Shanghai-ed – Then Liberated
Saturday, May 28, 2016 — 20˚C / 68˚F — Sunny and Springlike in Atlantic Canada @ 2:03 pm — Tweets below are copied & pasted – links won’t work.
— Um. I thought I had something more to say, but I guess I’m not immune to ‘Senior Moments’ – ((( Help? )))
——— jda ———
Tuesday, May 11th, 2016 — 6˚C / 42˚F & very bright and sunny @ 7:56 am in Atlantic Canada & Yesterday was Rasputin’s Birthday { & by the way, he was neither ‘mad’ nor a monk. } — {{ P.S. My friend Jim W. told me May 10th was also Swami Yukteswar’s Birthday and his (Jim’s) late Uncle Bruce’s – and three young women who were like 7 years old when Jim was helping his Cousin Glenn get Glenn’s daughter, Sarah, to school in the mornings – and meeting her at the bus when she came home after school, when Glenn’s job dictated that he had to be in work at 6 am and the school bus picked the grammar school kids up at something like 8:30 am – 3 young girls in Sarah’s circle of friends plus the mother of another one of Sarah’s friends — all celebrated the same birthday. May 10th. }}
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Must Read? :
“Heat & Light” by Jennifer Haigh
Heat & Light is a novel about the lives of Pennsylvanians – Farmers and Rural land owners – struggling to make ends meet and being seduced by oil and gas companies’ fast talking salesmen, convinced to opt-in to contracts with Frackers whose promises of lots of ‘free money’ for allowing the Gas Companies to Frack their property – poisons their water, ruins their property values, ruins the landscape around them and leaves them in much worse economic condition than they were when they were merely desperate.
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The top headline in each article is linked to the original article on the CBC.ca/news/ site.
— While it looks to a lot of us that political slight-of-hand is alive and well in Canadian politics – Justin Trudeau – who’s been the Prime Minister up here for a little more than 6 months – appears to be keeping a campaign promise to come up with an alternative to the current ‘First Past The Post’ electorial system — by having a committee investigate the feasibility of weighted voting and other possibilities to make Canadian elections a bit more democratic and have the elected officials in the Federal Parliament reflect the over all vote and not just the winners from each ‘riding’.
— For instance: If – in a hypothetical Federal Election: the Liberal party received 35% of the vote, the New Democrats received 25%, the Conservatives received 22%, The Parti Quebecois received 10%, the Green party received 6%, and several smaller parties received the remaining 2% – Then – Sitting members of Parliament should more closely resemble those percentages. — Where the current ‘first past the post’ system might have populated the Parliament with something more like 52% Liberal, 20% Conservative, 18% NDP, 9% PQ, & 1% Green (depending on where the votes were cast and what the local races looked like). { I intentionally had one party get fewer votes than another while winning more seats than that party did in the above fictional results from a fictional election. }
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“Maple Match” is a dating service advertizing that they can find Canadian mates for people who might want to escape from a nightmarish Trump Presidency.
— Earlier news items up here – reports from a couple months back – indicated that officials ( or residents? or somebody — ) in several provinces announced that they would be happy to welcome refugees from the U.S. into their communittees if they wanted to escape from the USA if and when DJ Trump became their President.
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— New Brunswick’s (Liberal) Premier Brian Gallant announced a new programme to give low income New Brunswick students free tuition at New Brunswick Universities. It was later revealed that this program would benefit about 7,100 students while it took away current tax rebates from between 35,000 to 40,000 students. The new program would reportedly cost $25 Million while cutting the earlier program would save more than $50 Million. -I’m not sure those dollar figures would reflect yearly costs – but that’s my best guess here.
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— Zondra ‘Pricelys’ Roy, who also goes by Zoey, is an activist, spoken word poet, hip hop artist and social entrepreneur. She will be presenting at The Walrus Talks The Indigenous City in Winnipeg, May 11, 2016.
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Other News Items:
Winnipeg Free Press:
FORT MCMURRAY, Alta. – RCMP have seized some guns following the fire in Fort McMurray, but won’t be a conducting a mass seizure of firearms like they did after the flood in southern Alberta.
Sgt. John Spaans said Tuesday that officers have taken one or two guns found in public places, but are not going into homes looking for more.
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& Internet outages have been reported in parts of Atlantic Canada. — Luckily, that hasn’t effected me (yet?)
