More on 'Bullshit Rights'

Ten years ago I wrote a post about 'Bullshit Rights' vs Inalienable Rights.  Without wandering far afield into philosophy and natural law, I shared that I'd learned to define 'Bullshit Rights' as those which invariably deprive someone else of their Inalienable Rights.

Today I read of an example that illustrated this perfectly.

In 2011, in a travesty of justice, a New York Judge ordered a Christian couple fined $13,000 for refusing to host a lesbian wedding in their home.  The Christian couple, Cynthia and Robert Gifford, were earning an income from hosting weddings and receptions on their family farm.  They'd informed the engaged couple that the were willing to host their reception, but not the ceremony itself, which they'd objected to on religious grounds.  In addition to the fines, they've now been forced out of business.

After meeting with the Giffords, the lesbian couple decided to punish them because their F E E L I N G S were  H U R T.  Jennifer McCarthy and Melisa Erwin, the lesbian couple, complained to New York State's human rights division.  McCarthy justified her attack on the Giffords, telling the media that no one should be forced to face discrimination on their wedding day. 

No, but apparently if you can't keep her feelings from being hurt you go out of business.

So who had their rights denied?   The Gifford's Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Religion, and their right to earn a living?  Or McCarthy and Erwin's Rights to force the Giffords to host a same-sex wedding ceremony in their home?  Their home. Their home. Their fucking Home.

I ran a business out of my home for over twenty years.  I would never have accepted it if someone had told me that meant they could force their way into my home against my will.

Bitches couldn't get the venue they wanted.  I think 'bitches' is an appropriate term in this case. There's always other venues; it happens all the time in wedding planning. But because the happy couple were gay, they get to punish someone.

I'm glad the Giffords are now fighting back.  I'm saddened that they have to.

Why I support Israel

One side in the conflict wants the other dead.  Just read Hamas motto.

Redford Abused her power, CBC misses the point.

"Was it SEXISM?" asks the CBC.   How lame.  

Go to Google right now, and you'll find many descriptions of her spendthrift sense of entitlement. News story after news story. Predictably, the CBC (Civil-servant's Broadcasting Corp) has missed the story and is trying to create the narrative that it was a bias against her gender that got her turfed.

I learned long ago that it's a common flaw of human nature to assume your hangups are shared by everyone else.  This then is an interesting insight into the cultural mindset of the CBCers.  Only man-haters will buy that bit of fiction. That's a bit of absurdity that's right up there with the Obama apologists in the U.S. who, after two terms watching him develop the worst Presidential track record in history, continue to assert that anyone who's not an Obama supporter is a racist.

Did people not like her?  Sure. I believe many people who tried to vote conservative and ended up electing Alison Redford to power were very disappointed with their pig in a poke.

But from day one she described herself as a 'progressive' and took pains to refer to her party as the PROGRESSIVE conservative Party (her emphasis). At the time I suggested that she was one of those political lefties who figured the only way to get elected to power in conservative Alberta was to pretend you were a conservative. Conservative voters have only themselves to blame.

Next time PAY ATTENTION.

Canada's Green Party sides with the Haters

Paul Estrin has learned that the Green Party, despite a claim of neutrality, has no tolerance for party officials who express contempt for Gaza's Hamas leadership, or support for Israel's right to defend itself when attacked.  Estrin, who last week was the President of Canada's Green Party, last month posted a 2,200 word blog entry on the party website on 'why Gaza makes me sad.'  He made a point of condemning the Hamas leadership for hiding in shelters while encouraging it's civilian population to remain in place and suffer casualties from Israeli attacks on rocket launch sites in civilian areas.

The Party received numerous complaints from party members, many of whom threatened to withdraw their memberships and financial support.  Leader Elizabeth May was quick to distance herself from Estrin.

Estrin has resigned his position as Green Part President. The party says Estrin's resignation has no connection to his blog post.  And if you believe that, I have a Green Party Memberhip application form for you to fill in.  They like credulous fools over there.

My own personal position on the Green Party is that it's made up of well-meaning, credulous fools whose thinking processes must be mostly of the 'wishful' sort. I shouldn't be surprised that it's supporters were so largely swayed by the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli news coverage in Canada.

Mid-stream Media misses the point, Again.

The National Post's Jen Gerson got part of the story right, concluding that Alberta's Spend-Happy Progressive Party Premier Allison REDford needs to reign in government spending. Unfortunately she and the majority of the midstream media continue to miss the root of the problem, that Allison Redford is a Tory in name only.
From her election-night acceptance speech to the present day she has persistently referred to her party as the 'PROGRESSIVE conservatives' and has made clear her intention to make real that last-century fiction adopted by conservatives across the country.  That was when they made an oxymoron of their name by adding 'Progressive' to their name in an attempt to make their party more palatable to voters during socialism's unfortunate ascendancy into so-called respectability during the 20th Century.

The midstream media's role here is the same one we saw repeated over and over again in the last few decades: 

1. mislabel spendthrift interventionist big-government politicians as 'Conservative'
2. then blame 'Conservatives' and/or 'Conservative Ideology' when the shit hits the fan

It's not a conspiracy, it's merely an example of like-mindedness. Fake conservatives tend to get a pass from the fake-imparital media as the politicos conduct their social engineering experiments at your and my expense. Later,  when the experiments inevitably fail, the actual Liberals and socialist parties look more reasonable at election time.  Witness the electoral histories of B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.

Why then has Alberta stayed conservative for so long?  It has, but in name only. Premiers Lougheed, Getty, and Klein all proved to love big government spending. Yes, in spite of his early big cuts, even Ralph Klein.  Allison Redford has merely recognized that for a good socialist to get power in Alberta, you have to appear to be a conservative to the voters. 

Conservatism is pretty simple. It just takes a little familiarity with math. Every dollar stolen from me by the taxman is a dollar less I can use to feed my family, and you can't increase government spending without getting the money from somebody.  Socialists all conveniently forget that if they raise taxes on the corporations that sell us the stuff we buy, the corporations always raise their prices and we pay for it anyway. This has happened everytime it's been done in the past. D'oh!

Make life better for people by reducing the size of the government we have to pay for, reduce it's  interference in our lives, and improve our lot in life by freeing up our spending power through lower taxes.  Only an idiot or a liar can't see the math. Yes, I see most socialists as liars or idiots.

That said, the National Post's Jen Gerson makes a good point that the mixed messages from the Ms Redford and her Finance Minister (we could try a sales tax, no we won't raise taxes, we're not going to reduce spending, we're looking at a 'hard-times' budget, etc...) can hardly reassure Albertans. Gerson's big failure here is either in failing to call a spade a spade, or in her inability to see Redford for the liar I expect she will prove herself to be.

Too Much of a Good Thing...

 

...isn't a good thing.

Now that I’m back in marketing after a twenty-two year hiatus I’m noticing newspaper ads again. Mostly because they’re proving to be a fine way for me to find businesses that would benefit from moving their advertising dollars out of a dying 17^th century media and into the twenty-first.

One of our local papers had a sale on full page color ads, selling for $300 a pop what would normally cost over a thousand. Many local merchants thought that was such a great idea that they crowded like lemmings into this week’s weekly edition which had over 51 pages in a row of full color ads …and not much else.

Now how many consumers will want to read all that? Probably just the merchants who paid for them. I’ll wager the rest of you (if you’re a subscriber) will take one look and toss the entire thing into the trash.  That’s $16,000 of advertising money wasted.

I’ve always said advertising is supposed to stand out. I’ll be finding out this week how some of those merchants feel about being squeezed into the middle of 51 pages of ads.

 

I’ve also always said you get what you pay for.  But in this case I don’t think those merchants got their $300 money’s worth.

 

 

Workin for the Man

My little brother works for the power company.
One time, when I spent the night following a computer gaming binge at his place, I noticed he'd left his computers switched on.  I switched them off.
The next day he acted all perplexed as to how or who had shut them down.  I told him I did, to save power.
He said, "I work the power company.  I don't want to save power."

Keep Christ in Christmas

I am pretty sick and tired of constant low-level attacks on Christmas and Christianity under the false banner of "inclusiveness" and/or "historical accuracy."  Today, after I shared a "Keep Christ in Christmas" banner on MY facebook page I received a negative comment.  I wasn't surprised, considering that western society is becoming increasingly hostile to Christianity.  Indeed, a review of the portrayal of christians by our leftist-dominated mainstream media shows anti-christianity is the one acceptable bigotry left to 'polite' society.

She said, "Ok. I respect that but then you need to move the celebration to the spring when he really was born and give us back our mid winter solstice celebration."  I know this person, and knowing her, I'm certain she didn't mean it in a mean-spirited way. My first inclination was to dismiss the statement as a typical harmless wishy washyism of an agnostic who, not certain what to believe, unthinkingly repeated something she heard on tv. But I could not read it again without concluding that whoever uttered it first, did so with total malice in their heart.

Remember the entire "Keep Christ in Christmas" meme is meant to pull people back from the crass commercialization of the Christmas season.  What's wrong with that? The answer is, nothing. So why would someone say their respect for this concept required the removal of Christmas from December 25th? Certainly mainstream Christianity isn't oppressing non-Christians from celebrating the winter solstice.

Perhaps I was being too literal and the writer was simply being sloppy in how she chose to craft her compound sentence.  It certainly doesn't help that the "he (Jesus Christ) was really born in the springtime " thing is a well-known deconstructionist myth, and is often invoked in a mean-spirited way to belittle the faith of Christians.  I've seen that weak sentiment  brandished about like a bludgeon in web-forums as if it were argument enough to convert Christians into atheists.   It completely misses the point that mainstream Christianity doesn't pretend it was actually December 25th, but instead holds that date as 'tradition'.

The veracity of the first part of her statement, "I respect that" is immediately given lie by the words which follow it.  Look again at the implications of the second part that statement, "...you need to move the celebration to the spring..."  December 25th is the one day agreed upon by the world in general for the celebration of Christmas. It would be impossible to get all the varied peoples of the world to agree on a new date, and would destroy the universality with which Christmas is celebrated. That would be a tremendous blow against Christianity.

Since the date isn't known, December 25th is as valid a day to chose for Christmas as the deconstructionists "Sometime in the Spring".  Indeed, December 25th is the more valid, as it not only carries the weight of hundreds of years of happy tradition, but moving it would simply be one more opportunity for chaos and strife.  How the HELL could that be better?

It can't.

Hiram Mann's "Freedom"

With the U.S. Presidential Election days away, my thoughts increasingly turn towards the possible consequences should that great Republic's electorate vote for suicide.  That's the end I foresee for America should they continue down the wide and easy path of mindless 'good intentions'...

Hiram Mann's "No Man Survives when Freedom Fails"

I made this 1600 x 1040 pixel wallpaper for my laptop after seeing something similar on facebook.

Still as true now as it was in 2005

I was surfing the net today and came across a birth photo of a friend's newborn baby, taken today in Hamilton, Ontario, and  a 2005 Time Magazine interview of Ann Coulter.

"They're terrible people, liberals. They believe--this can really summarize it all--these are people who believe," she said, now raising her voice, "you can deliver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exercised. That really says it all. You don't want such people to like you!"

It's clearly coincidence, but I thought it was funny as hell that the captured fugitive on the front page of yesterday's Edmonton Sun bears a striking resemblance to the dope-smoking ex-con "Ricky," a character created by actor Rob Wells for the TV show "The Trailer Park Boys".  The fugitive's photo was taken in 1995 when he was 33 and wanted for the beating and abduction of an Edmonton area man.  I've no idea what he looks like now. 

In a near perfect example of life imitating art, the police officers who broke down the guy's door captured him in the middle of a marijuana grow op.

What about Khadr's Victims?

 Self-confessed and convicted murderer Omar Khadr's triumphant return to Canada as heralded by the CBC and his predicted release on mandatory parole next year just underlines how unjust the Canadian legal system is. The NDP is quacking about compensation for Khadr for being put in jail.  Compensation for being a convicted self-confessed murderer?  I'm more than convinced now that the Canadian Left are evil 'tards bent on destroying society.

What I want to know, is what about Khadr's victims? What about Tabitha Speer, widow of the Medic Khadr murdered with a grenade in his failed suicide attempt?  I have no doubt the NDP and Khadr's legion of admirers and supporters don't give a damn for her or the other members of Speer's family.

CTV is no better, calling Khadr an "Accused" murderer. Is this a mistake?  Or on-purpose?