Roads To Nowhere

Roadkill 9 Comments

It’s a poorly kept secret that the left-wing, labour oriented New Democrats governing Saskatchewan are hostile to the United States.
They parrot the “friends and most important trading partner” line, but they really don’t believe it. The NDP are socialists to the core – suspicious and antagonistic towards the US. Nor are they afraid to sacrifice the economic interests of residents of border constituencies to make their point. After all, it’s not like the southern rural areas are NDP strongholds.
What evidence is there for this? As I do nearly every year, over the past few weeks I’ve made road trips to North Dakota and Montana. Despite the fact that these border states are as sparsely populated as our own province, particularly near the Canada-US border, the American roads are well maintained – this is typical.

It must come as a shock to American residents when they cross into Canada.

This is what the last 50 miles looks like on those highways on the Saskatchewan side of the border leading to the ports of Northgate, Monchy and Climax. With broken pavement, huge potholes (never ignore a red hiway surface warning marker in this province) and eroding shoulders, these highways are in dangerous condition. According to border agents, there are American tourists who turn around after a few miles. Who can blame them?

What they don’t know is that all of these highways improve dramatically, for no identifiable reason, around 50 miles into the province.

Bent Over Billboards

June 18, 2004

Moonbats 1 Comment

CBC Watch:

With copy slogans like “He came inside me,” “I came inside him” and “He likes it Raw,” Health Canada and a handful of AIDS groups are running a new national HIV ad campaign targeting gay men under the catch phrase “Think Again”(a phrase already used by Health Canada for a campaign to target smokers).

CBC Watch has a followup on the reaction of the People’s Network to Jim Pattison’s refusal to run the images on Pattison Group billboards. Short version: “bad conservative billionaire!”.
I like Kathy Shaidle’s take.
A couple of years ago, a friend who works with Sask Health mentioned that they were worried that a new needle exchange program was going to anger diabetics, who had to pay for their own. I told her, “And rightfully so.”
“But,” she protested, “AIDS is a public health issue.”
“and diabetes isn’t?”
“A lot of people don’t know that you can catch HIV through intravenous drug usage. They don’t know….”
“What.. ? Did they miss the day in Grade 6 where we learned shooting drugs into your veins with a needle is bad for you???

Big Sky Country

June 18, 2004

photoblogging 3 Comments

Just some pics along hway 3 from Billings to Great Falls. Full size versions at this directory

Life Is A Highway

June 15, 2004

Blogging 1 Comment

Posting from beautiful Billings, Montana…
Things are going to be light here for a few days. I have the laptop with me, but precious little energy for blogging after a day in the sun and wind.
Check out the Shotgun (on the sidebar) for their take on the federal election leaders debate. Doesn’t sound like I missed much.

Positive Vs Negative Rights

June 14, 2004

What He Said 3 Comments

Professor Bainbridge has a piece on the difference between positive rights and negative rights. For Canadians, a worthwhile reminder that governments that purport to protect one’s “right” to employment, to health care, for example, provide them at a great cost to negative rights and personal liberty.

If the majority thinks all employees should be paid a living wage, the freedom of individual employees to take a lower wage and of individual employers to offer a lower wage is circumscribed. Again, we often see the same sort of disregard for private property and freedom of contract in nominal democracies as in totalitarian regimes.

Saskatchewan provides a recent example of the danger of postive rights governments – withdrawel of government “guaranteed” rights to health care in rural Saskatchewan.
In forcing a “right to health care”, the state has prohibited private providers from operating in the system. So, when the state decides that it cannot or will not provide service to a segment of the population, those citizens suddenly find that instead of having a “right” – their access to health care has been effectively prohibited by the same government that claims to guarantee it.

SubLiberal Advertising

Radioactive 2 Comments

In the latest Harper attack ad, the Liberals use a series of “negative” images – among them the barrel of a gun, pointed directly at the viewer, ostensibly to illustrate the dangers we face if the gun registry is revoked…. but that isn’t all there is in the ad.

Free Dominion;

I downloaded the Liberal attack ad off their own website and converted it to quicktime to have some fun editing it. I didn’t expect to find what I found though.
…
The location of the flash matches up with the gun and it CLEARLY is a subliminal message that the gun has been fired at the viewer. It seems to be the only subliminal message in the ad. If that commercial gave you a creepy, uneasy feeling you couldn’t explain, that is why.

Go check out the images for yourself.
hat tip – Shotgun

Rarer Than Anyone Knew

Roadkill 4 Comments

Via my my favorite blog in the world this little story on environmental protection run amuck…

[T]he LeSatzes aren’t able to build their own riding arena. The only decent site on their property in southeastern Wyoming lies within 300 feet of Chugwater Creek, and building there is far too expensive because of Endangered Species Act restrictions intended to protect the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse.
“The mouse that doesn’t exist,” Amy LeSatz noted drily.
After six years of regulations and restrictions that have cost builders, local governments and landowners on the western fringe of the Great Plains as much as $100 million by some estimates, new research suggests the Preble’s mouse in fact never existed. It instead seems to be genetically identical to one of its cousins, the Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse, which is considered common enough not to need protection.

Flashback Saskatchewan Highways fined for fishless habitat destruction.

Super Size Good Sense

What He Said 1 Comment

Something tells me Sean is going to win this battle, if attitude counts for anything.

I Get Butterflies

Insufferable Twits 3 Comments

Someone else has managed to turn the normal into the diseased to carve out yet another psychology employment niche.

CTV; Child psychologist Steven Feldgaier is using a program called “Friends” — a child program started in Australian schools — to teach kids how to walk through their problems, tackle life’s stresses in small steps — and relax.
For example, “you can go to a quiet room and relax where no one can bug you,” he told one class.
The Friends program is slowly making its way through schools in Winnipeg, as well as a school in Vancouver.
In today’s hectic, fast-paced world, more and more people are feeling overwhelmed. But experts say stress is no longer just an adult problem, but one affecting children as well.
Children as young as five years old are falling victim to stress.

I have an idea – let’s make this program self-supporting, through the taxation of children’s allowances. Then, Steven Feldgaier can explain to them how it’s all for their own good. Let him convince them to go to a quiet room to think about it.
I’d buy a ticket to that.

Ghost Of Boredom

Blogging No Comments

You know, when I find a topic “boring”, I don’t link to the subject on other blogs. Or criticize the interest of others or suggest that opposing views constitutes “hatred”. If I don’t care about a debate, I don’t demand that new arguments must be found, because previous ones have exceeded their entertainment value half-life.
Nor am I likely to make multiple entries in my comments section to stress how little I care. before shutting it down to replies.
I just don’t write about it. Easy? Easy.
But that’s just me.

Tax Revolt

Gopher News 2 Comments

Three percent of Saskatchewan’s taxpayers pay 28% of education taxes.
They are getting tired of it.

Trudeau Was A Clueless Idiot

What He Said 4 Comments

Not that this is a startling revelation. But, in contrast to the timeless wisdom we are reminded of in the wake of Reagan’s passing, Jaeger has some quotes to remind us just how clueless our former prime minister was.

“We have a great deal to learn from the Soviet Union . . . a country from which we have a great deal to benefit.”

Harper Support Continues To Rise

Political Animal 1 Comment

As the media and political adversaries begin to spew charges of “intolerance” towards the Conservatives – “intolerance” towards abortion, “intolerance” of homosexuality, and yesterday, “intolerance” of the Metis – I predict that during this coming week, they’ll be reviving the anti-Reform rhetoric charging out and out racism.
And through it all, momentum continues to build. Canwest is reporting that the Conservatives may be within striking distance of a majority government, if poll trends prove accurate.
Paul Martin’s Liberals would do well to consider that the majority of Canadians oppose gay marriage and aren’t nearly as supportive of our no-holds barred abortion policy (Canada has no laws at all governing abortion) as left wing activists would have you believe. Being profiled as an “extremist, intolerant bigot” isn’t likely to convince the majority of Canadians who have quite reasonable objections to abortion and gay marriage to vote for you.

Small Masticated Animals

Roadkill No Comments

Via Drudgereport;

Two Australian men may be prosecuted after they chewed live mice and bit off their tails as part of a pub competition to win a holiday.
The RSPCA called the incident “outrageous” and said it would seek the maximum penalty against the men.
RSPCA chief inspector Byron Hall said they could face two years in prison and fines of A$75,000 (US$52,050).

Mr. Hall added that the RSPCA is also tracking down unconfirmed reports of mouse-chewing involving cats.

Berkeley Intifada

What He Said 1 Comment

Michael Totten, at Tech Central Station;

It’s bad enough that the torchbearers of Political Correctness compromised their honorable anti-racist principles with expediency and hypocrisy. But what’s left of Political Correctness is worse even than that. There’s also something implicitly racist about it. White Christians are held to the highest possible standard. They’re expected not to have a racist thought in their heads and are called out for the slightest infraction. Culprits who really are racist (and who aren’t merely guilty of checking the “wrong” box on their voter registration) deserve all the shellacking they get. Meanwhile, however, ethnic and religious minorities are allowed to behave like skinheads. It looks as though the activist set expects hatemongering anti-social behavior from Muslim immigrants just as they expect a dog to pee on the rug. It’s the “soft bigotry of low expectations” with a racial twist.

Read the “Berkeley Intifada”.

You Don’t Say

Radioactive 3 Comments

A story you won’t find on the CBC.
UN inspectors: Saddam shipped out WMD before war and after

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.
The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam’s missile and WMD program.
The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.

An obvious explanation that is conveniently avoided by sophmoric critics of the Iraq war and “absence” of weapons of mass destruction. (Not that weapons and precursor materials haven’t been found – more sophmoric denial there). The months long “rush to war” didn’t exactly deprive him of advance warning.
And of course, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was “Mother Of All Exterminators” Again – far, far too many dots to connect for mere media consumers to digest, so it’s been ignored by the press “analysts”.
update – some have expressed speculation that this is the only source.The New York Times also reported on this story on the 9th.

UNITED NATIONS, June 9 – Equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been emptied from Iraqi sites since the war and shipped abroad, the head of the United Nations inspectors office told the Security Council today.
Demetrius Perricos, deputy to the former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and now the acting executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told a closed- door session of the council that many of the items bear tags placed by United Nations inspectors as suspect “dual use” ones having capabilities for creating harmless consumer products as well as unconventional weapons.
Mr. Perricos accompanied his briefing with a report showing satellite photos of a fully built-up missile site near Baghdad in May 2003 and the same site denuded in February 2004.

Putin Smackdown

June 11, 2004