23 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  7. Dr Oz is just another of these phonie new age TV quacks blabbering their usial mindless babble to get americans to cough up a few more dollars for some hokie diet ideas

  9. Toronto Star, Saturday, Dec. 20. Politically correct newspaper runs column seeking discussion of political correctness:
    http://www.thestar.com/opinion/public_editor/2014/12/19/can_we_talk_please_about_political_correctness_run_amok_public_editor.html#
    This one is almost unbelievable. A recent Star op-ed about the CBC argued that that network might have to go through some really rough times before the politicians bothered to “save” it. The piece was accompanied by an illustration (included at the link) that showed the familiar CBC logo (a circle surrounded by bits and pieces of other circles) about to be engulfed by waves. Each piece of the logo was accompanied by a shadowy human figure.
    The problem? The shadowy human figures were coloured black. And to a correspondent with the Star’s public editor Kathy English (author of the column at the link), the bits-and-pieces of the CBC logo looked like … watermelon slices. Therefore, RACISM!!
    “‘Am I seeing tiny black people holding on to what could be taken as watermelons as large waves assault them?'”, asked the correspondent.
    You might be. I’d bet hardly anyone else is.
    “‘Given the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, the number of African Americans who lost their lives and their homes, it is shocking that this drawing would be used.'”
    Lots of people sadly lose lives and homes in nasty ways. What if the illustrator had used a tornado rather than a wave? Undoubtedly some blacks somewhere have been killed by a tornado. Would that be equally “shocking”?
    The correspondent is described as one “whose work involves exposing systemic racism and sexism”. What a huge surprise. Not.
    [Editor English] “explained that I didn’t think the drawing depicted what she believed she saw.” The correspondent responded that “she ‘got’ the CBC logo”, but “My point was that as presented, there was another more shocking reading of that image. I was asking that you take a look at it from another point of view.” And of course, “‘it is not about intent, it is about impact,’ she added.”
    The “impact” here appears to be on exactly one person, in which case it’s probably most appropriate to dismiss the “[]other point of view” as that of a crank.
    When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
    When the only argument you have is “That’s racist,” everything looks like racism.
    Another manifestation of the mindless modus operandi of Marxist political correctness.

  10. My Dad was assigned to an American Engineering outfit in Holland for several months. He was in the Canadian RCASC. These guys put together Bailey Bridges, (spelling?) often under fire. Dad said they were the bravest men he had ever served with. A sniper would take a man out while working on the bridge structure and another would quickly take his place.

  11. Heh. Ravens are wicked smart, too. Just last week, a guy at the job with me put his carton of coffee cream outside because his fridge had quit. A raven pecked a hole in the carton, letting the cream seep out into the snow, which the raven then ate. Polished off the whole carton of cream, it did.
    How did that bird know there was cream in the carton, and that it was good to eat? Cream is not a natural part of their diet, one would guess.

  12. Globe and Mail, Saturday, Dec. 20. Another Facebook scandal, this one at Dalhousie U. dental school:
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/expulsion-has-not-been-ruled-out-for-13-male-dalhousie-dentistry-students/article22169749/
    This one involves sexual harassment of female students. Some women protesters want to see the men involved expelled.
    I’ll just say this: If that’s an expulsion offense, then any student who advocates any form of socialist ideology, which has claimed millions of human lives in cold blood, should be well ahead of the dental students on the expulsion list.

  13. Globe and Mail, Saturday, Dec. 20. How the entitled go about protecting their entitlements:
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/alex-himelfarb-on-austerity-inequality-and-trickle-down-meanness/article22151886/
    Yes, it’s former Privy Council clerk Alex Himelfarb again.
    AH: “Austerity at every level of government–largely self-imposed through years of unaffordable tax cuts – has eroded our key redistributive institutions, welfare and employment insurance, and continues to squeeze the programs that mitigate the consequences of inequality, including medicare. Austerity has yielded a kind of trickle-down meanness.”
    What austerity? Government spending in certain sectors, like health care, is bigger than ever. Socialist bureaucracies tend to do that. That’s what’s squeezing other sectors. But hey, we wouldn’t even need employment insurance or much welfare if we would just reduce the amount of government intervention in the economy such as by letting wages find their free market level and turning welfare over to the private charitable sector, where it belongs. Then we could lay off thousands of unproductive bureaucrats. In other words, the solution to our problems is a quite a bit of austerity.
    AH: “We have had 30 years of an assault on government. The right’s greatest success has been to redefine taxes as a burden or punishment and an unjustifiable constraint on our freedom, and to equate government with inefficiency and corruption. For decades we’ve heard that our main problem is the size of government. Is the problem climate change? No, the problem is the size of government. Is the problem inequality? No, the problem is the size of government. And the solution is to make government smaller. That’s a conjurer’s trick! That’s a distraction! And it has worked profoundly. Of course, government has to be made better, but that won’t happen so long as the very idea of government is seen as the problem.”
    Not surprisingly, this is completely off the mark. We’ve had 30 years of people talking a bit about cutting government, but rarely doing anything about it. Taxes that grab close to half one’s earned income are high, any way you slice it. And governments really are the epitome of inefficiency and corruption. Anyone who reads the papers encounters this on a near-daily basis.
    Government is coercive. Coercion does not solve societal problems. Nor does it invent, create, discover or innovate — all it can do is destroy. Government’s function is to step in when individuals beat each other up or cause trouble. Otherwise, stay out of the way and let people run their own lives. It’s a “conjurer’s trick” to think that government can significantly improve one person’s life without having a devastating effect on numerous others.
    Climate change looks more and more every day like a fraud perpetrated by the extreme left. And inequality is not a problem in itself; a certain level of it is normal and inevitable in a society where it is more or less proportional to effort. A large problem is that many government programs end up hurting the people they’re allegedly there to help.
    If you’re a bureaucratic type and you can trick the populace into believing your efforts are there to help them, then you can take your entitlements at leisure and no one will question you or the dubious “social programs” you are in charge of.

  14. Ravens are the dominant bird species here in the north and are even smarter than crows. Ravens play a large role in the local aboriginal history/mythology as one might expect. Ravens also have the highest ratio of brain mass to body mass for birds, like humans do for primates and dolphins do for cetaceans. They have a large vocabulary with many distinctive calls, and can recognize specific humans. There’s a ‘resident raven’ that ‘hangs out’ around my property, and sometimes it will accompany dog and me when we go for walks. The raven will fly ahead, perch on a branch or pole then ‘talk’ to us as we pass then fly ahead and repeat the process for the whole walk. The antics of dog and raven playing together is quite entertaining.

  15. Wind farm operator PacifiCorp Energy will pay $2.5 million in fines after pleading guilty Friday to charges related to the deaths of protected birds in Wyoming.
    The subsidiary of Portland, Oregon-based PacifiCorp pleaded guilty in federal court in Wyoming to two counts of violating the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act under a plea deal with prosecutors.
    The U.S. Justice Department said the charges stemmed from the discovery of more than 370 dead birds at the company’s Seven Mile Hill and Glenrock/Rolling Hills wind projects in Carbon and Converse counties from 2009 until now. Authorities counted 38 dead golden eagles and 336 other dead protected birds, including hawks, blackbirds, larks, wrens and sparrows.
    It’s the second prosecution of a wind energy company for harming or killing protected birds. Duke Energy pleaded guilty last year to killing eagles and other birds at two Wyoming wind farms.
    An Associated Press investigation last year documented how the Obama administration, which has championed pollution-free wind power, was failing to enforce protections for birds at wind energy facilities nationwide, including at PacifiCorp facilities in Wyoming.
    http://news.yahoo.com/pacificorp-energy-pleads-guilty-bird-deaths-195801455.html

  16. Gord K. and John G.
    Re- Ravens. Track down a copy of “Ravens in Winter” by Bernd Heinrich.
    “Patiently and with a naturalists precision, Heinrich pursues the answers in the frigid silence of the Maine woods where he studied Ravens for four years, and in raven lore from Native American myths to a report from the Yeoman Raven Master at the Tower of London. His book is a landmark work of scientific detection, written with charm and wit.”
    You’re in for a treat!

  18. LEST WE FORGET!
    December 17, 2014. A day, in Alberta politics, that will live in INFAMY!
    Wildrose defectors – to the camp they were elected to oppose.
    Danielle Smith (Highwood)
    Rob Anderson (Airdrie)
    Gary Bikman (Cardston-Taber-Warner)
    Rod Fox (Lacombe-Ponoka)
    Jason Hale (Strathmore-Brooks)
    Bruce McAllister (Chestermere-Rocky View)
    Blake Pedersen (Medicine Hat)
    Bruce Rowe (Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills)
    Jeff Wilson (Calgary-Shaw)
    And not forgetting……..
    Kerry Towle (Innisfail-Sylvan Lake)
    Ian Donovan (Little Bow)
    WE WILL REMEMBER THEM.

  19. Don’t worry, Ogabe censorship intact (Fast and Furious, Benghazi attack, Lois Lerner scandal…etc)
    ———————————-
    “I wish they had spoken to me first,” Obama said of Sony executives at a year-end news conference in which he said, “we cannot have a society in which some dictatorship someplace can start imposing censorship …”
    http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/12/19/barack-obama-says-sony-decision-to-pull-the-interview-was-a-mistake-vows-revenge-against-north-korea/

  22. Why is this happening? Who can explain, the pundits are at a loss. How can it be that federal polls show the race is tightening? There’s no reason for it or is it maybe that election day is getting close? Anyway, I’m amazed so-called serious journalists are calling for Harper to either lose the 2015 election or at least his majority:
    http://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2014/12/21/federal-polls-show-race-is-tightening-but-cant-explain-the-reasons-why/#.VJcMQP8Dc

  23. It’s nothing but media-masturbation. Nothing will matter till a month before the next election.

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