… be a shame if something were to happen to you.
CBC- Avery’s Law makes organ, tissue donation automatic in New Brunswick
Update: Apparently you don’t even have to be technically dead yet either.
Road to nowhere
After massive pandemic era spending on alternative travel options like RVs, the marginal consumer is finally tapped out. Things were not helped by post-pandemic surge in production costs and the skyrocketing price of fuel.
Winnebago reported a 38.2% year-over-year plunge in the quarter due to sliding unit sales related to souring RV retail market conditions. Discounts were much higher than in the same quarter last year, an attempt by management to spark demand. However, high interest rates are curbing demand.
Revenue fell the most in the Towable RV segment, down 52% to $384.1 million. The decline is primarily due to lower unit volume associated with ‘challenging’ retail market conditions and discounts and allowances versus a year ago. Revenues declined 27.5% in the Motorhome RV segment.
No speech for you!
Some foolish ideas just refuse to die. Ideas like the claim that laws against murder are an infringement on freedom, but a very acceptable and necessary infringement. It never takes long for someone to take that preposterous argument to the next level, and before you know it there’s no freedom for anyone.
You will see throughout our constitution, yes you have rights, but they are restricted for the common good. Everything needs to be balanced.
“If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace then I believe that it is our job, as legislators, to restrict those freedoms, for the common good,” Ms O’Reilly added.
Unfortunately, the Irish Green Party’s views on the nature of freedom would be right at home here in Canada. Our entire constitution is based on the idea that every individual has freedom…until a majority of the tribe decides that you don’t.
Here, kitty kitty….
The most disturbing thing in this story is not that some kid identified as a cat and a teacher harangued students who wouldn’t play along.
The teacher at the Church of England’s Rye College in East Sussex reportedly told one student she was “despicable” after she refused to accept a classmate who identifies as a cat.
The 13-year-old girl and her friend were reprimanded at the end of a Year 8 “life education” class, in which they were told they can “be who you want to be and how you identify is up to you,” the Telegraph reported.
What’s really disturbing is the metamorphosis of a non-concept into a moral principle. If “how you identify is up to you”, culturally and politically this is going to lead to civil war. If the primacy of consciousness becomes a guidepost for life choices, what happens when some people “identify” as the “vanguard of the proletariat” or the “master race”?
More than a lifetime of debt
I’m always a little skeptical when I see the term “expert” in an op-ed title these days, but in this case he seems to know what he is talking about.
“I’ve had many clients with amortizations, that are 70, 80, even 90 years remaining, in the extreme cases, and that’s simply because their payments are not going towards any principle at all,” he said.
“It’s mainly because the payments are strictly just paying interest to the bank, they’re not paying down any of the principal payment at all.”
Many of these same “experts” are getting worried about infinite mortgage amortization, but it’s unlikely anything will be done about it for one simple reason: monetary authorities fear a 2008 style wave of mortgage defaults far more than they fear 90 year mortgages. These authorities previously assured us that only good things can come from zero percent interest rates, and unfortunately a large portion of the population believed them.
O’Keefe Strikes Again
This time, it’s BlackRock.
BREAKING: @BlackRock Recruiter Who “Decides People’s Fate” Spills Info on Company’s World Impact
“It’s not who the president is- it’s who’s controlling the wallet of the president”
“You got $10K? You can buy a senator"
“War is real f***ing good for business” #BlackRockExposed pic.twitter.com/DZIy1DuZKF
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) June 20, 2023
O, Great Spirit Of Cascadia
THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL: Judge rules that Seattle must not enforce law against graffiti
Scapegoating as a national sport
Sometimes one has to wonder why any investor would bother to park his money in Canada these days. In the case of a particular parliamentary committee looking at food prices, the solution being offered to rising prices is to hit competitors with higher taxes. I’m sure that will make food prices go down, right?
If Canada’s Competition Bureau finds that grocery store giants are profiting excessively from food inflation, the federal government should consider slapping a windfall tax on those excess profits.
Rather than condemn such a ludicrous idea, the milquetoasts at the Retail Council of Canada had this to say:
“While we welcome the collaborative tone of the report, we would caution against increased government intervention in the operational aspects of the retail food business.”
We Need A Famine
The Safety Culture: The Dangers of Being a Germophobe
Good discussion.
Kicking the can
The steep rise in interest rates over the past year should be triggering a wave of foreclosures and price declines in the real estate industry by now, but if anything, the opposite is occurring. House prices are rising again in many cities. The reason is fairly straightforward: banks are simply extending mortgage terms to accommodate whatever monthly payment cash-strapped borrowers can afford. Belatedly, one of the other central planning authorities professes to be worried about this.
Canada’s financial regulator is urging lenders to tackle risks from mortgage extensions at the “earliest opportunity” as many borrowers try to navigate higher mortgage costs after the Bank of Canada’s surprise rate hike last week.
But judging by the content of the article, don’t expect any action anytime soon. The zero percent interest debacle is something that none of these folks want to actually tackle.
Y2Kyoto: Below Net Zero
“Ex-Mayor Lori Lightfoot” Is Not The Name Of A DC Comics Character
Harvard University has granted a fellowship in public health to former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who recently became the first Chicago mayor to lose a re-election bid in 40 years after a controversy-ridden tenure as the Windy City’s top boss.
In her role as the Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow, Lightfoot “will teach a course in the fall at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health,” the Ivy League institution recently announced.
The June 1 announcement lists several of Lightfoot’s achievements as mayor, such as leading the citywide response to the pandemic and creating a “Racial Equity Rapid Response Team.”
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
The sequence of events that led to this digital exile began innocuously enough. A package was delivered to my house on Wednesday, May 24, and everything seemed fine. The following day, however, I found that my Echo Show had signed out, and I was unable to interact with my smart home devices. My initial assumption was that someone might have attempted to access my account repeatedly, triggering a lockout. I use a fairly old email address for my Amazon account, and it’s plausible that an old password might have been exposed in a past data breach. However, I currently use strong, auto-generated passwords via Apple and employ two-factor authentication with an authenticator app, so unauthorized access seemed unlikely.
I swiftly checked my other accounts (social media, streaming apps, etc.) to ensure I hadn’t been compromised. All seemed normal, with no flood of notifications from Microsoft Authenticator that would indicate an attempted breach. Puzzled, I followed the advice of the Amazon app and dialed the customer service number it provided. That’s when things began to take a surreal turn.
Expert opinions
After reading this missive from Global, who could possibly doubt the reality of anthropogenic climate change? And who could question the brilliant insights of a researcher at the Future of Workers or the CEO of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy?
“I think at a time when the country is burning and we’re not sure what the future is existentially, we need to do something very serious about climate change,” Armine Yalnizyan, Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers, said.
She added, “And a carbon tax is something that had had at one point cross-party support. So, let’s just do something. Let’s not stop doing the things we can do.”
It’s very simple: the beatings must continue until morale improves.
Schadenfrozen
Whether it’s chemicals or steelmakers, demand for natural gas from Europe’s power-hungry industrial heartland was slammed hard by the energy crisis that unfolded after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The largest consumers of the fuel still appear reluctant to run their businesses at full steam after the record surge in power and gas prices prompted them to curb production over the winter.
The sustained demand shortfall is one of the main reasons European gas prices have collapsed 60% this year alone.
Unless something fundamental changes in the short-term — perhaps record-high storage levels unexpectedly dropping due to extreme hot weather and an increase in demand for cooling — prices are set to remain under pressure.
And who can blame them.
Well, moving production to China is a plan: More companies setting ‘net-zero’ climate targets, but few have credible plans
Never Forget
A forgetful society lives on the precipice of history’s abyss. Lloyd Billingsley reminded us of this when he warned, “as ever, the struggle against genocide is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Billingsley was referencing the Communist Khmer Rouge’s democidal frenzy of 1975-1979 that killed over 2,000,000 people, specifically “Cambodian children were clubbed to death and babies smashed against trees.” He provided a link to an historical, contemporaneous 1977 account of the communist regime and its bloodthirsty Angka Loeu (“organization on high”) leadership’s initial crimes against the Cambodian people and humanity: Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia, by John Barron and Anthony Paul. It is a horrific chronicle of how the insidious tactics and crimes into which the murderous ideology of communism metastasizes and, ultimately, consumes a people.
It is a lesson of history that humanity ignores at its peril. Consequently, in the hope of reminding the present about the past to preserve the future, let us delve into Barron and Paul’s reportage of the survivors’ accounts of the Khmer Rouge’s barbarity perpetrated in the name of the very people these communists tortured and killed.
Classroom Incongruity
WATCH THE GAY KISSING VIDEO IN MATHS CLASS OR I WILL PUNISH YOU.
I paraphrase, but just barely.
Regulate me harder
In an industry in which competition is legislated out of existence, it’s no wonder that Canadian airlines are little more than poorly run, expensive public utilities that excel at fleecing consumers. The government would rather preside over this sorry state of affairs than, God forbid, allow foreign airlines to offer services within Canada.
Budget airline Swoop will shut down later this year and have its operations folded into WestJet, the company announced Friday.
The merger into WestJet’s operations is expected to be completed by Oct. 28, the Calgary-based airline said. Swoop will operate its existing network until then, and Swoop employees will move to WestJet once the merger is completed.
Global Test
Apparently its OK to shake the hand of an accused narco-terrorist on the DEA’s most wanted list, but disagreeing with Kerry about climate change makes you worst than Hitler.
MORE BIKE LANES
The City of Saskatoon is facing a $52-million shortfall as it begins its budget process for next year.
That revenue gap is “probably close to double” the amount that city administrators have faced in the past when starting the budget process, chief financial officer Clae Hack said at a media briefing on Wednesday.
If there are no cuts to services or future growth plans, city residents would face a property tax increase of 18.56 per cent next year and 6.95 per cent the year after, the city said. But the multi-year budget process for 2024 and 2025, which is starting this month and will wrap up in November, will be focused on lowering that number.
Hack stressed the city isn’t recommending a property tax rate at this point, just offering a “fully transparent view” of what administrators and city council will be wrestling with.
They’re socialists, its their nature. Saskatoon city staff unveil $19B climate action master plan