psychology community seems agreed that if you accept people to be members of the race they say they belong to, then the mean intelligence scores among the races will rank in order, from Ashkenazi Jews as highest, followed by North Asians, White, Hispanic, and Black. The differences in means vary by the instrument used for the measure, but the rank orders are consistent and have been for many year, despite vigorous efforts to reduce cultural effects on scores. This is given in tedious detail in dozens of peer reviewed academic studies, and has been commented on by many best selling books, including “The Mismeasurement of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, and The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein.
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/11261872/James-Watson-selling-Nobel-prize-because-no-one-wants-to-admit-I-exist.html

  12. Star writer Fiorito seems to have never gotten over his as a child representing the family standing in the cold in a crowd of workers waiting before Christmas for the slim chance of winning a present given out by a company president. The experience is reminiscent of the scene in Claude Jutra’s film Kamouraska with the hated English boss giving out a bit of charity at Christmas.

  14. AGW: RIP.
    “A juvenile American mastodon skull lays on top in natural asphalt at the 1952 Observation Pit building at the Page Museum La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.”
    …-
    “Mastodons weren’t hunted to extinction by Ice Age humans — they simply froze to death, new study finds”
    ““To think of scattered populations of Ice Age people with primitive technology driving huge animals to extinction, to me is almost silly,” said Grant Zazula, chief paleontologist for the Yukon Territory and the study’s lead author.
    “It’s not human nature just to see everything in your path and want to kill it,” he said.
    “Their time in what is now the Canadian North appears to have been brief, and occurred during a short-lived interglacial period when temperature and conditions would have been similar to today.
    “They migrated northward: ‘Let’s come up to Alaska and the Yukon on a vacation to see what it’s like,’ but then when conditions got cold again they were immediately wiped out,” said Mr. Zazula.”
    http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/12/01/mastodons-werent-hunted-to-extinction-by-ice-age-humans-they-simply-froze-to-death-new-study-finds/

  16. “Style, elegance, and her mother’s winning smile”

    Yes indeed, it’s Mooch Jr..
    Check out the top photo. Some unlucky fella will be destined to a lifetime of hell.
    h/t

  17. AGW Regress Report: 91 vs 93.
    …-
    “Reagan Man Gone Solar Is Hint of a Thaw in U.S. Climate Debate”
    “Living a life powered “on sunshine,” Shultz, at 93, has a message for the doubters who dominate his own party: “The potential results are catastrophic,” he said in an interview. “So let’s take out an insurance policy.”
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-01/reagan-statesman-s-sunshine-power-hint-of-thaw-in-climate-debate.html
    …-
    “PAUL HELLYER’S MONEY MAFIA
    In church basement appearance, the former defence minister turned conspiracy theorist warns of government cabal keeping solutions to global warming secret”
    “There are light years between the photos and Helleyer’s notoriety today in the ET disclosure community and his belief in the existence of extraterrestrials. At a University of Toronto conference in 2005 he declared, “UFOs are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head.”
    After patiently inscribing all the copies in the room, the 91-year-old, who was Pearson’s defence minister, and deputy PM and transport minister under Trudeau, uncoils his lanky frame and takes to the podium.”
    https://nowtoronto.com/news/paul-hellyers-money-mafia/

  18. Of Ezra Levant, Fracking, and leftism.
    …-
    “Oil at $40 Possible as Market Redraws Politics From Caracas to Tehran”
    “Global energy markets have been upended by an unprecedented North American oil boom brought on by hydraulic fracturing, the process of blasting shale rocks to release oil and gas.”
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-30/oil-at-40-possible-as-market-transforms-caracas-to-iran.html
    …-
    “EZRA LEVANT: THE CONSERVATIVE CAUSE’S USEFUL IDIOT”
    “Levant has seemingly been able to convert that solid he did Harp years ago into quite a career, including as a shill for the oil industry. His 2011 best-seller Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, got a big boost from the PMO. (The PM’s former director of planning and now director of issues management, Alykan Velshi, was the mastermind behind the site EthicalOil.org set up to promote the book’s ideas).
    And predictably, in his latest for oil and gas interests, Groundswell: The Case for Fracking, Levant musters some of the popular climate denial rhetoric that the HarperCons have been selling since they took office. Here too he takes on the West’s reliance on oil from Muslim regimes Iran and Qatar with bad human rights records. A loyal huckster’s work is never done.”
    https://nowtoronto.com/news/ezra-levant-the-conservative-causes-useful-idiot/

  19. Plainzdrifter – that is actually from the movie “Holiday Inn” from 1942. “White Christmas” was written for that movie.

  21. The CBC has a dangerous article up about curing cancer.
    http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/cancer-cured-by-medicine-man-first-nations-man-says-1.2852376
    This might cause a few deaths but, c’est la vie et c’est le mort, political correctness is very important to the state broadcaster.
    I also witnessed the power of traditional ‘medicine’.
    My ex’s sister had ovarian cancer. She was treated for 6 weeks at the Tom Baker in Calgary with chemo. It was on a partial outpatient basis. The taxpayer paid for her treatments and her motel village room.
    When the treatments were over, she returned to the reserve. While resting she took the traditional route and did a few sweats and herbs.
    BTW, this particular medicine man preferred his gift of sacred tobacco to be in cartons marked “DuMaurier”.
    She returned to the Tom Baker a couple of months later and was found to be cancer free. In her mind, the same as this fella, it wasn’t the white man’s chemo that cured her. It was the traditional ‘medicine’.
    If an adult wants to forego real medicine for mumbo-jumbo based on superstition, I’m all for it, save us a few dollars.
    But, the CBC article is directly linked to the child that is dying of leukemia.
    The CBC,in their quest to be PC and prove they are ‘one’ with the natives, have hastened the death of this child and likely others.

  22. Those generous Russians, sending another aid convoy to Eastern Ukraine. Thank God for their food, fuel and ammunition aid:
    http://news.yahoo.com/large-unauthorized-convoy-enters-east-ukraine-russia-ukrainian-134642916.html
    Just so everybody knows, Russia is not invading Ukraine, when not technically anyway; that is fascist propaganda, just like what happened to Crimea. Umm, I mean Russian Crimea, yeah that’s it. Follow the watch, you are getting sleepy….
    Look for later aid convoys to Belarus, Romania and Poland (oops sorry Moldova), right after the aid insurgents arrive and run out of ammunition, I mean food.

  23. I thought violent crime, specifically gun related crime, was going to go ballistic if the gun registry was done away with…
    http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/12/01/canadas-homicide-rate-drops-again-hits-nearly-50-year-low-statscan/
    “Firearm-related homicides were down, but fatal stabbings increased. There were 131 homicides tied to guns in 2013, down 41 from 2012. This was the lowest rate of firearm-related homicide since comparable data became available in 1974.”

  24. The RCMP have changed their position on the murder of our soldiers.
    Apparently protecting the ideology of the terrorists is more important than telling the truth to Canadians.
    ” I do understand the public interest in understanding what’s in that video and I do remain interested in seeing some version of that being shared with Canadians.”
    Paulsen should be fired, or if he had an ounce of decency, resign today.
    http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/politics/archives/2014/12/20141201-133910.html

  25. Between Rock & Voodoo: Liberalism.
    …-
    “ALLAN ROCK
    How Michaëlle Jean will
    re-energize la Francophonie” (g-m)
    …-
    “The Gun Registry: Only One Part of Allan Rock’s Trail of Blunders”
    “The brainchild of Allan Rock, then Minister of Justice, the Gun Registry was introduced under the false pretence of saving lives. It has been a fiasco of enormous proportions almost since its inception, even among Liberals. It is said that the Registry cost Rock the leadership bid in 2003.”
    http://www.thepolitic.com/archives/2005/09/26/the-gun-registry-only-one-part-of-allan-rocks-trail-of-blunders/

  26. “But the Red/Green campaign availed not.”
    …-
    “Mining Engineers Led by Communications Studies Majors”
    “Russia has generally shown scant concern for environmental protection and has a long record of harassing and even jailing environmentalists who stage protests. On fracking, however, Russian authorities have turned enthusiastically green, with Mr. Putin declaring last year that fracking “poses a huge environmental problem.” Places that have allowed it, he said, “no longer have water coming out of their taps but a blackish slime.”
    But the Red/Green campaign availed not. Daniel Yergin writes in the Wall Street Journal that Putin is being crushed by politically incorrect America. “The decision by members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countrieson Thursday not to cut production reflects a profound shift in the world oil market. The demand for oil—by China and other emerging economies—is no longer the dominant factor. Instead, the surge in U.S. oil production, bolstered by additional new supply from Canada, is decisive. This surge is on a scale that most oil exporters had not anticipated. The turmoil in prices, with spasmodic plunges over the past few days, will likely continue.” Technological advances mean North American oil might be viable right down to $50 a barrel.
    It is now clear that the new U.S. production is more resilient than anticipated. There has been a widespread view that at around $85 or $90 a barrel extracting “tight” oil from shale would no longer be economical. However, a new IHS analysis based on individual well data finds that 80% of new tight-oil production in 2015 would be economic between $50 and $69 a barrel. And companies will continue to improve technology and drive down costs.”
    http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/12/01/mining-engineers-led-by-communications-studies-majors/#more-40660

  27. Yeah well,there is one thing certain about UFOs……
    The most certain way to lose credibility is to disclose a positive view to the existence of either UFOs or Bigfoot.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation