==

TD Bank made record profits again recently (they almost always do manage that), and here’s a part of why/how. I didn’t use my line of credit very much, always paying it off entirely very quickly when I did use it. Last year though I decided to borrow a little from it, to pay for my wedding. Expecting to pay it off sometime next year, I had a rather reasonable ~7% interest rate. I got a letter in the mail the other day from TD, however, stating that I was having my interest variance rate reviewed, and it was being upped by 1.25%! I phoned today to complain, and the call taker said that many people are calling, unhappy with up to 4% interest rate changes! Yet another reason to consider quickly switching more completely to credit unions instead, eh?

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Here’s where I saw the Vancouver mayor clip. It was on the Big Oily Questions for MPs page. Our lazy, loitering, louts in the House of Commons for the most part won’t give you a straight answer to these tough questions. I can answer them though. The answer is beneath the questions, as it’s the same answer for all of them.

1. Why aren’t some oil sands revenues being set aside for future Canadians?

2. Are we harming our democracy?

3. Are you aware of ‘Dutch Disease,’ and if so, how do we prevent it from eroding vital parts of Canada’s economy?

4. Have you examined the geopolitical risks of tying our fate to China as superpower?

5. Are we boarding an economic roller-coaster that could crash?

6. Why aren’t we taking a strategy that would directly shore up our own energy security?

7. Why raise fears about charities whose foreign funding is a tiny percentage of what China invests in Canada’s economy and politics?

8. Does becoming more oil rich mean we also will become more militarized?

9. Have we abandoned commitments to lower carbon emissions to help prevent catastrophic climate change?

10. Why not refine it here, creating jobs and lowering risks?

11. Were you elected to hasten pollution and increase cancer risks for Canadians?

Answer (in my best Harper voice):
In these challenging economic times, we have to remember that Iran frightens me. Therefore we must diversify our markets, and focus on the economy. I don’t see a recession coming, but these foreign special interests are trying to stop our ethical oil production and exports which must now be allowed to falter. The most dangerous thing in the world is Iran, not cancer. Don’t let the hippies turn Canada into a giant National Park for our American friends.

My $600/taxpayer calculation has become a lowball conservative estimate many times over since first calculating with Harper’s misleading quote before the 2011 election.

2011 broke nearly every storm record there was to be broken, and it was the first time in recorded history we’ve had two years in a row with more than 18 storms in the hurricane season. But if you were to listen to the TV weather reports of Justin Berk of WMAR-TV in Baltimore, or Bob Breck of WVUE-TV New Orleans, or Dave Dahl of KSTP-TV Minneapolis you would think this was nothing to be alarmed about.

These and dozens of other weatherman across the nation do not believe in climate change. Yes that’s right — weathermen (and yes they are all men as noted by ThinkProgress) the guys who are supposed to know the most about what causes weather — seem to be in denial about the overwhelming scientific concensus on climate change.

If you’ve caught any local weatherpeople distorting the facts on climate change, please leave a comment with a date and description of the incident, and perhaps email the CRTC too.

On Groundhog Day, it’s a perfect day to recognize that forecasters don’t always know what they are doing. ( Pointed out by @neiltyson )

“I felt like it is kind of an insult to be a denier for a long time,” said Sen. Bert Brown, last month at a parliamentary committee studying energy policies. “It feels pretty good this morning.”

What I find particularly disturbing about so many climate change deniers ending up being appointed to the highest levels of government, isn’t just that ignorant, anti-science, Harper cronies are running the country, but that they credit their embarrassing ignorance of science as one of the reasons they got the job! And they are proud of being stupid because stupidity brought them power! What an excellent message to send to children, eh?

You wonder why smart people get bullied for answering questions in class? Blame Conservative Senators, or the Culture of Dumb, that put them in charge of sober second thought. If Conservatives were actually concerned about coddling children, passing them along through school while being illiterate, and awarding them an E for effort (when they should actually get an F for failure), they wouldn’t appoint more than one illiterate jock to the Senate. Useful, illogical, dishonourable idiots should not be deciding our laws.

“I have to admit that what I read tells me that there is not a consensus among scientists,” Greene Raine, (former Olympic alpine skiing champion) another senator appointed by Harper, told the committee when it heard from Environment Minister Peter Kent, earlier last fall. “There are many different points of view and different kinds of research happening out there. One of the things that I am starting to see now is quite a few studies showing that we may be heading into a period of global cooling, which would maybe be a lot more problematic for Canada than global warming. Our country is on the cool side.”

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist at the University of Victoria who publishes research in peer-reviewed journals, noted that the skeptics who appeared at the committee in December were all over the map in terms of making arguments about warming, cooling, warming from the sun, or cosmic rays.

“It was like a shotgun of inconsistent arguments,” said Weaver, noting that evidence from research must be proven by science, without opinions involved.

There are many “different points of view” as Greene Raine says. If someone tells you that 2+2=5, that’s a point of view too. Is that point of view correct? Don’t expect an elected or appointed Conservative to give you the correct answer to that question if it suits their purposes to lie or promote a fiction. As Weaver states, these liars will try a shotgun method until one of their lies resonates or sticks for a while. Have you been caught in their blast of stupid?

==

Our ghoulish Globe and Mail thinks it’s a good thing that seniors will be without pensions, because they’ll have to work for their retirement instead. Kids looking for jobs must love this perspective too. Harper didn’t campaign on OAS cuts, but here they come anyway. Happy strong and stable majority, old dude Conservative voters. Not so smug now, are you?

==

Woman asks Obama to “dance a jig” after he offered to look at her husband’s resume! Truth is stranger than fiction. And I get the impression that CTV wants us to watch American football.

==

Canadian government website posts same press release for border Security and border Privacy, and few notice the DIFFERENCE. (Here’s the real “privacy” release, elsewhere.) For this huge oversight, a Flack Award was given to a Harper employee.

Here’s where I hypothesize why it’s more dangerous to be on a phone conversation, than chewing gum while driving (or walking). Gum chewing is a veritable automatic response to there being a food-like substance in your mouth — you chew. This is not the same as engaging in conversation, which requires the use of thinking and non-automated parts of your brain, the same parts that much be responsible for calculating trajectories of pending threats to your vehicle and others’ lives. Tying up your thought process with thinking of responses to the person you’re conversing with by phone is statistically proven to imperil your life. As if vehicles weren’t dangerous enough, we’ve started treating the blasted things like they’re working on Jestons’ autopilot, and are using them head-free, while on hands-free phones.

If smokers weren’t juggling a burning object at high speeds, I’d say it’s probably safer to be smoking and driving, cancer risk included, than to be involved in conversations on cell phones while driving through high incident areas like cities and intersections with regular traffic. The habit of putting burning tubes to ones mouth and breathing in and out are entirely automatic, hindering only the automatic processing that goes with driving once a driver is experienced. Talking intelligently, on the other hand, is hardly an automatic response for the human brain. Many people are not even able to hold intelligent conversation while not operating heavy machinery accelerated to dangerous speeds.

So, should the cell phone laws be amended to the unpopular position of banning in-motion/on-road phone conversations, leave the law half-hearted and half-headed by banning only one type of dangerous cell-phone activity, or be removed entirely for being half-wrong in recommending another unsafe activity to replace the very unsafe act of holding a cell phone conversation in your hand, and in your mind, while accelerated?

January 27, 2012

Governments of Canada and Saskatchewan Invest in Research on Oil
Production Technologies

Regina, Saskatchewan* A combined investment of over $800,000 by the
governments of Canada and Saskatchewan will help the Petroleum
Technology Research Centre (PTRC) and the University of Regina (U of R)
study innovative recovery methods for oil and gas production, as well as
reclamation of associated byproducts.

If there is any public funding of this magnitude announced for solar or wind, or other renewable energy research, I’ll be sure to let you know. Don’t hold your breath.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s important to know how to deal with toxic waste. I’d just prefer that the government legislate on scientifically recognized safe levels of waste to be in our air, soil, and water, and leave it to companies to not exceed them. If the government wants to help out energy industries, there are start-up green companies that could use the support a lot more than dirty energy coal and oil who can pay their own R&D bills with ease. I’m not anti-subsidy, I just would rather not subsidize industry that we ought to be winding down as much as possible, to survive.

Dear Prime Minister Harper,
Threatening charities as ‘adversaries’ of your government, is wrong.

The form response I got back started with:

Dear [Saskboy]:

Thank you for writing to the Prime Minister. In your e-mail, you raised an issue that falls within the portfolio of the Honourable Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources.

-Photo by Andrew Forget of QMI (http://www.torontosun.com/2012/01/17/singing-the-praises-of-joe-oliver)

Who knew that threatening charities was a responsibility of the Minister of Natural Resources? I would have guessed John Baird, or Peter McKay from a helicopter shouting obscenities at people on the ground.