It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Real Estate…

Everywhere you go…

As oil barrel prices have hit record numbers every day in the last week or two, I was hit with a bad case of deja vu.

I’ve traced it to the real estate market, the dot-com market, and just about every other “bubble” that has been mentioned in the last 10 years.

As much as I have tried to believe that it really is accelerating demand in emerging markets like China and India, it just didn’t seem right.

Evidently I am not the only one anymore.

Oil price ‘a bubble waiting to burst’
‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation’

Polygamy Amongst Ontario Muslims

You know what would straighten out these guys who insist on flouting Canadian law?

A few child support orders, all from different ex-wives, enforced by the garnishing of wages.

When you have 4 exes with kids and they all come asking for $1000 a month in child support, you will be destitute.

And it will serve you right for entering into such stupidity.

Vive le Quebecois de souche!

I take issue with one of the recommendations of the Bouchard-Taylor report that seeks to stamp out the term “Quebecois de souche” because, according to them, it alienates immigrants. I recommend precisely the opposite. The label should continue and Quebeckers (whether they identify themselves as de souche or not) should be proud of their culture. There is a lot of controversy over who, what, where, why and how Canada began. I do not mean to denigrate the rest of Canadian history but I am of the opinion that Quebec is the origin of Canada.

Quebeckers are not better than anybody but they are individuals. Demanding patriotism is not my style but I enjoy seeing people celebrate their origins and their community. This Bouchard-Taylor recommendation would lead to the demise of an exciting aspect of North American culture.

It seems like Falardeau-Poulin were able to see this coming more than twenty-five years ago:

ELVIS GRATTON : Moi je suis un Canadien québécois, un Français canadien-français… Un Américain du Nord français, un francophone québécois canadien… Un Québécois d’expression canadienne –française française. On est des Canadiens américains francophones d’Amérique du Nord… Des Franco-québécois…

I hope Quebeckers do not get sucked into the trap of political correctness.

No, You Don’t Give Poor Fat People More Money for Food.

Ok, hold on a minute.

Ontario already has a program by which people who are on welfare, who are overweight, are given more money for food to support their obesity?

And now they want to give them even more money because and extra $20 isn’t enough?

1.  The treatment fat people need to deal with their fatness because obesity is a health problem, is less food!

2.  Therefore giving them more money to spend on food is like buying heroin for addicts giving a stipend to welfare smokers to support their habit.

3.  If they need more money for food they can work for it.  There are thousands of jobs that people can do that require minimal training and minimal physical activity (thought if they are obese they could probably do with more physical activity, but I am willing to grant that some obese welfare recipients may be obese because of physical problems that inhibit them getting proper exercise).

4.  If someone can’t work and the government is supporting them, then they have agreed to accept that the government will act as their caregiver and steward.  As such, this means that Welfare will act in the interests of the person’s welfare.  Which means they will take such steps as to maintain the person’s optimal health given their situation.  Which means we should not be giving them more money for food when they are already fat!

5.  If a person doesn’t want the government telling them how to eat, then they should quit accepting the government’s money for food and make their own choices about what to, or not to eat!

End rant.  Hat tip to FFoF and Halls of Macadamia.

From The Same People Who Brought You Our Inadequate Health Care System…

…comes sex changes galore! And remember, it was this very troop who, in 2000, did a great disservice to our nation’s health when they used a bunch of emotional rhetoric to spook people into voting Jean Chretien into a third term as Prime Minister. Somehow, methinks the image of cross dressers screaming in agony on the street at the prospect of having to stick with the gender God gave ‘em wasn’t exactly what our nation had in mind when it rallied behind a universally insured country.

I’m glad to see the Liberals are going to the fringes again with their plans (Ontario Health Minister and notoriously dogmatic homosexual activist George Smitherman bragged about how this would only affect about a dozen people per year) since it will allow us Conservatives the opportunity to point out the folly to a health care system which on paper is completely financed by the government but in reality is only as good as the government decides to make it. On the provincial level, it would be hard for Dalton McGuinty to justify how he can allow thousands in the province to go through life with debilitating back pains or limited eye sight but hey, at least Fred is happy with that new figure we bought him when we dressed him up and called him Sally! Well, at least it would be if there was actually an opponent out there who wasn’t a complete pushover or leading a party with even less hope of winning the top prize than the Leafs.

All of which makes one happy to see our national government contains MPs who are willing to go to bat for us average Ontarians whose self-esteem issues are generally limited to the names our parents gave us and foregoing extremely expensive cosmetic surgeries for a shopping trip on the weekend. It’s nice to know that somebody out there still get the notion that “public” health care is supposed to cover more than one out of every one million people in this province!

When the Grade “F” No Longer Means You Fail

Apparently some schools in the United States are going through a policy change that would give minimum scores of 50% to students who fail:

Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.

“It’s a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F,” says Douglas Reeves, founder of The Leadership and Learning Center, a Colorado-based educational think tank who has written on the topic. “The statistical tweak of saying the F is now 50 instead of zero is a tiny part of how we can have better grading practices to encourage student performance.”

John Gruber, from Daring Fireball, pretty much sums up my feelings on this topic:

This is so profoundly stupid it’s hard to believe it isn’t from The Onion. That F covers 0-59 doesn’t make it six times more likely that a student will get an F than any other grade, unless test scores are based on random numbers rather than actual performance.

If McCain was not born in the US, can he still be President?

Of course this question will not likely be officially answered unless John McCain actually wins next November, but it is an interesting legal question nonetheless:

Article II of the constitution states: “No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

The framers of the constitution didn’t define “natural born citizen.” The phrase was added without any clarifying debate. The Supreme Court has never been asked to definitively settle the issue. And so we are left with a phrase just ambiguous enough to cause controversy.

Obama, Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the Race Card…

Gene Lyons, in The Cagle Post:

This because under the politically correct rules of engagement preferred by the Obama camp, only the Illinois senator gets to make ex cathedra observations about such ticklish matters as race and class, which must be treated as infallible. Pundits like Herbert and the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson have been chattering about the so-called “Bradley effect” ever since New Hampshire, but the Clinton camp must not.

Why not? Because contrary to conventional wisdom, it wasn’t the Clintons who “racialized” the contest at all. It was the Obama campaign, seemingly for the sake of galvanizing African-American voters in must-win South Carolina. (See Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s article “Race Man: How Barack Obama Played the Race Card and Blamed Hillary Clinton,” in The New Republic.)

“Revenue Neutral Carbon Tax” = LIES

In Canada there is nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  That requires the government to account for the revenue generated by taxes.  All goes into general revenue and is dibursed for whatever reason.  Anyone who says anything different is LYING TO YOU.

Yes, it is theoretically possible that a government could calculate the possible revenue generated by a new tax, and reduce other taxes to balance the budget.

But, I do not know of this EVER happening in Canada.  Government always miscalculates and apologizes later.  The reason is that it is expedient to lie to get your way, if your only cost is to apologize after.  It is always easier to get your way then apologize later than it is to suffer the ignominy of not getting your way, even if you were wrong.

Every tax increase ever introduced in Canada has been accompanied by the promise that it will be “revenue-neutral”.  It has never been true.

I defy anyone to prove any assertion of this post wrong.

If there is any way forward, it is the passing first of legislation that forces government to dedicate revenue from certain taxes to certain services.  This needs to be done for every tax in existence on the books.  It is only with accountability for income and expense that this promise can be seriously meant… and kept.

If this was done, then the government may actually become accountable to the people.  But we know that nobody in government wants that.

Jail this teenager for being a thoughtless cur. And her mother too.

Aside from the absurdity that is a father being thrown in jail because his daughter, who doesn’t even live with him, has failed to attain high school equivalency, (ostensibly for contributing to the delinquency of a minor), I have to question one other thing.

Both the mother and the daughter freely admit that he had nothing  to do with her failure to pass her GED.  They both contend that he should not be held responsible for her daughter, who has an infant and is engaged, almost 19 years old.

So then why did she not pass her GED?  Surely this did not come as a surprise to them.  They knew he was going to be sent to jail if she didn’t pass.  But yet they did nothing to stop it.  The daughter herself I hold in particular contempt.  It doesn’t sound like she hates her father.  But she has sure acted like it, forcing him to take upon himself the punishment that she probably deserves, if for no other reason than being so selfish as to send her father to jail.

The libertarian in me questions the point or need for truancy laws, or what the government even cares if a person simply refuses to permit herself to be educated.  But I am disgusted that this man has to pay the price for someone else’s misbehaviour, when he had absolutely zero control over the situation.

Might as well just sentence him to jail for allowing a stray dog to pee on the lawn in the middle of the night.

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