The Grey: A Great Reminder of Crucial Truths

The Grey: A Great Reminder of Crucial Truths

I want everyone to know that the pesticide season is just about just about on us and fortunately, the pesticide watch will be up and running in  once again.
As you are probably aware there are several concerns regarding the proper use of chemical pesticides as well as a plethora of unfounded chicken little, the sky is falling, we're all going to die, allegations that are having and will have a direct impact on the quality and consistency of life as we know it on this planet.

Most of us are well aware that food crops are vitally important to the economy of salvation of humans on this planet. Because there are so many of us may have had to adapt many of our agricultural practices to accommodate the ever-growing number of humans requiring sustenance.
Much of the technology we use today is in its infancy and with the help of diligent agricultural scientists and geneticists we are rounding the corner to her more productive and healthy environment for humans, less dependent on nonsustainable animal products and increasingly less dependent on our original pest deterants.
If we allow the tree hugging all natural simply organic ecco freaks to control the outcome of modern science is highly likely and eminent the needless suffering in many deaths by starvation will be the norm for the 21st century. Never in the history of the world have individuals with so little to offer society had such a strong voice in the outcome of the future of humanity.
While I believe in free speech and the right to one's opinion I am strongly critical of the law being a subculture that has been created not so much by virtue of scientific knowledge but rather by virtue of unfounded wealth.

Joseph L. Bast ,president of The Heartland Institute said:
Don’t be shy about saying you are an environmentalist. Don’t let them call you an “anti-environmentalist” or a “right-wing environmentalist.” We are the mainstream now. We’re not knocking on the door asking for permission to join the movement; we’ve been here all along. They are the small alien band of ideologues who hijacked the movement in the 1960s, and we have put up with their anti-technology, anti-logging, anti-farming, anti-car, anti-capitalism, and anti-freedom rhetoric long enough. It’s time they left the room.
•Tell people you are part of a new generation of environmentalists, a generation that relies on sound science instead of scare tactics and markets instead of government force.

Freedom is not incompatible with a healthy environment. Without freedom, a health environment cannot be protected.

And finally, if you know someone who is still a member of the Sierra Club, tell him tear up his membership card .http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/15197/Heartland_President_Addresses_CommonSense_Environmentalism.html

About how to be a Canadian

1907 PHOTO - This one needs to circulate

 I think this is one email that needs to be forwarded until every

Canadian with a computer receives it.

The year is 1907, one hundred and 5 + years ago.

READ PRINT UNDER PICTURE !

Wilfred Laurier ideas on Immigrants and being a Canadian in 1907.

'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith

Becomes a Canadian and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin.  But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet a Canadian, and nothing but a Canadian...there can be no divided allegiance here.

Any man who says he is a Canadian, but something else also , isn't a Canadian at all.

We have room for but one flag, the Canadian flag... And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the Canadian people .'

Wilfrid Laurier 1907

Every Canadian citizen needs to read this !

KEEP THIS MOVING

Alberta premier Alison Redford has put her government in national headlines with news that the province, at a time of high oil prices and outstanding labour-market conditions, is going to finish with an enormous deficit for 2012-13. The actual shortfall for the first half of the year came to $1.3 billion, and the 12-month total might be more than $4 billion. Redford blames what she calls the “bitumen bubble.” Alberta has sometimes gotten into fiscal trouble because of the unpredictability of benchmark prices for oil, but this time it is getting crushed by poor regional prices as the U.S. Midwest transforms from needy buyer to massive seller. Economists and pundits inside and outside Alberta have used the opportunity to repeat long-standing pleas for the province to make its public revenue less oil-dependent. Since oil is a “non-renewable resource” that can only be sold once, goes the theory, the province’s share shouldn’t be used to meet ongoing government expenses; the worthy thing to do is to set it aside and invest it. I find aspects of this argument amusing. In the early ’70s everyone agreed that Alberta’s “non-renewable” conventional oil would be gone in a decade or so. Yet the trend was for the amount remaining to keep getting larger. Meanwhile, how’s Newfoundland making out with its hypothetically “renewable” cod biz? Every “resource” is a mixture of matter and human labour: if we are going to sequester oil royalties, that means sequestering not just the value of the sold hydrocarbons, but the added value of the effort by present-day Albertans to find, extract, and, when it comes to tar sands oil, change it into something deliverable to refineries. Syncrude Ltd. is called “Syncrude” for a reason: it sells a product synthesized from nature’s materials, in the same way—in principle—that a chair is. Even Albertans have some trouble understanding this. You can only sell a barrel of oil one time, once it’s in the actual barrel. But given the presence of hydrocarbons in a place, it is inherently likely to go through cycle after cycle of new exploration and increased efficiency. In essence there aren’t “renewable” and “non-renewable” resources; only less renewable and more renewable ones. The idea of sequestering oil revenues is, I think, a subtle combination of utilitarian appeal and moral suasion. The government shouldn’t “squander” current flows of oil money, we hear; it should “save” virtuously for the future. The implied premise, interestingly, is that current government spending is “squandering” rather than “investment.” If it cannot be proper to expend precious oil revenue on current government programs, surely the capture and use of worker and investor income is equally unjustifiable? Our working lives are the ultimate non-renewable resource, no? If you read credit reports on Alberta, you find that the raters take an interesting view of the Alberta government’s supposed abuse of oil revenues: namely, that the province is positioned to withstand an economic shock like the “bitumen bubble” precisely because it already used oil money to eliminate debt. Like a household that had run up a credit-card balance, Alberta chose not to pour windfall oil revenue into some investment apparatus like the Heritage Fund. It paid down the credit card. In this sense Albertans and their AAA-rated government are already living in a future benefiting from sound past stewardship. I find myself wishing that economists would set aside quarrels over oil-revenue policy and help out with the practical corollary of a large deficit: chopping government spending. Alberta governments have invested plenty of energy in windbag futurological reports on what to do with oil surpluses. None has yet done what Ontario did: recruit one guy (star economist Don Drummond) to autopsy the budget and publicly identify areas of excessive fat. Premier Redford has been elliptical about what specifically needs doing about spending in the face of her “bitumen bubble.” Putting a Drummond to work wouldn’t cost much; heck, maybe Drummond is available! He wouldn’t necessarily find it easy. Alberta already survived a generation of remorseless program-slashing, and it seems likely that high current spending is mostly a product not of specific boondoggles, but of all-around bad habits concerning public sector employee compensation. There are probably exceptions: Alberta’s alphabet soup of agriculture supports, to take one example, seems like a good candidate for economizing. But the tendency of premiers to bribe interest groups at politically sensitive moments might be the biggest problem of all, and no one has shown any appetite for tackling it. For more Colby Cosh, visit his blog at macleans.ca/colbycosh

Why I hate Shopping

One of the things I least enjoy doing is shopping for groceries.
My wife and I usually go together and try to get enough fresh fruit and vegetables, canned goods etc. to last us at least two weeks. At least that's the plan and it never works.

This leads me to my rant of the day.

My wife had a short list of five or six things we needed and I needed a package of seeds feed my birds.

The closest store that had what we wanted was one of those Canadian box stores that attempts to sell not only groceries but health and beauty aids, outdoor furniture, plants and any other area they feel they can slide into for a quick profit.

I'm not a big fan of supporting such endeavors but on the way in the store they had assembled a screened off "clearance center" and I spotted a large pile of plastic lawn chairs. Ours had seen better days and they developed the traditional oxidative film of death on the surfaces. I looked at the huge stack of chairs and there was only one sign sitting on one of the center chairs which reads as follows:

I looked at the sign a couple of times and tried to discern what exactly the store meant but it was so ambiguous. There was no clerk to ask either.

I was not sure if the number in the sign meant you had to buy 2  to get the price and it was followed by the word "assort" which might have meant we had a choice between the high back or the medium backed chair at the same price. At any rate, I took it to mean that and picked up four chairs struggled them onto my buggy and proceeded to shop for groceries.

As is their custom in the store we were rushed through the cash register and shoved down the moving rubber track to load our groceries and get out of the way of the next customer. Like the trusting fool I am I didn't look at the bill until we got home and I was putting things away. What I had assumed was a clearance price of $5.94 turned out to be $9.94 on my bill. (Incidently, that's the street price for this style of chair in our area.)

My mind began to scream "bait and switch" because I have endured dozens of instances in this store where the advertising is at the very least, incomplete or misleading. The extra four bucks a chair won't break me or even alter my lifestyle in any way but it began to stick under my saddle like a burr.

I piled the chairs back in the truck and the next day I dragged them back to the store along with my bill to complain about the advertising and or get a credit for the chairs.

As chance would have it while standing at the refund desk the manager stopped and asked me if he could help.
I explained the situation to him and I could immediately see that he was not going to be a goodwill ambassador for the chain and as a matter of fact he began to justify the signage etc. explaining to me that I should've read the fine print on the chair labels determine what was being sold. I asked them where the sign then would be for the chairs that were $9.94. He didn't answer. I asked him if he truly believed that the chairs on sale were regularly $12.00 each and now $5.94. He didn't answer. Next he tried to tell me that the word "assort" meant assorted colors.

Here's a picture of the pile of chairs they had for sale and I don't see any assorted colors.

I of course took that to mean assorted "styles" which was the only option given the presentation.
Long story short I have my money back, I'm out my time, my gas and a much more wary consumer than I had been.

From now on I'm putting my customer loyalty on the back burner and I'm going to shop these guys like a predator chasing down a rabbit.

The Wind-Energy Myth - Robert Bryce - National Review Online

The unfortunate truth about wind energy is that it's not there when it's needed most and storing energy at this point in time is economically not feasible.

The Wind-Energy Myth - Robert Bryce - National Review Online

The “Ick” Factor and the Myth of “All-Natural”

The “Ick” Factor and the Myth of “All-Natural”