Devine’s Upgraders, Part 5

Ethical Energy youmightbeinsaskatchewan 2 Comments

Were the Regina and Lloydminster upgraders worth it?

In 2011, when oil was 14 per cent of revenue, health care was around 41 per cent of expenditures. That meant that during those boom years, oil revenue could be considered having paid the bill for every doctor, nurse, hospital, old folks home and home care worker south of Craven, and that includes Regina.

That revenue became so important to this province that when OPEC opened the taps in late 2014 and oil crashed from over US$100 per barrel for West Texas Intermediate down to US$26, the provincial deficit for several years almost precisely matched the decline in oil prices. I was able to confirm this at the time by asking both the premier and finance minister several times. That remained the case for several years.

If It Wasn’t for Government Jobs

Great Reset Shiny Pony 26 Comments

There’d be hardly any jobs at all.

Armstrong Economics- Canada’s Private Sector on the Decline

Canada’s job recovery last year seemed strong according to standard measures. However, it was recently revealed that the majority of jobs were created in the public sector. Nearly 9 in 10 jobs created between 2020 and 2021 were in the public sector. Government, not business, is expanding. Between February 2020 and July 2022, private sector growth remained relatively stagnant after posting just a 0.4% increase. The public sector, on the other hand, rose 9.4% in that same period.

Manufactured culture wars are killing our energy

Media Social Disease 17 Comments

A short essay by Terry Etam.

Suppose a person starts a new business. Months of tireless effort ensue. It all works out. The business grows like crazy and within five years it employs a thousand people. The owner becomes wealthy.

Philosophical junction point: Did that person create a gift for society in the form of creating a thousand jobs, plus the ancillary spin off jobs created by their spending?

Or did the business owner become rich on the backs of employees, capturing the benefits of their labour for their own outsized benefit, while the employees did not become rich?

You will predominantly be drawn to one option or the other.

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

CreepyJoeBiden Democrats Drain The Swamp 6 Comments

Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio (R) received a complaint from someone inside the agency over the FBI’s designation of American Contingency, a veteran-led group that assists people in the wake of natural disasters, as being ‘facilitators of domestic terror.’ And it was further revealed that the FBI already knew this wasn’t true, having previously investigated the group and found them to be on the up and up.”

Monday On Turtle Island

Turtle Island 15 Comments

Woke Britain:  Outraged Karens phone police, when Jordan Peterson visits a British school.  New York Times trashes the British prime minister.  What Canada can look forward to, as a diversity outbreak in Britain occurs.

Biden’s America:  The Old South shall rise again, by Victor Davis Hanson.  Truss will ask China Joe to stand up to the Chinese.  Wish you weren’t here.  Sometimes Hunter Biden gets his drugs by mail.  An example of Democrat hypocrisy.

Today In Islam:  This story was quickly dropped.  Muslim man rushes Queen’s coffin.  Muslim attacks Rabbi in Germany.

Trudeau’s Canada: Klaus Schwab groomed Justin Trudeau.  Culture camp teaches illegal hunting.  In Canada math is racist.  And Trudeau must go.

Guest Post

Not Quite News 22 Comments

SDA regular Denise has written in with something relevant to our current times. The photo is of her and her friend, Cassandra, and her kids.

Forty years ago this month I left the comfort of Canada for the discomfort of West Africa. My remarkable Sierra Leonean host was a septuagenarian midwife named Cassandra Roques. With no electricity, Mama Cassan delivered babies by kerosene lantern and cooked our meals over an open fire. It had been years since water flowed from the government-supplied water tap in her yard, so she joked that it was a monument. A shower was a bucket of rainwater. When nature called there was a pit latrine. She was the embodiment of strength, resilience, and vitality in what was then ranked the planet’s poorest country on the UN Human Development Index. There was evidence of international aid: a barely begun hospital long abandoned; a paramount chief with an elaborate throne; government officials living the good life. Then, and now, aid flows into poor countries, but where does all that money go?

A decade after returning to Canada I met the granddaughter of Sierra Leonean ruler Siaka Stevens (1967-1985) when she was studying at London’s Western University. I said how sad I was that a horrific civil war was raging in her ancestral home, but she was nonplussed: she’d never been there. She was from Switzerland and had attended the best private schools that international aid money could buy. In The Crisis Caravan (2010), an exposé of the disturbing underbelly of humanitarian aid, Dutch journalist Linda Polman describes a festive gathering at a luxury hotel in the West African capital after the UN once again named Sierra Leone the world’s poorest country in 2001. The cream of Freetown society was jubilant: now even more aid money would flow into Sierra Leone and into the pockets of the elite and powerful.

For a more succinct and amusing assessment, husband James Frazer offers Worse Than Useless, a ska-influenced musical critique of the aid industry. In a nutshell: “The people stay poor and the Big Man gets fat. How can they think that they’ll end hunger by propping up kleptocrats?” To catch all the words, you can view the lyrics here.

Biden-Speak to English: A New SDA Service

Baiting The Left Democrats Wuhan Flu 17 Comments

Here’s video of what Biden said this weekend:

We fed it through the SDA Biden2English™ Translator and this is what came out:

“It was no longer politically expedient for us to milk the pandemic with all of the fear mongering that worked so successfully with Democrat voters in 2020 & 2021 so we decided to drop the Covid theatre entirely.”

Diversity is our Strength

More Pavilions At Folkfest 46 Comments

The Spectator- Why is violence breaking out in Leicester?

For the past few weeks Leicester has become a kind of mini-Kashmir in the middle of England, with clashes, protests and disorder breaking out in the city between young Muslim and Hindu men. It’s a remarkable turn of events for a city which has long prided itself on being a functioning multicultural society, a place where Hindus and Muslims live alongside one another in relative harmony.

Working in 2022: Remote vs. At the Office

Great Reset 47 Comments

To the best of my knowledge, San Francisco (SF) was the first major city in North America to shut everything down in their reaction to the Covid pandemic.  I remember having dinner with friends at a restaurant in the Mission District of SF on Friday, March 13th.  One of them, who did some part-time work for a virologist, kept telling us that everything was about to change.  I thought she was being hyperbolic and dramatic but . . . she was absolutely correct!  Three days later, on Monday, March 16th the stay-at-home order was issued and everything instantly changed.

I was part of a small software engineering team in SF and, on a dime, we all started working from home.  I arguably had a better tech setup at home than at the office and had worked on my own from my home in Vancouver for many years so it wasn’t a problem for me.  For some of my colleagues, it was probably a bit weird at first but soon they grew to like it, and then love it.  Most of them lived far outside of the city and now no longer had to engage in a 90 – 120 minute commute each way to get to work.

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One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function 17 Comments

“I was threatened, my life was threatened”

The former Center for Disease Control and Prevention director who was cast as a conspiracy theorist for saying the evidence supported the lab-leak explanation for COVID-19 – allegedly provoking death threats – claims that the real “conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community.”

Robert Redfield told former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci “knew” he funded gain-of-function research that makes viruses more dangerous, and “misled Congress” when he denied it,” but “[n]othing’s going to happen as long as the Biden administration is here.”

“Tony and I are friends, but we don’t agree on this at all,” Redfield said in an interview published in Thacker’s Disinformation Chronicle newsletter.

“Everyone had to agree to the narrative” pushed by Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a “wet market” in Wuhan, not the Fauci-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away, to avoid becoming a public target of the two officials, he said.

The virologist Redfield told the immunologist Fauci from the “second or third week in January” 2020 that “I’m very concerned that he was championing this theory that it came from animals.”

The particulars of the novel coronavirus, such as the furin cleavage site and the “human” sequence in it, make clear that it’s not from bats, he said. “This thing was manipulated, orchestrated. That cleavage site was created.”

Transmission doesn’t make sense under natural evolution, according to Redfield. “You have a virus that is one of the most infectious viruses in the history of humanity, and yet that virus no longer can infect the bat? … No, this is highly abnormal.”

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