Warren Buffet on Deficits

No further comment needed.

Bullshit Install Programs

Does this piss you off?   It does me.  What I'm referring to is the "small installer file" that will install the app I want but also Ghu knows what else in the process.  This is obviously an attempt to curb unrecorded access and distribution of downloaded software.  In other words, they don't want you to download a program and keep a copy of the downloaded install exe for sharing with your friends or to reinstall later if subsequent automatic upgrades make the app less appealing.


This is also terribly inconvenient for people in internet-challenged areas like mine, where downloads are slow and bandwidth restricted by lousy ISPs.

It's control; It's access to your computer and your data... and it's pissing me off.

Some people are Rotters.

Decades ago during my college years I was at a New Years Party being held at a friend's farmhouse. It was dark, 30 below zero, and a group of us were walking to our cars from the house when one of the guys stopped and pissed all over the windshield of our host's Plymouth Horizon. He laughed drunkenly about it all the way to his own car.  Over the years I wondered that he didn't end up in Jail.

I'm glad to say he wasn't a friend, and ashamed to admit I didn't tell our host. Sorry Carole, you deserved better.

But yesterday I thought of that guy, Pierre C, when I discovered someone had jumped all up and down on the trunk of my convertible with muddy shoes and scratched up the paint. 

Some people are just assholes.

Quebec's Spoiled Brats Deserve No Sympathy

I almost made the title of this post "Quebec's Politicians Cave in to Spoiled Brat's Temper Tantrum".  Another title could have been "Quebec's Just Desserts."

A quick check of tuition fees in Quebec compared to tuition fees here in Alberta show that Quebec's Rioting students have nothing to bitch about, should be spanked -no, beaten severely, and given well deserved jail sentences.

In 2012 a Quebecois BA student would pay $2,167.80 tuition while an Albertan would have to pay $5,238 in 2011.  Speaking as a former student who paid his own way back in the 1980's I think the Quebec rioters are well-indroctinated communists who need dire lesson in real life. This is an excellent example of how Quebec's Trudeaupian sense of entitlement at the rest of Canada's expense has led to these chickens coming home to roost.

Instead Canada's midstream media, in particular the CBC, has been portraying these spoiled brats as heros with a legitimate grevance.

NDP Leader Scapegoats Prosperity

Only someone who believes in the backwards economics of socialism could feel threatened by another's economic prosperity.

It reminds me of the opening chapters of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." It's been years since I read it, but as I recall, it began when a socialistic government forces it's nation's few healthy profitable transportation companies to hand over their profits to a bunch of unhealthy but politically connected transportation companies.

Unsurprisingly, that's the position adopted by newly minted Federal NDP leader Thomas Mulcair towards the oilpatch-fueled economic prosperity in Alberta and, lately, of Saskatchewan.  Speaking last week to CBC Mulcair likened our Energy Sector to a disease, and blamed it for the decline of central Canada's manufacturing sector.

This is Socialism 101. Obviously if you are successful, you must be cheating someone, somewhere, and it's the State's job to redistribute your wealth to the less successful. If you, dear reader, believe this, you're as misinformed as ol' Thomas.

University of Calgary economist, Professor Frank Atkins, says Mulcair would FAIL economics 101 with the stuff he's saying.

• Video LINK: Frank Atkins Interview

Instead of blaming Western Prosperity and wishing for Trudeau's 75 cent dollar so that inefficient Canadian Manufacturers could compete on the global market, Mulcair should be encouraging them to become more efficient, more competitive.

Bahahahahahahaa!  As if that'll happen.

I'm worried that people who believe Mulcair's nationally divisive line of crap will one day grant him the power, through the polls, to control the Canadian Economy and ruin it the way socialists ruined the economies of the European Union... or California... or Saskatchewan.

Police Bureaucrat Tells Conservative Gov't to F*ck Off

Isn't it funny how the Liberal's Long-gun Registry cost taxpayers like you and me close to two billion dollars, but now the government bureaucrats are running an illegal shadow registry for FREE?

Ontario's Chief Firearms Officer has just thumbed his nose at the Federal Government, and defied Public Safety Minister Vic Toews order yesterday to stop illegally intimidating retailers and illegally collecting information about long-gun purchases.

(link to the story: HERE )

Without going into conspiracy theories, it's quite obvious from watching news stories about people who were victimized by crime that it's a part of Canadian Police Culture to reflexively act against anyone who attempts to defend themselves. Victims of crime are often charged by Canadian Police with assault and worse when they act in their own defense against their attackers.  They also seem to be especially interested in bringing the entire weight of the State down on any Canadian who responds with violence against against a criminal when the criminal wasn't violent first.

The Criminal Code allows self defense, but our Police don't. This defiance of Parliament regarding a shadow gun registry is logical extension of the same mindset.

A Registry Model that Works

Jamie Hall of the Edmonton Journal wrote a few months back a story about a new NATIONAL BICYCLE REGISTRY. Internet based, it can be accessed anywhere in Canada.and is available in both Official Languages.

With little or no advertising, it had accumulated some 4000 registrations. The cost is entirely borne by user-registrations of $25 per bicycle. That means so far, it's grossed about a hundred thousand dollars for the three Richmond Hill sisters who started the registry three years ago.

With their own resources, these sisters have done something that the Federal Liberals and their gun-hating ilk have been unable to achieve with the force of law, a billion of our tax dollars, and thousands of fat and sleek well-paid civil servants: A workable, national registry. If the government were to create one it could cost... billions?

This seems like a good argument for firing the civil service and privatizing much of the federal government. Using the model developed by Kate, Jane and Trish Renwick, the government could hire them for something between 175 million dollars. (that's assuming an estimated 7 million gun guns at $25 per firearm). (source: Justice Minister Allan Rock, Standing committee on Justice and Legal Affairs, April 24,1995) For that kind of money I'd run the damn thing. Just pay me once, I'd be good for twenty years... that is, if I supported the concept of gun control in general. I don't.

 No one was happier than me when Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government announced it was scrapping the registry.  Just that phrase invoked images of empty offices and file cabinets, laid off civil servants, and a blow against Big Government.

Yet like anything else that involves politics, the reality has proven to be somewhat disappointing.  Even though the Parliament has issued orders for the destruction of the records, Powerful Bureaucrats like Canada's Chief Firearms Officers are disobeying the elected government by interpreting the orders to destroy ALL the Registry data in as narrow a set of definitions as possible.  The RCMP in Ontario and Alberta are still intimidating retailers into providing them with their records of  customer sales.

The answer is clear. Pink slips for every civil servant involved in this revolt, and then burn the buildings to the ground... or at least convert the buildings into low-rent housing.


Ok, enough humor.


The problem, is our Conservative MPs, who were elected to trash this bloody thing, don't seem to have the will to act.

(video link: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid868989705001?bckey=AQ%7E%7E%2CAAAAybGjzqk%7E%2C6NfTc6c241GVQxOh-GBHNHu5Cuhlf-y9&bctid=1627300326001 )

Canadian Gun control has failed it's avowed goal of preventing criminals from using guns in criminal acts. Hand guns, the weapon of choice in most gun crimes, have been registered and restricted in Canada since the 1930s. All gun control does is inconvenience the law abiding, and through discouragement encourage disarmament of the general population.

Gun control in Canada, as practiced for the last decade, implies eventual disarmament of the population through confiscation.  Canada abandoned nearly a thousand years of property rights (which we inherited from English Common Law) when Liberal Prime Minister and former communist party member Pierre Trudeau foisted the Charter of Rights and Freedoms upon us in 1982. A flawed Charter that deliberately denied Canadians the ancient right to own their own property.

That's right dear reader. In Canada, a man's home is NOT his castle. Instead of protecting your right to security of property, our constitution enshrines (by omission) the State's right to rip you off. Legalized looting, I think, was what Ayn Rand called it.  Until now,it seems the courts and legislatures of the land still sort of respect common law property rights, but there is no constitutional bar to prevent the state from passing confiscatory legislation.

The way in which the Federal Liberal Government set up their billion-dollar gun registry in the early 1990s is in part to blame for the poor participation levels it's experienced. Provisions of the legislation that created the firearms registry allow the police to enter any dwelling they suspect may harbor unregistered firearms, Without a warrant or even probable cause. The police may also steal- I mean, confiscate, without compensation, any citizen's firearm. On top of it all, in spite of an absolutely ridiculous overuse of tax-money, (estimated to reach a billion dollars - holy shit!) the law-abiding had to PAY MONEY to obey the law when they registered their guns.

I never met a tax-payer yet, who thought they hadn't already paid enough money to the government.

The only way guns can cause crime is if owning one were a crime. It's PEOPLE who cause crimes. If we went back to what I suggested earlier, a simple registration of PEOPLE with guns, should be enough already. The government already had that in the 1980s, with the old Firearms Acquisition certificate. 

I don't give a rats ass if the government knows If I'm a gun owner or not. Most gun owners probably feel the same way.

I have friends who are police officers. When Police respond to that most tense of situations, a domestic disturbance, there's no qualitative difference between knowing the occupants have a long-barrel firearm, or just that they have a permit to own firearms.

And if Public Safety Minister Vic Toews is reading this, Oh yeah, I'm serious about running it for you. You fix the law and put up the cash and it's a done deal. No union contracts. No pension liabilities. Just me, your 175 million dollars, and whoever I hire to set up and run the thing for me.

Let me know Vic. I'm taking applications at my email address: hamm172(at)gmail.com

NEXT DAY UPDATE:  

The media exposure appears to have worked.  By noon yesterday, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews issued a letter to the nation's Chief Firearms Officers specifically informing them that they should Stop trying to circumvent the will of the Parliament and cease any and all attempts to maintain any backdoor gun registry!

http://www.bikeregistrycanada.com
http://www.bikerevolution.ca/
www.garrybreitkreuz.com/publications/GunsinCanada.htm