The Secrets Of Vancouver BC, Canada

We Are Screwed – Rantings Of A Friend.

Received an email from a friend who lives in the US today… seems Obama has finally pushed him over the line:

“We’re fu*#d.

Permanently, I mean.

Until this morning, I thought we were temporarily fu*%ed, then the President made a few announcements this morning.

So far, all he’d done was order the closing of Gitmo (which is the action of a Swarthmore sophomore), delay by 120 days the trial of the Sheik of 9/11 (the action of a fool), steal another trillion dollars from Americans as yet unborn (the action of a what we now know as an intergenerational thief), and guarantee permanent democratic ascendancy by issuing income tax rebates to people who don’t pay income tax (the modern version of panem et circenses). Not to mention bringing back Federal funding for abortions.

This morning, he laid out the first steps of a plan that will dwarf anything done by FDR whose lunacy merely extended the Great Depression by 12 or 13 years.

We’re not going to survive Obama.

This morning, he conflated energy independence and alternate energy sources. Insane.

He squeezed two concepts together:

1) independence from oil from foreign sources and …

2) independence from oil. He knows they are not the same thing. He did not mention our own vast and accessible but politically untouchable oil resources. He did not mention oil refineries.

He did not mention his promise to shut down coal production (and, of course, all the energy, including about 50% of our electricity, that we get from coal.)

He did not mention nuclear electric plants.

He brought “climate change” into the energy “discussion” this morning.

He did not call it global warming. The alarmists don’t call it that any more, either, because they now understand that nothing we do, one way or the other, will impact the temperature of the earth by even one degree F over the next 100 years.

Nonetheless, Obama is going to saddle our auto producers with outlandish fuel economy and emission standards while those companies are struggling to stay in business. Those companies will die and soon.

Best of all, he is doing this by Presidential fiat, executive orders, unlikely to be countermanded, or even discussed, by the House or the Senate.

This is all after one week in the Oval Office. We have at least 208 more weeks to go (there’s a Leap Year in there somewhere).

We’re fu@%ed. “

As it is not yet safe to criticize the Great Leader yet, my friend shall remain nameless…

photo credit: nacaseven

Garth Turner’s Long Goodbye

Seems Garth finally realized that his political career is finished in politics.

Long, long ago, before I’d met Stephen Harper, before I once again won a seat in Parliament, before anyone believed a Conservative government could lose $50 billion in four years, before I was kicked out of my own party live on TV, before I learned Conservatives were no longer Progressive Conservatives, before I became a refugee Liberal, before I lost my seat, before I understood it’s all about power and not the people, before I wasted three years and neglected my wife, before my Tory colleagues shunned and hurt me and my new Grit family embraced me, before I was dooced, before the crash and when I still believed passionately in the integrity and worth of individual democracy, I started this blog.

Now it ends.

So long Garth. Don’t let the door hit you….

Sunday Late Night Funny

Another Obama Voter – listen to the whole thing…

Go Ahead and Repo My Car, “We Got Barack Obama”

A bit of reality from the London Telegraph:

This will end in tears. The Obama hysteria is not merely embarrassing to witness, it is itself contributory to the scale of the disaster that is coming. What we are experiencing, in the deepening days of a global depression, is the desperate suspension of disbelief by people of intelligence – la trahison des clercs – in a pathetic effort to hypnotise themselves into the delusion that it will be all right on the night. It will not be all right…

Winter Games – Vancouver’s Stimulus Plan

Good to know that our politicians in Vancouver are doing our part by spending an unreal amount of money on a glorified hockey tournament, called the Winter Olympics.

The Vancouver Sun has a breakdown, but the bottom line is:

The various levels of government are spending a combined $5.84 billion on the Games. We still don’t know the full cost of: security (budgeted at $175 million, but now estimated at up to $1 billion); the Vancouver Olympic Athletes’ Village; 2010 curriculum; indirect labour costs; municipal torch relay celebrations; municipal programs designed to piggyback on the Olympics..

I wrote in August that the games would cost us at least $3 billion – I guess my wild prediction was off by almost half.

New prediction? 6.5 billion. This will blow away the Montreal Games “debacle” and will translate into much higher property taxes in Vancouver for the next 30 years.

photo credit: Antony Pranata

New York Plane Crash – Landing On Video

The US Coast Guard video camera caught the plane landing on the Hudson – catch the plane skidding in the water at the 2 minute mark…

Simply amazing – you’ll see how fast people got out of the plan and the first responders also.

Oops. Google Wakes Up.

Looks like the party’s over at Google – they laid off 100 recruiters, and it’s a sign that the excess is ending.

Earlier they had laid off 6,000 of their 10,000 contractors, closed the free food cafeterias, and cut tech support to almost nothing…

The surprise is that they now see the light…

From Valleywag:

…100 Jobs Cut

Larry Page and Sergey Brin made grand promises about treating their employees well.

But the pain of the economy has at last hit Google’s staff. (Google has only had one previous staff layoff of note, eliminating superfluous employees after acquiring DoubleClick.)

The recruiters are surely the first wave of layoffs. Some analysts estimate that Google, which has spent freely on frivolous side projects, could run its business with a quarter of the employees it has now; the sheer profitability of its search-advertising monopoly has hidden its inefficient experimentation for years. Google’s first real layoff will not be its last.

Makes me think of a famous Calgary bumper sticker -”Please God, give us another oil boom. This time we promise not to piss it all away“.

Also, check out this hot site for tech news – bringing back the days of the dot com bust.. check it out here. Bonus points if you can remember the name of the site that did the same in 2000-2005.

photo credit: dinimueter

Vancouver Olympics – Declared a Debacle?

Not that I didn’t think this was coming….

From the National Post:

Jean Drapeau, the Montreal mayor who brought Expo ’67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics to his city, once famously boasted, “The Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.” How about two babies? Only last year did Montreal pay off the final instalment of its Olympic debt — more than 30 years after the event. And as details of Vancouver’s fiscal fiasco for hosting the 2010 Winter Games trickle out, it’s easy to see how that city’s taxpayers could still be paying in 2040.

Let us state emphatically, from the outset, that we have every confidence Vancouver and Whistler will host a fabulous Games. A little more than a year from now when the sporting world turns its focus on Canada’s West Coast, it will witness a slick, well-run, thoroughly world-class event, the best Winter Olympics since Calgary’s in 1988. None of the financing controversies now swirling around the Vancouver Games will impact the final product.

But after the competition, there will remain the nagging question of who is going to pay for all the cost overruns, shaky financing and grandiose planning.

I won’t state is as emphatically… we’re going to get hit with a huge bill for these games.

photo credit: clevercupcakes

Payback

I couldn’t resist…

Countdown Until Obama Leaves Office…

A View From Florida

I’ve been in south Florida escaping the Vancouver “snowmageddon” and although it’s paradise down here , the fear and concern over the economy is being felt everywhere – from South Beach all the way to Disney.

It is a depression. At least that’s what the TV and the papers are telling us.

I can say after living on the East coast for 8 years, including NY through 9/11, I have never felt this type of chill.

I’ll be back to Vancouver next week, where we’ll hopefully escape what’s going on here.

Once your house drops by 20% it changes everything. Banks have frozen credit even on people who have equity in their “newly” valued homes – now you need to have at least 50% equity, or they’ll take away all your credit lines.

If it does spread north, at least I’ve been acclimatized.

photo credit: Wonderful_World**