The Left Wing Redneck

Enter the wayback machine and set the controls for November 1988.  Canada was having an election. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, made the election about the Canada USA free trade agreement.  The message was, if the Progressive Conservatives did not win, Canada was doomed.   In the newly created Alberta riding of Beaver River  there was no incumbent.  The riding consisted of the area surrounding Bonnyville, Saint Paul, Cold Lake, and Lac La Biche,  created in 1987 from  Athabasca ,  Pembina  and  Vegreville . It was safe to assume that whoever  the PC's nominated as their candidate would win. The three ridings Beaver River was carved out of elected Progressive Conservative MPs in the previous election. The nomination meeting was held shortly before the election behind closed doors, no one other than those inside  knew how or why candidate John Dahmer was picked. The Liberals and...

  This redneck mispent a significant portion of his youth devouring science fiction. I pretty much stuck to what is now categorized as 'hard' science fiction, as in based on 'hard' science, ie what we thought we knew about physics and such.  We populated other planets, solar systems, created new societies, fought wars, and when things got tough, we could board a rocket and go somewhere else. Space travel was easy. About the same time I grew out of sci-fi, the genre evolved into fantasy and science fiction, as in mostly fantasy, elves, dragons and wizards, and magic without science.  Then we got dystopian future fiction, which  is also classified as fantasy and science fiction.  In contrast to the sci fi I grew up with, the dystopian was a future  no one would want to live in. Looking back with a critical eye, so called hard sci-fi was every bit as fictional and magical as elves and dragons.  When science fiction went to Hollywood it became even more di...

  "Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals..." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics).   "Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about everything." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science). Political truths only need agreement or compliance. There is no requirement for political truths to make sense.  Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet  agronomist who was appointed the head of  the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences by Joseph Stalin.  Lysenko stated that  genetics and agricultural science was "bourgeois and  fascist   " .  Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics, substituting his own crackpot ideas.  As many as 3,000 soviet scientists who challenged his ideas were silenced, fired, imprisoned or even executed.  Lysenko studied as an agronom...

  The United Nations has declared July 2023 the hottest month in recorded history. “Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” said UN chief  Secretary-General António Guterres.  Fortunately, it appears that Canada has found a way to defeat global warming. According to Canada's Department of Environment and Natural Resources Weather Information Services, Ontario Capital City, Toronto's July 2023 monthly average temperature of 27.1 was actually 1.2 degrees Celsius cooler than  July 2022 .  Alberta's Capital, Edmonton, was 1 degree C cooler, 23.6 in 2023 vs 24.6 in 2022 . Ottawa, the national capital, was fully 3 degrees C cooler than July  2020 , in fact, Ottawa's July 2023 27.4  C monthly average  was  identical to  July 1892's monthly average, convincing proof that Canada has found the solution to halting global warming. Canada's achievement in combating climate change can be attributed to the ...

  A recent tempest in a tea pot was about gas stoves and their potential hazards to health and environment.  The usual suspects have climbed on their soapboxes, the loony left demanding the sale of gas stoves be banned, and the right wing-nuts proclaiming that the right to buy a gas stove is right up there with assault rifles. After an exhaustive five minute internet search, I have discovered that gas stoves may result in a statistically higher incidence in childhood asthma, may leak methane when turned off, and may release nitrogen oxides when they are used. Burning natural gas has also been blamed for the release of toxic chemicals, such as benzene. So cooking over open flames might be dangerous, who knew?  Digging a bit deeper it turns out that the source of leaked gas inside homes was due to leaks in gas lines.  So plumbing might also be dangerous, or perhaps the plumbers are dangerous.  I wonder what the ban the gas snowflakes will do when they find out tha...

  People who write for a living are all excited about ChatGTP, that generates an intelligently written response or explanation on almost any subject. I gotta admit, it's amazing. ChatGTP has a huge knowledge base and provides a well worded response to almost any question.   On the other hand, reports are coming in that some i phones  are sending false emergency calls for accidents that never happened at amusement parks and ski hills because the phones were programmed to automaticially detect accidents based on their motion detectors.  Go for a roller coaster ride, fall off your snow board, put your phone in the glove box and hit a few potholes, and your phone calls 911 on you.   The latest 'feature' included with almost any household appliance is  the ability to connect to a smart phone.  You might wonder why your phone needs to speak to your refrigerator.  You now have the ability to turn off your bathroom light in your Oshkosh hom...

  Liberal democracies buy their stuff.  Liberal democracies provide a wide variety of opaque financial instruments to hide their wealth. Liberal democracies sell them the technology and weapons they need to stay in power. Liberal democracies abide by the rule of law, in other words with the right lawyers it is possible to get away with just about anything. If things go south at home, somewhere in the liberal democratic world a safe haven will be provided for the right price. What's not to love?

As the great Canadian Border and Capital Cities blockades wind their way down, we might ask where were the police?  This was far from the first Canada's first blockade rodeo. When the Indians (as in First Nations), environmentalists, G20 summit protesters, strikers, unemployed workers etc., take to the streets the police can be counted on to show up in full riot gear ever ready to restore order.  Maybe they learned from past mistakes, or maybe cops are reluctant to bust the heads of their drinking buddies.   Most Canadian cops are smart enough to keep their opinions off social media, but there are a few who have not gotten the memo yet .  Which is yet another reason that our police forces need greater diversity.  With a better selection of pissed off oppressed minorities the cops would be able to respond to any flavor protest with equal enthusiasm.   

  As Queen Elizabeth II's record reign winds down to its inevitable conclusion, Canadians are thinking about who will be our next head of state.  Canada is a constitutional monarchy and Queen Elizabeth is Canada's head of state.  As she is a very busy lady, Elizabeth delegates queening to Canada's Governor General.  At one time the British Monarchs chose their proxy from a pool of unemployed British aristocrats who might benefit from being thousands of miles away from their liege, but these days the Monarch is even too busy to choose Governors General, so lets Canada's Prime Ministers pick who will represent them. Being that Elizabeth is 95 as  this is written, Canada can expect a new monarch sooner than later.   For the same reason Barbados, another of the Queen's realms, have chosen to convert from a constitutional monarchy to a republic.   Which has some Canadians wondering whether Canada should do the same.  Not that Canada has anyth...

When opinions are criticized, we are told that every one is entitled to have an opinion even if it is wrong. Unless, of course, you disagree with this.  

Dick, Jane and Spot  go to school The redneck,is a boomers, people born between 1946 and the late 1950's.   We are called boomers because our parents had lots of kids, so they named us the baby boom.  Now that we are senior citizens the baby part was dropped.   An interesting thing about being a boomer is that apparently no one saw us coming, despite  census data that would have revealed that we were not sneaking up on anyone.   The most memorable thing about my school years is that every school I went to was under construction. Every one of my schools also  had 'portables' trailer park classrooms planted in the schoolyard.   One of my schools was so short of teachers it was staffed with old warhorses who should have been retired decades ago.  My grade 5 teacher used to fall asleep like clockwork every day, right after morning recess, he had to be at least 70 years old. When we got to College, it was the same as our school days.  ...

  The  Siberian Shaman Humanity's original religion was probably Animism.  Animists believe that all things living or dead have spirits, even inanimate objects like rocks, trees, rivers and motorcycles.  Animals hunted and killed for food, or trees cut down for construction projects have spirits too. It is OK to to kill the deer or cut down the oak but their spirits must be treated with proper respect.  The Redneck has been bitten, burned, tripped, and smacked by just about every inanimate object or living thing he failed to treat with respect.  Animism remains the religion of choice in remote inhospitable environments from the high arctic to steaming jungles and arid deserts, places where a good deal of respect for the things around you are needed for survival.  You might be a closet animist if you swear at hammers that hit your thumb, or if you gave your car a name other than the manufacturer or registry office supplied one.   According to ...

  This is a test. Which of these three vehicles do you think was responsible for the most carbon dioxide emissions per year in Alberta?  Each vehicle was listed for sale in the Alberta Kijiji on line marketplace in late April 2021, cherry picked by the Red Neck to make a point.  So if you smell a rat, you are correct.  The Tesla is only four years old as this is written, but has managed to rack up an impressive 171,000 kilometers.  The little Civic is also extremely well used, 480,000 km and counting.  The truck on the other hand, has accumulated 82,327 km over 7 years, which for Alberta means it's mostly a lawn ornament.  Comparison  will use the average mileage, or kilometerage per year for each vehicle, so the Tesla's impact will be based on 42,750 km per year,  Honda has been motoring along for 15 years, so 32,000 km PA, the dumb truck could only manage 11,761 diesel burning km a year.   But wait the Tesla is electric, so zero e...

  Officially Canada is 100% metric, but in reality our heights are in feet, we weigh ourselves in pounds, but we buy our steaks in kilograms and put liters in our gas tanks.  There are several good reasons to use imperial measure and some bad ones. The best reason for imperial is that we share many products with our imperialist cousins, the excitable states.  Most of the stuff we buy,  food weights or volumes, cooking temperatures, building products manufactured, measured and sold in feet, inches, gallons, quarts, liquid ounces or in Canada as awkward conversions to metric no one uses, such as a 3.78 liter one US gallon can of paint.    A bad reason to use imperial might be old fartism, of which I could be guilty.  When I learned to measure it was in imperial, but stick with me a for a moment.  When the 18th century enlightenment era philosophes (bored French rich people) contemplated ridding society of archaic measuring standards, such as the le...

Charles Murray, a political scientist, is worried about social breakdown of the USA.  He has authored numerous books and articles criticizing social welfare policy and people who score low on IQ tests, especially if they weren't white.  Murray uses census and survey data to show what should by now be obvious to everyone familiar with the USA. Some people are doing spectacularly well, and a large number are seemingly locked into a downward mobility spiral from which there appears to be no escape.  This time he confines his observations to the white population to avoid muddying the waters with race, unlike a previous book, The Bell Curve . Murray attributes the  decline of the white working class to the breakdown of the two parent family, laziness, failure to attend church regularly and dishonesty, as in not respecting the law.  Distressingly, Murray notes that working class IQ and SAT (Scholastic Achievement Test) scores are getting lower. The upper middle cl...

This was published a year ago, but went back to draft for some reason, so here we go again. The red neck remains not entirely convinced that one side or the other was right about climate. What swings me to the agnostic side are things like the University of Alberta's apparent firing (officially she resigned) of their Vice President of Community Relations for daring to suggest that global warming might not be all bad.  To put this into context, the University of Alberta is located in Edmonton.  Edmonton has the dubious distinction of being the farthest north city of more or less one million population in the western hemisphere.  Winters here are long and cold, anyone who can flees south for winter, including many of our birds.  Despite all this, Edmontonians in the public eye are supposed to profess that even here warming will be catastrophic or risk their career and reputation. Alberta also has oil and gas, lots of it, including the infamous tar sands.  Al...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypticism#/media/File:Durer_Revelation_Four_Riders.jpg So, it turns out that global warming started 100 years ago .  This is really bad news if increased carbon dioxide levels are responsible for global warming. In 1900 it is estimated that the 296 ppm (parts per million) CO2 level was only 16 ppm higher than they were before the industrial revolution (estimated 280 ppm in 1800) started to impact CO2 levels .    Let's review what that implies.  In 1804 world human population was about 1 billion. World wide coal consumption could be measured in thousands of tons, mostly for heating homes in the few places where coal could be found or transported.  There were no gas or oil wells except maybe a few in China. And other than a few steam engines in Western Europe and the USA there were no cars, trucks, trains, airplanes or stationary machinery running on fossil fuel. According to Our World in Data coal energy pr...

Your correspondent has a personal interest in the subject of global warming, or climate change, if you prefer.  The Redneck has been following the climate change debate with great interest for over 20 years.  The consensus in 2019 appears to be that each of the opposing sides, the  Alarmists and the Deniers,  are lying.  The Redneck only wants an answer, for how much longer does he have to put up with this white shit that keeps falling out of the sky, not to mention sub zero temperatures, C or F, take your pick. The Redneck will avoid taking sides in the great global warming debate as he has not studied climate the way Al Gore (A.B. Harvard, former Vice President) or Leonardo DiCaprio (GED and two (2!!) Golden Globes)  or all those guys with PhDs in Meteorology Physics and other stuff that requires you are able to do mathematics who are telling us that NASA and IPCC data has been tweeked, or to put it their way, shamelessly faked, obviously these fell...

Hogarth's busted poet -  some things never change So back in the late 18th early 19th century Mr. Moneybags buys a factory full of machines, hires workers, and by applying the latest in management techniques and technology  increases production, lowers prices,  increases profits, and transforms dispossessed rural laborers into dispossessed urban factory workers. The critics say that Mr. Moneybags' profits were stolen from his workers,  cheerleaders that Mr. Moneybags deserves his profits for being clever and for providing the rest of us, (who don't work in his factory), with more, lower priced, and better products, and even a better life for his workers, when compared to their former lives as mostly unemployed and starving farm labor. Because we live in a fair minded quasi democratic society, the workers vs capitalists conflict ended  with an armistice, legislation guaranteeing reasonable treatment for workers, and capitalists having to suck it up, until...

Well the leaves are falling, but signs are springing, another election, Yay!  Alberta Conservatives got their well deserved comeuppance a few months ago, and now it is time for the Federal version to walk the plank. So what's the major issue that will determine the outcome of this election?  Based on the latest media reporting, it appears that what will determine the election won't be the economy, or how Canada will stop global warming, but what ladies are going to be allowed to wear on their heads. Hmmm.  The Left Wing Red Neck has managed to make it through life more or less safely by following a few simple rules for survival, one of which is telling ladies what they should or should not wear is a really bad idea. Following an exhaustive 15 minute google session, the Red Neck has determined that the apparent objection to head covering is focused on ladies of the Islamic persuasion.  It seems that Islamic ladies are being forced to cover their ...