You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Canada’ category.
I am not sure what possesses people to make the abrupt switch from summer to winter clothing. Well actually I do, the weather in Alberta has been getting steadily colder as we progress toward the icy cold death we know as winter. My point is that I think our response is a little out oof context for the situation we have live in, here in Alberta.
We usually have 6 months of really inhospitable frigid winter weather. Snow/ice/windchill… badness in general. Our bodies are fully covered and rightly so, no questions asked.
However, when the temperature is still well above zero, and there is no snow on the ground. Is dress like this justified?
With footwear like this?
Come on people. We are in a cold weather climate, 3-10 degrees centigrade is *not* cold weather.
I am currently wearing these along with shorts and a t-shirt/shirt combo and am not freezing solid.
Let’s not overreact to the cool weather and embrace what little snow free time we have left.
It has been a bit of dry spell here at DWR, I’ve been busy exploring my career options as of late and have not had the time nor the impetus to post anything useful as of late. Still feeling a little bloggers-block I scanned CBC for headlines and found a few potential starters, but being at work today, I had access to the best source of them all: the newspaper known as the Sun, specifically its comment section. With the likes of Michael Coren and Salim Mansur to engage with, how can one NOT be energized into blog-action?
“Priestly Porn Scars” by Coren – Catholic apologetics at its best, condemning this ‘new age of tolerance’ in which the Church somehow is held to a special standard that just isn’t fair. The other point is that a few bad apples should not tar the reputation of the Church in all of its godbaggery glory.
Oh pity the poor catholic church hmmm… perhaps when they stop buggering boys and consuming child pornography we will get on with not holding the church to such ‘strict standards’. One can always count on Coren to defend the Catholic church, I’m sure if they found a baby sacrificing death cult within the church’s confines it would be the fault of the vile New Atheists and the mainstream media.
Let’s Dial the Way-Back machine to September 18th, 2007. Alberta’s Royalty review was released for all to see and read. The contents of the report indicated that we as Albertans’ were getting a raw deal on the Royalties being extracted by the various private energy companies that had taken up residence in Alberta’s Tar Sands. See the whole document here. (Catch a critique of the Royalty Review here) This is from page 7 of the Executive Summary.
“Albertans do not receive their fair share from energy development. The royalty rates and formulas have not kept pace with changes in the resource base and world energy markets. Albertans’ own the resource. The onus is on their government to re-balance the royalty and tax system so that a fair share is collected. This must be done within an equitable and flexible administrative framework that maintains Alberta’s competitive edge for energy investment.
The total government take (Alberta and Canada, taxes and royalties) can be increased with Alberta still remaining an attractive investment destination. The Alberta Royalty Review Panel recommends that the total take for the energy sector be increased by sector, as shown in this table.”
Current Sharing Recommended Sharing
| Current | Sharing | Recommended | Sharing | |
| Albertans’ Share | Developers’Share | Albertans’ Share | Developers’ Share | |
| Oil Sands | 47% | 53% | 64% | 36% |
| Conventional Oil | 44% | 56% | 49% | 51% |
| Natural Gas | 58% | 42% | 63% | 37% |
Okay, nothing unreasonable going on here. Consider Norway or even Alaska for successful royalty planning. Comparatively speaking, Robert Sheppard in his Reality Check article says: “Norway’s technique seems to be to throw virtually everything it gets from offshore oil into the fund and to try to live off the cream. Alberta’s has been to live off its royalties and, if there’s any cream left over, toss some of it into the fund.”
The Results?
In 2004 the Alberta Heritage Trust Fund stood at 12.4 billion.
In 2004 Norway’s Petroleum Fund was valued at 133 billion.
Way to go Alberta Tories. Squandering our money seems to be the mission possible of the day or more succinctly, preserving the profits of the heroic oil companies that rape our land. Of course when we hear it from our rightist lapdog media in Alberta, the Royalty Review is virtually proposing the absolute destruction of the energy industry forever and ever. Which of course, is utter horsepucky, but not particularly surprising considering how politically addled we are as a province. But really, I needed to tell you about this story tell you about this one.
Alberta Health Services CEO and president Stephen Duckett speaks to reporters Wednesday in Edmonton. (CBC)
Alberta will move hundreds of hospital patients to newly created community-based spaces over the next three years, the provincial health authority confirmed Wednesday.
Alberta Health Services told union representatives on Tuesday that 350 hospital beds in Calgary and Edmonton will be closed and patients moved to 775 community-based spaces.
The province has now confirmed the breakdown of bed closures in the two cities — 160 in Edmonton and 190 in Calgary. Of those beds, 20 in Edmonton and 40 in Calgary will be kept open this year to help with what officials called “emergency room pressures.”
The government also revealed that 246 beds will be closed at Alberta Hospital over the next three years. {…}
Do you think possibly that maybe if we had decided to actually get a reasonable amount of return for the resources we have in Alberta would we have to be closing acute care beds? If the Alberta Government did not actually have the the Oil Patches procreating member lodged firmly in its posterior we might be able to pay for the necessary Health Care of the citizens of Alberta.
So what does the enraged populace of Alberta do?? Do we march on the parliament buildings to protect our healthcare? Do we write our MP’s angry letters? Do we say to ourselves maybe we should elect a viable opposition to the government? HELL NO!! We elect Paul Hinman of the Wild Fraking Rose Party of Alberta in a by-election to show our displeasure. The Wild Rose Party is batshite-crazy further to the right than the current Alberta Tories. Make sure you check out their platform; or more succinctly, imagine every wrongheaded neo-liberal fascist clusterfrack policy debacle… their platform gives a wild-eyed thumbs up to them all.
The crazy is strong here today, and I am not liking it.
At least, to the Harper government.
At first it was just Omar Khadr and Maher Arar. Oh, and Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin also had lovely “vacations” in Syria. Abousfian Abdelrazik was detained and tortured in Sudan (with apparent collusion, if not at the direct request of, our government), and when he finally got out of prison, Ottawa put every hurdle they could come up with against bringing him home. Then there are Abdihakim Mohammed and Suaad Haji Mohamud, who in separate incidents were stranded in Kenya and left to fend for themselves by their government – in fact, in Mohamud’s case it was the Canadian government that accused her of identity fraud. These people seem to have something in common besides having gotten the shit-end of Harper’s foreign policy stick*. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, Bill 44 has been passed into law.
What is Bill 44? Bill 44 is the ‘parental rights’ legislation that stipulates that parents have the right to pull their children out of contentious classroom situations. Topics such as Human Sexuality, Religion and Evolution have been mentioned as possible situations.
Bill 44 or “The Right to Remain Ignorant” bill has been postponed in its implementation. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reports that the culture minister Lindsay Blackett has delayed the legislation for some more fine tuning to allow the schools to as he puts it: “Our intention is certainly not to get school boards before the Human Rights Commission.”
Intentionally or not this legislation allows teachers to be brought before a HRC tribunal when discussion such controversial topics such as evolution and sexual education are included in a lesson without parental approval.
This is a gross neglect of public education in Alberta. I’ve already written about Bill 44 here when this particular travesty of Bill came out. I am hoping that the Alberta Government have realized the magnitude of the stupid (stupid burning so bright that it made it a mark on PZ Myers’s blog Pharyngula) that is in this bill and working to neuter it as quickly as possible.
Given the lovely conservative nature of the politics in this province, I highly doubt any significant revisions will be made.
The Chicago School of thought is opportunity capitalism at its finest. Naomi Klein wrote about how that if no crisis exists then state actors will often create a crisis to get the public to accept changes that during a non-crisis period they would not accept. The Shock Doctrine is an important book that is definitely worth reading to gain a better understanding of how the world works.
Furthermore, it goes a long a way to answering the question: “Why do they hate us so much?”. Our policies toward other nations can be quite horrific at times as we encourage profit over people almost in every case. Klein’s detailed analysis should make you feel a little ill by the time you are done with the book.
See the film short about the Shock Doctrine on ytube.
This post is dedicated to debunking the whole “harsh punishment on criminals is good” mentality. This post will have nothing to do about ‘prisoner rights’ or ‘criminal coddling’, but rather it will look at the efficacy of ‘harsh punishment’ on crime in general and how efficient longer jail sentences would be. Does it actually work? To what degree? Is that degree of success worth what it costs to citizens? Lets take a look.
For as long as there have been communities, murderers and thieves have been seen as criminals. Indeed, non-human primates share this with us as they will also punish, banish or kill deviants of this kind. And since the birth of the community, punishment for these crimes has been vast, varied, ingenuitive, brutally painful, and many have been fatal. So what we have is a near perfect case study. Thousands of years worth of experiments where two specific crimes have met with the pinnacle exemplars of the object of our study, harsh punishment. If harsh punishment really had any effect whatsoever on deterring or reducing crime, after those many thousands of years of diligent application we should find that the social problems of murder and theft are all but solved, strange memories of an era long past away. As we don’t seem to be any closer to a crime free utopia than early communities (indeed, most would argue we are further away) the only conclusion is that harsh punishment is contending for the rank of ‘most ineffective idea ever actualized by any government’, which is a highly competitive race. But for those that find this thought experiment a bit too neat, lets break it down a bit and look at our system of imprisonment.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…