The Left Wing Redneck

Fully 54% of my 11 site visitors readership is from the USA, so it is time for the left wing redneck to explain the difference between the USA and Canada.  The redneck knows that most USians know little about what goes on up here (and could care less), but this will be offset by Canadians loving to read self serving comparisons between themselves and their southern neighbors. It is little understood that Canada is (and always was) conservative and the USA is (and always was) liberal.   I am sure that my southern neighbors will be as surprised to hear this as my fellow country persons, but it is true.  The redneck has heard the vicious anti-Canuckian commentary by  'conservatives' Ann Coulter and fellow travellers that  liberal  Canadians,  i.e. socialists, kowtow to a nanny government which has taken away their guns and forces them to stand in line for medical treatment. All true.   Except that political commentators have cunningly redefined the meaning of conservative a

As a Canucklehead, the left wing redneck is often  bemused and  amused by his southern cousins.    Walt Wawra, a Kalamazoo cop holidaying in Calgary Alberta,  complained about feeling threatened during an encounter with local youths. Due to Canada's repressive gun laws, Walt was unarmed, so he was forced to end the confrontation peaceably instead of inviting the punks to make his day, or querying them if they felt lucky.  Shortly thereafter came the Dark Knight shoot em up in Colorado, followed by the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Sikh temple by a lone gunman in Wisconsin. So I am thinking, this cop on a holiday in Canada doesn't feel safe without a gun in his pocket, but after Walt is back home, everywhere is getting shot up by crazies with guns.  WTF!! Why didn't the Colorado nut job go down in a hail of return fire from the Batman audience? Where were the off duty policemen with their off duty guns, where was the citizenry exercising the constitutional 'righ

thanks to wikipedia Everyone who has ever had anything to do with the social research or polling industry will have heard the story about how all the opinion polls were so positive that Thomas Dewey was going to defeat Harry Truman in the 1948 US presidential election that the Chicago Tribune declared Dewey the winner the morning after the election.   The reason this happened, say opinion pollsters, is that the polls predicting a republican victory were done by telephone, and failed to account for democratic voters being less likely to  have telephones than republicans, telephones still being a luxury in 1948.   This is not necessarily a problem if  pollsters know that say, 90% of the  republican voters have telephones vs 80% of the population that vote democrat.  If this is known, mathematical adjustments are applied, and the poll becomes more accurate.  Because the results were so embarrassing, they figured out what they did wrong, and opinion polling has been fairly accurate

It was the summer of  '85 when I took a University course on personal computers.   One of the TAs gave us a lecture on why it was our duty to pirate copy computer software.  Her logic was that legal copies of software were outrageously overpriced and the capitalist running dog monopolist software makers needed to be taught a lesson.     I never really took that lecture to heart, when I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, I found the software for it very affordable, and boughten software came with excellent manuals, a necessity in the days of the command line interface.  I bought the Commodore because I needed a word processor, and Paper Clip for the Commodore was a huge leap forward from fighting with handwritten drafts, typewriters, and correction fluid in order to submit the dreaded 2,000 word essay. That Commodore served my needs for years before I upgraded to a PC 'IBM clone' running MSDOS and Windows 3.1.  It was an amazing machine for one used to the C64 hooked

The interesting thing about artificial, so called, intelligence is that machines like computers and what we call robots are best at the things that are associated with smartness, like being able to do mathematical calculations in seconds that would take centuries using paper and pencil, or playing chess at grand master levels.  What computers and their smart robotic cousins are very bad at are the things that any idiot is capable of, like being able to walk from one place to another without falling over,  having a conversation, or carrying out instructions that are not pre-programmed somewhat inflexible commands. There is not one robot out there of any size or complexity that can match the multiple capabilities and complex behavior of an ant with its brain about the size of a grain of sand. Which has me wondering, if machines can do the things that smart people can do better than smart people, but can't do the simple things that stupid people can do better than stupid people..

tks Vegans are vegans because they say it is cruel to eat animals but OK to eat plants. Of all the forms of life on earth, only plants and their prokaryote cousins (lookitup) have the ability to capture energy from the environment, such as sunlight, and convert it into food. Not only that, but plants are also the primary means of carbon capture, yes all plants are busily removing deadly global warming prime suspect CO2 from the atmosphere. All the other lifeforms, including the cute little cows, sheep, piggies, rabbits etc., that Vegans don't want to eat are parasites, too lazy to create their own food, instead they just munch up the hard working members of the vegetable kingdom, not to mention polluting the atmosphere with CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Now where is the justice in that?  If somebody broke into your fridge and scarfed all your food, you would call the cops.  But this is exactly what the herbivorous species are doing to plants, not to mention all those Vegans.

I am sure you are all familiar with the following example of why we need money. "If you have an ounce of weed, and you want a bottle of whiskey, without currency you have to find someone who not only has a bottle of whiskey, but also wants an ounce of weed and will agree to the trade." blah blah blah.... (with partial thanks to HowStuffWorks.com) I have come to the conclusion that money is really time and dirt or,  T+D=$.  You plant some weed seeds in dirt.  You add time to cultivate and watch over the crop while it grew, and more time to harvest it.   The bottle of whiskey has a similar provenance, someone or several someones grew the ingredients (dirt+time), processed them (time), made bottles (dirt+time). etc. etc..  Everything started as some combination of time and dirt.  Maybe more of one than the other,  digital porn is mostly time,  a cubic yard of  uncut diamonds is mostly dirt.  Most of us are engaged in some form of investing time and dirt into things that ot