The Winnipeg Police Service may have to buy a smaller helicopter than they anticipated.  The Manitoba provincial government may not provide as much funding to operate the helicopter as the City of Winnipeg anticipated.

This has caused the City to look for a lighter helicopter that is better on fuel consumption.  The helicopter program will go ahead said mayor Sam Katz.  “But we will have to reduce the overall budget, in whatever form that takes,” stated Katz.

Below are some new models that the Police and City are looking at:

 

The Police are hoping the revised budget will at least let them buy a helicopter with an enclosed seating area.  As the temperatures in Winnipeg in winter at 500 meters up could get down to -50 C.

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man — living in the sky — who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! ..But He loves you.

George Carlin

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

Bertand Russell

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Albert Einstein

If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we’re going?

Justin Brown

Any religion who’s primary icon of worship is an image of a naked man nailed to a cross by his hands & feet, crown of thorns on his head, blood trickling down his face. Still sounds like some weird Sadomasochistic cult to me? Ivan Ratoyevsky The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Richard Dawkins On the first day, man created God. – Anonymous

I have taken my cigarette breaks for some time now around Cityplace.  I have noticed some of the Vagrants buying Triple X Sherry from the liquor store and downing the horrible mixture right outside the Cityplace doors.  They form a huddle in trying to hide the drinking and proceed to funnel the sherry into their steel stomachs.  No sipping here, it is an all out guzzle.

The plight of the vagrants is sad.  Nowhere to live, no money, poor health and the constant threat of violence.  So I guess the instant relief provided by the booze allows for their angst to subside for a while. 

To climb out of the holes they have dug themselves into would be a huge endeavour.  I have noticed that a lot of the derelicts and vagrants in downtown Winnipeg are in their 40′s and 50′s.  They have likely given up trying to sober up and working the odd day job.   To put it bluntly many of these people are incapable of working.  Half of them limp and their complexions are a mixture of odd colours, bumps and bruises.

They then become permanent street people who rely exclusively on hand outs and the odd sherry induced blissful rush.  The last picture is on Ellice across from the University of Winnipeg where the little green space with benches has been dubbed bum park.

 

 

 

Unemployment in the U.S. in the past few decades has hovered around 4 to 6%.  But since the Great Recession that started in 2008 and continues today unemployment rates in the U.S. have reached 10% for the first time since the early 1980′s.  In some areas of the country the rates may be as high as 20% as many people have stopped looking for work.

Canada was not affected as bad as the U.S. because we didn’t experience the out-of-control housing bubble.  More sane Canadian government regulations controlled mortgage rates and interest rates.  Canadian unemployment rates are at around 8%, up from the traditional 6%.

Manufacturing and construction sectors are hit hardest by the recession with major job losses.  There were so many house foreclosures that house construction stagnated in many parts of the U.S.  The financial sector has also seen substantial job losses.  From Wall street to Burger street for many of the money handlers.

The financial crisis has been linked to reckless and unsustainable lending practices resulting from the deregulation and securitization of real estate mortgages in the United States.  The US mortgage-backed securities, which had risks that were hard to assess, were marketed around the world. A more broad based credit boom fed a global speculative bubble in real estate and equities, which served to reinforce the risky lending practices.

Obama came to power at a strange time in U.S. history.  His stimulus packages are an attempt to stop an all out depression.  Most economists contend things will start to get slightly better by the middle of 2011.  Below are some graphs on U.S. unemployment statistics.

Some people are saying the Harper Conservatives have suspended, or with the new word in Canada, prorogued parliament to avoid criticism regarding the Afghan detainees.  Whatever is behind the Harper agenda for proroguing parliament is anybody’s guess.  But this Afghan issue has to be put in perspective.

 

What are we suppose to do with the Taliban captured by Canadian forces?  Put them on a plane and bring them to Headingly or Stony Mountain.  There is no room in those pens.  Some say we should hand them over to the Americans in Afghanistan instead of giving them to the Afghan army or police.  The Americans have enough prisoners to handle.  We should give them back to the Afghans, after all it is their country. 

Torture is wrong, but in many parts of the world it happens.  Who are we to sit on our high horses and tell this ancient civilization how to behave.  In 80% of the world torture of enemy prisoners is the norm.  We in the Western world always think we have the right to dictate morals to less advanced regions.  What gives us that right?  That it makes the political correctoids feel good. 

 U.S. governments constantly harm their foreign relations with China by lambasting that country on its human rights record.  Chinese civilization is one of the oldest in the world.  Imagine how they feel when a 230 year old country is telling them how to behave.

So enough of this lets treat the Taliban prisoners with velvet gloves.  If those fanatics ever got their hands on a Canadian soldier I cringe to think of what hell they would administer.

 

In the last week over a thousand small earthquakes have been reported at the Yellowstone Caldera.  If this thing blows it could put the earth into a nuclear winter scenario where there would be 2-4 years of continuous winter as the ash would block the sun.  There could be 12 inch deep ash a thousand miles from the actual volcano.  Of course this would be downwind.  Winnipeg is 600 miles northeast.  Most winds blow west and southwest.  Nature does not fool around.

The loosely defined term ‘supervolcano’ has been used to describe volcanic fields that produce exceptionally large volcanic eruptions. Thus defined, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is the volcanic field which produced the latest three supereruptions from the Yellowstone hotspot. The three super eruptions occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago; forming the Island Park Caldera, the Henry’s Fork Caldera, and Yellowstone calderas, respectively. The Island Park Caldera supereruption (2.1 million years ago), which produced the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff, was the largest and produced 2,500 times as much ash as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. The next biggest supereruption formed the Yellowstone Caldera (640,000 years ago) and produced the Lava Creek Tuff. The Henry’s Fork Caldera (1.2 million years ago) produced the smaller Mesa Falls Tuff but is the only caldera from the SRP-Y hotspot that is plainly visible today.

The last full-scale eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, the Lava Creek eruption which happened nearly 640,000 years ago, ejected approximately 240 cubic miles (1000 cubic kilometres) of rock and dust into the sky.

Geologists are closely monitoring the rise and fall of the Yellowstone Plateau, which averages ±0.6 inches (about ±1.5 cm) yearly, as an indication of changes in magma chamber pressure.

The upward movement of the Yellowstone caldera floor—almost 3 inches (7 centimeters) each year for the past three years—is more than three times greater than ever observed since such measurements began in 1923.  From mid-Summer 2004 through mid-Summer 2008, the land surface within the caldera has moved upwards, as much as 8 inches at the White Lake GPS station.  The U.S. Geological Survey, University of Utah and National Park Service scientists with the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory maintain that they “see no evidence that another such cataclysmic eruption will occur at Yellowstone in the foreseeable future. Recurrence intervals of these events are neither regular nor predictable.”

The corner of Main Street and Broadway Avenue in Winnipeg has undergone some big changes in the last 40 years.  Where the Wawanesa building and parking lot now stand was an apartment building called Broadway Estates.  It burned down in the mid seventies.  The building had a courtyard with a pagoda type structure in the middle.

Across the street, at what is now the southeast corner of York and Broadway across  York from the current Earl’s on Main, was the Empire hotel.  Interesting architecture and likely a vibrant beverage room.  From what I could gather the hotel was demolished, but it may have burned down.

More recently the Petro Can gas station at the corner was torn down along with the Winnipeg city building just south of the corner.  A historical park will be completed in the next few years on the site.

I can just imagine sitting in the Empire hotel beer parlour watching the moon landings on a black and white TV.

Four out of five stars.

Skating on The Forks river skating trail is overall a nice experience.  The ice is well groomed and very smooth.  There are a few cracks but nothing that will cause a wipe out.  The rest benches are every 400 meters or so, and cute little evergreens are placed near the benches to provide wind cover. 

The view of the city from the trail is really interesting.  The high end condos and apartment buildings off  Wellington Crescent and Roslyn Road along the river are impressive.  There are more of them than I expected.  And they look quite luxurious with big balconies, the view must be very good.  The big homes in Armstrong’s Point also look impressive.

The skates were rented at the Forks Market.  They cost 4 dollars for 2 hours.  I hadn’t skated in over 20 years so I am no expert on skates.  But the pair I had seemed to work fine. 

The only negative was the forty-something guy that rents you the skates.  The guy seemed so bored and annoyed with his situation that he emanated negativity.  No hi, thank-you, yes you go that way etc.  Actually the guy made it look like you were bothering him.  So the service sucked but overall a really enjoyable experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The voters in Massachusetts tonight voted in a Republican to replace Ted Kennedy’s carved in stone senate seat.  I thought the people of that northeastern state were intelligent relative to most of the other country.  I was wrong.  Americans are basically stupid in all corners of all 50 states.

Apparently the voters in Massachusetts felt that the Democratic controlled senate and Barack Obama have gone to bed with wall street and corporate interests.  Unemployment in America is at 10% and the Obama administration is still helping corporations stay on their feet with massive spending.  The average Joe six-pack feels they are being abandoned by the government. 

If the Obama administration and the Democratically controlled Congress allowed the big corporations to go belly up the unemployment rate could hit 30% by some expert estimates.  Obama is trying to keep the genie in the bottle.  And who tried to unleash the genie?  The Republican Bush administration.  The republicans deregulated wall street to the point where many capitalists lost control of their greed and allowed upper and middle managers to score big profits without reporting that the credit issued to Joe six packs would never be paid back.

Obama is trying to fix a mess that was conjured by the nasty Republicans.  And the democratic voters in Massachusetts vote one of those into the senate?

Obama should have held back on health care reform until his second term, if he would have been allowed a second term.  Americans are not ready for progressive social reform.