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.

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.

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.

NBC'S Chris Matthews FIRED for BIGOTRY

NBC'S Chris Matthews needs to be 'FIRED'. Hosting last night's NBC coverage of the GOP convention, the self-confessed Obama-fanboi noted that since the candidates, Romney, Gingrich and Santorum were "two Roman Catholics and a Mormon" that delegates would be forced to pick one of three "CULTISTS".   Twenty-five percent of Americans are Catholic, and another 4.6 percent Mormon, and Matthews dismisses them all as "CULTISTS".  That's nearly a third of the country folks.

Does that offend you? It offended me.

Especially because the Media Party wouldn't have allowed him to say anything disparaging about their religious backgrounds had the candidates been Wiccan, Hindu, or MUSLIM. 

 (comic courtesy Mallard-Fillmore)  Thanks to Roger for posting about this first.

CBC Archives: Edited for Ideological purity?

I was eager to denounce the CBC this morning. I couldn't find a specific podcast in their archives that questioned one of the sacred cows of the Politically Correct and I jumped to the obvious conclusion that it had been deliberately left out or lost. As historical revisionism is one of the identifying characteristics of Political Correctness, and the CBC is nothing if not nauseatingly p-c in the extreme, this was not an absurd conclusion. So I set out to review their archives to prove it and immediately discovered that I'd made a mistake.

The programming item I sought hadn't aired yet.

Oops.

So without any further need to prove a point, I gave up on wasting any more time reviewing their archives for nefarious activity; that's the sort of thing the Politically Correct do.

Yet I remain dissatisfied with our state broadcaster. It's mandate has been obsolete for decades; it's audience has shrunk to a miniscule percentage of the population; as a taxpayer-funded entity it depresses the economy by leeching advertising dollars away from private broadcasters; and worse,  it uses my tax-dollars to promote a Big-Government tax-and-spend socialist ideology I don't agree with.

That last point is particularly galling.  If the CBC were a private enterprise it should be free to adopt any editorial standpoint the ownership desired. Yet as one of the current owners ( I'm paying for it, so I damn well consider myself an owner) of the CBC I am regularly disappointed with what I get for my money. Clearly the CBC needs new owners.

I were Prime Minister, I'd privatize the CBC with my first breath.

U.N. No Place for Canada

It's past time for Canada to withdraw from the Corrupt Dictators Club that the United Nations has become. The latest Gong Show event was Navi Pillay, the U.N.'s "High Commissioner (now THERE's a Banana-dictatorship style title) for human rights" clumping Canada in with a host of third world shitholes because of Quebec's Bill 78, an attempt to curb the Violent and anarchistic riots by that province's spoiled and undeserving brats. It's a law passed by a democratically elected government, and is being challenged in the courts by the anarchists, (isn't that ironic?) In Syria they are shooting protestors in the streets, but apparently Canada has 'crossed the line' by making it illegal to wear a mask while rioting.

Smells like bullshit. Someone, (Navi Pillay and the U.N.) is getting paid way too much money for the value we're getting for our taxes.

This is not a kneejerk nationalistic rant in response to a criticism of my country. I mean, fire away. I support freedom of speech for anyone who would not deny me my freedom of speech.  And that's the crux. These repeated U.N. criticisms are from an organization that harbors and legitimizes our world's worst rights-abusers while demanding that we not only bend to their so-called standards, but pay the tab too. I've said it before and I'll say it again. ...and again.

Time for us to leave this party.

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.

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

Another Dishonest Gas Pump? Westpark Husky

Gassed up in Fort Saskatchewan this afternoon at the Westpark Husky on Hwy 21. The two pumps I checked either were out of date or not stamped. Gas was $74.00

Posting Comments, Honesty and Anonymity

I'm pretty opinionated.  Really.

So I have come to expect that my comments here and on other forums on the web will sometimes elicit an angry response by some (usually of the politically correct, lefty liberal types) here and on those other websites and forums.

Now when I make a comment on someone else's website I normally identify myself and even include this blog as a place to contact me.  So I think it's reasonable to expect visitors to my blog to identify themselves too. I won't post anyone's anonymous comments. Anonymity on the web sometimes brings out the worse in people.

(Image from www.penny-arcade.com)

I once had a guy ( let's assume it was a guy ) who so objected to my statements on one web forum, he created a blogger account just so he could come here and call me names.  Of course he blocked anyone (like me, for instance) from seeing his blogger profile so I archived his comments where they deserved to be, in oblivion.

Coward.

Signs of Spring (...and honesty at Costco)

It's March 20th, the time of the Spring Equinox, and the signs of a new season are around us.  The first migrating geese of the year, the first glimpse of snow mold on last year's lawn,  the unique smell of the first of the thawing dog doo emerging from under last winter's blanket of snow...

...and since Christmas, my first honest gasoline pump. Yup.  It's March 20th, and this is the first honest gas pump I've seen in nearly three months. I was so excited I took a picture of it.

See the sticker? There's a Federal Regulation that requires all Service Stations and Gas Bars to have their gasoline pumps certified according to a set schedule. Since I gas up at least twice a week that's at last 27 other times I could have been gouged at the pump.

Seeing as how the oil companies have already been manipulating the cost of oil to gouge us honestly at the pump this little bit of extra larceny on the part of the retailer just pisses me off.  One time last month, at a highway gas station between Fort Saskatchewan and Lamont, Alberta, the pumps didn't even have the old, outdated certification stickers that showed they'd at least been certified once in the past. I went into the store and complained to the elderly lady ( I thought she was the owner/manager) behind the till about her pumps not being certified. Even though I had heard her speak to a customer ahead of me, she pretended she couldn't speak or understand english well enough to answer me.

I'll be gassing up at the Costco again in the future.