Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 4)

I found this about halfway home from work last night, just sitting on the ground beside the sidewalk on 18th Street South. This is the second time in two weeks that I have found an intact six-pack ring, or drink yoke, just laying on the ground. Both were in a couple hundred metres of each other.

If you find one of these laying on the ground, please pick it up and dispose of it properly, which means cutting it or pulling it apart so that none of the rings is still intact, including the small holes also. These rings are insidious little devices when left out in nature. Wildlife get themselves tangled up in these and end up choking or starving to death, or in some cases becoming deformed as their bodies try to grow around the obstruction.

Such a thing happened to Peanut the Turtle here years ago in Missouri. Her body continued to grow after getting caught in the yoke. She will be shaped like this for the rest of her life. Lucky for her it didn’t kill her, but its an unfortunate outcome that could have been avoided. Many animals are not as lucky as her.

Now, drink yokes are not the most pressing issue out there, and there are probably bigger issues for humans when it comes to the environment, but this one seems so unnecessary. From the person who tossed this drink yoke out irresponsibly, to the drink distributor, and the yoke manufacturer, there are a number of people perpetuating a product that we really have no need of.

Please stop buying drinks that are packaged in this fashion. Cardboard packs recycle very easily and if improperly disposed of, do not threaten wildlife in such a horrible way. To the politicians, it would probably be fairly easy to just ban these things form sale in your jurisdiction, be it municipal or provincial. To those that say that politicians have more pressing matters, I would agree, however, I tend to think that our elected representatives can do more than one thing at a time, so this would not take away from other importantvmatters.

Mayor Decter Hirst, MLAs Reg Helwer and Drew Caldwell, and Premier Selinger; I would ask all of you to consider getting rid of these unneeded consumer waste product in Brandon and in Manitoba. Drink manufacturers have other options; banning these hurts nobody.

It’s not the two drink yokes that I found within meters of each other that scare me… it’s the ones I didn’t find.

The interesting thing about adopting a humanist outlook on life is the way you start to look at things differently. Things that you just used to accept as that’s just the way it is suddenly seem to not make much sense anymore.

One of those things that has “bothered” me for the last few years has been the basis of our calendar. The Gregorian Calendar is the most widely used calendar in the world. It is based on the believed date of the nativity from the New Testament of the Christian Bible.

For years I have thought that our calendar is kind of annoying. Once you get down to year 1, you jump to year –1 and start counting in reverse. I’ve never liked how we start counting backward, dates just don’t seem right getting “bigger” as you go back in time. It’s one of those things that doesn’t keep you up at night, but you know that it is just a ridiculous system, at least when documenting human history.

I’ve thought for a while that we should pick a date sufficiently far back in the past so that it encompasses all of written human history and move forward from that as a year zero. To me it has always made sense to make it an even multiple of 10,000 so as to be able to keep our current numbering system during a transition period. As it turns out, 10,000 years is just about right, you don’t have to go back further.

So with this in mind, I did a search on the internet last night, figuring that if I had had the idea, chances are someone before had too. The gentleman to the right is Cesare Emiliani, an Italian-American geologist and palaeontologist, who later in life in 1993 proposed just such a system.

He saw four problems with the current calendar: (from Wikipedia)

1. The Anno Domini era is based on an erroneous estimation of the birth year of Jesus Christ. The era places Jesus’ birth year in 1 BC, but modern scholars have determined that he was born in or before 4 BC. Emiliani argues that replacing it with the approximate beginning of the Holocene era makes sense.
2. Emiliani opined that the birth of Jesus Christ is a less universally relevant epoch event than the approximate beginning of the Holocene era.
3. The years BC are counted down when moving from past to future, making calculation of timespans difficult.
4. The Anno Domini era has no year zero, with 1 BC followed immediately by AD 1, complicating the calculation of timespans further.

His solution was the proposal of the Holocene Calendar, or Human Era (HE) calendar which starts at roughly the beginning of the Holocene Epoch. Holocene is Greek meaning entirely recent. It turns out that 10,000 years is right about the time that the Holocene started.

To me the adoption of such a calendar makes sense. It requires very little adjustment to current systems other than sticking a one in front of the current date. I’ve heard people claim that it would cause a future computer problem, however, I personally would be very surprised if computers 8000 years from now were using current code anyway.

Today for example would be April 5, 12014. We could still consider 2014 to be shorthand, but in scientific and historical studies the HE date would be used. Here are common dates from history.

In my opinion such a calendar should be considered our standard calendar, moving us away from a calendar based on an event that is not historically significant to a large part of the human population. It puts most significant human events on one timeline, and for those adverse to change, it affects day to day current calendars very little if at all. I know that in school such a calendar would have made much more sense when studying written human history.

It always amazes me how uncommon “common sense” seems to be. Case in point, the elimination of the penny. After years of NDP MP Pat Martin pushing to get the penny eliminated, the Tory government of finance minister Jim Flaherty finally axed the coin early last year after being announced in the previous year’s budget.

Some people do not agree that the penny should have been eliminated, and someone took to stating that displeasure about Jim Flaherty’s involvement in the whole matter after the announcement of his retirement from politics. From Sound Off in the March 26th edition of the Brandon Sun,

“I will always be able to relate that Flaherty was the minister who, along with MP Pat Martin (NDP), took it upon themselves to eliminate part of the Canadian coinage system that was the foundation and building mainstay of money counting and saving. They called the one cent useless and excised its existence. There were other options that needed weeding, but no, the one-cent piece became their victim and was sacrificed on the stained altar of common sense.”

I’m really not sure what the writer was talking about. The one cent piece was useless to buy anything. We have now eliminated it, and as someone who works in a retail store, we don’t miss it one bit. In fact, everybody adjusted to the new reality in less than a week, and other than a few people thinking that pennies were illegal to use, there was no hiccups that I can remember. Pennies will remain legal tender for the foreseeable future, but no one uses them much anymore after only a year. As for being the foundation of our monetary system, I suppose there is an argument for that, but we once had half-cent coins before Confederation, and getting rid of that foundation didn’t hurt us.

I personally think that we didn’t go far enough. We should get rid of the nickel too. The CBC reported last year that according to Jean-Pierre Aubry of the Desjardin Group we should soon be getting rid of the 5 cent piece. He says, and I agree, that the nickel is approaching the point that the penny was at in 1982, the year that he says we should have gotten rid of the penny.

We really need to look at what these coins are costing us and if they have a use anymore. It is not sensible, despite so-called common sense, to keep using a coin that costs us more to make and handle than it is worth.

To me, the dime should really be the lowest denomination in our monetary system. Despite what the Sound Off writer says, it is the dollar that is the basis of our money, and the coinage smaller than it are only there to break it into parts; in 2014, 10 parts is enough.

Without a nickel of course, we can no longer have quarters, so those would go too. My assumption is that we would have a 10¢, 20¢, and 50¢ coin along with the loonie and toonie. At that point we could get rid of the rounding up or down system we have now for cash transactions and go to only the one decimal place for cash and electronic transactions. We did okay rounding away the 3rd decimal place for a century, I’m sure we could do the same thing one decimal place over.

Since our coinage would have to be retooled, we need to look at this now. Getting rid of the penny was simple, but getting rid of the nickel will take more than just stopping circulation. We had the ability to leave the penny until long after it was useful because its removal was so easy. The nickel we’ll actually need a plan. We should probably ramp up 50¢ piece production and put a 20¢ piece into circulation fairly soon, so that we can slowly reduce quarters and nickels until that day when we get rid of them altogether. And if we’re going to introduce new coins, we should do it now while cash registers still have that extra spot left over from the penny. This one shouldn’t wait another 30 years to happen.

Corporations are not people. I don’t care what the Supreme Court of the United States says on the matter. They are not people. It’s a ridiculous notion, and it is creating some pretty ridiculous arguments as a result.

Today in the United States, the Supreme Court heard arguments involving a chain store called Hobby Lobby and its claim that its religious rights were being trampled on by the requirement in The Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, that Hobby Lobby needs to offer health insurance that covers contraception to its employees, if it decides to offer health care at all. It doesn’t have to provide contraception to its employees, just offer a health insurance plan that covers it.

Hobby Lobby claims that that requirement goes against its religious rights because its owners believe that some forms of contraception are actually similar to abortion, which is against their religious beliefs.

So, now everyone seems to think that the decision is whether or not a company can have a religious belief and get an exemption to a law based on that belief. I have seen many people pointing out that such an exemption in this case would lead to exemptions in other cases. Maybe someone doesn’t believe in speed limits; should they get to travel as fast as they want on the roads? People and corporations would start saying that firing LGBTQ employees was okay because their religious beliefs made it so. Those are all very good and valid reasons for the SCOTUS to rule against Hobby Lobby… but it is all missing the point.

The part that never seems to get brought up is the employee’s religious rights. Seriously, if Hobby Lobby can claim its religious freedom is being infringed, what about the employee? This is the damn problem with our society these days. Why is all the focus on the company? The employee is a person and unlike the company, the employee was the one that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was referring to when it was written over a couple centuries ago.

For me it comes down to this, the law must protect the person who is in the less powerful role. The employer, whether a corporation or an individual, is in a position of power over the employee in many ways; dictating their religious choices should not be one. Hobby Lobby has decided to offer health plans to their employees, something that they do not have to do, but which they do for the tax break it gives them. If it hurts their religious morals so much, then they could forego the tax break, but they want the money more than they want to follow their so-called conscience. When they made that decision, that was the end of their choice. At that point the employee’s religious freedom kicks in, part of which is being able to not be bound to your employer’s religious beliefs.

If you think that you get to impose your religious beliefs on other people, then religious freedom is not exactly the concept that you think it is.

See that bus bench? I did, last night, on Princess Avenue next to the old fire hall. When I saw it, I just shook my head and rolled my eyes.

Of course if you go to the site, it claims that induced abortions have been shown to increase breast cancer risk. Never mind that their is no causal link found despite the site’s claim otherwise; perhaps that’s why they claim that more research needs to be done. The website is a coalition of various “Right to Life” groups from across Canada.

A quick glance at the research last night and this morning shows that there has been lots of inquiry done into the matter, and that there has been no causal link found between induced abortion and breast cancer.

When it comes to cancer, I think I will believe the American and Canadian Cancer Societies, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the National Cancer Institute, the World Health Organization, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

Nothing like threatening women with breast cancer to stop them from doing something you don’t like though. Class act!

So if you pass by this billboard, and check out the site it lists… remember it is FUD. There is no science here.

Today is Louis Riel Day in Manitoba.

He is now widely considered the Father of Manitoba, although it wasn’t always this way. Not too long ago it was taught in schools that Riel was a traitor to Canada and that his execution at Regina was justified.

Some people will call it revisionist history, but my feeling is that the re-examination of the facts with a less racist view has resulted in a story closer to the truth being told.

I personally do not think that Riel was necessarily a saint, few leaders are. To become a leader of people you often need some ruthless qualities to your personality. I do however believe that he was truly fighting for his people and their well being when he led the “rebellions” that he did. His labelling as a traitor seems to have been the work of a government that didn’t want to deal with The West.

What I find most ironic about Louis Riel Day is that the people here that are most opposed to the holiday being named as such, are also the most likely to resent the way that politics take place today in Ottawa and how they feel that the western provinces do not get a fair shake.

Riel was the original Reformer. The West wanted in on her own terms, not on those being forced by Ottawa politicians.

He is a man that helped build this country, and I am proud that my province has decided to honour him, warts and all.

Tuesday night there were two provincial by-elections in the “Tory Blue” Manitoba ridings of Morris and Arthur-Virden. The Progressive Conservative candidates crushed all competition, receiving more votes than all their competitors combined, both received over 50% of the vote. The night was pretty much as expected as far as the PCs go.

The story of the night seems to be the weakness of the NDP vote which collapsed, and the Liberals who increased their overall percentage.

This led to the following on Twitter:

Now both tweets say basically the same thing. However, the tweet from Drew Caldwell, a sitting NDP MLA reads like a warning not to vote Liberal if you do not want a Progressive Conservative government. It seems like less of a comment on the by-election, PCs were winning those ridings regardless, and more of a comment or even warning regarding the next general election.

This brings me back a gain to a topic I raised during the federal by-election in Brandon Souris, our first past the post system being broken. Here is a great example of that.

In Manitoba you have three centrist parties. The NDP are centre-left, the PCs are centre-right, and what exists of the liberals I suppose would be centre-centre (is that a term?). The two main parties, the NDP and PCs are fairly close in support a lot of the time. Mr. Caldwell’s point actually is in many respects true.

And it ends up being completely unfair to the Liberals.

If you look at the last number of years in Manitoba, it could be argued that the best potential premier of the province was the (former) leader of the Liberal Party, Dr. Jon Gerrard. The new Liberal leader, Rana Bokhari, seems to come with some stellar qualifications too. However, with the battle seen as between two alternatives, potential Liberal voters would most likely decide to vote strategically for one of the other parties.

This is another reason we need to reform our voting laws. If we were to go to a preferential ballot in Manitoba, then those who would vote Liberal could show that support with their first choice and then select their favourite of the main two parties for their second choice. It lets the third party show that it actually has some support, which I suspect is there, but gets lost in the strategies of voting day. If people start seeing the Liberals as having a little more support, they become more of a contender. More choice is good for democracy.

This is actually a time where we could get this done in Manitoba. My suspicion is that preferential ballot might actually be good for the NDP in a couple ridings going into the next general election, as I suspect more Liberals would go NDP as second choice over the PCs. In ridings like Morris and Arthur-Virden, it wouldn’t affect the outcome at all because of the strong first-choice showings of the Progressive Conservatives.

It may be an interesting experiment going into the next general election, and it may work in the NDP’s favour to try it.

Lastly, my friend Rob pointed out something else about Mr. Caldwell’s statement.

Does that mean that in the federal by-election in November, did drift towards the NDP give the Conservatives a win over the Liberal candidate? After all, had just a portion of NDP voters went Liberal, Brandon-Souris would have a Liberal MP.

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”
– Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1967

This September will mark the 10 year anniversary of equal marriage in Manitoba. While our neighbours to the south still grapple with the question of gay marriage, Canada has pretty much finished with the question, and we have moved on. The sky didn’t fall down, the sun came up, and heterosexual people didn’t start divorcing en-masse to join in holy matrimony with a new same-sex partner. Canada pretty much stayed the same after 2004 and 2005; we went from the status-quo to the status-quo + equal marriage.

I however look back and wonder if we even looked at the right question. After years of thought, and an awakening about my true feelings when it comes to religion, it occurs to me that perhaps the governments of the day, and of today, have the wrong approach on this topic. Why is the government involved in marriage at all? Why did governments feel that it was their prerogative to define marriage in the first place?

Historically marriage has been a religious institution, some would argue a cultural institution, but for the most part it has its roots firmly in religion. It is in many religions, and many religions practice it in different ways. It is really a religious entity.

Now, at first glance, it may seem that I am giving credence to those who would say that their religion should have some say about how we write marriage laws in this country, this is however not the case. What I am saying is that we should not have marriage laws at all.

The government should get out of the marriage business.

Sometimes, it has been said, the obvious solution is staring you in the face. This is one of those cases. Early on in the equal marriage debate we had the idea of same-sex couples having a domestic partnership, basically marriage in practice, but not in name. I’m not sure if that was the legal term, but I’m no lawyer so forgive me, please! It was not fair, it was discriminatory, and it was not a tenable solution. It did however provide us with an alternative, in my mind a much better alternative that we did not take.

The government should have taken the opportunity to get out of the marriage business altogether. Instead of moving forward and extending marriage to same-sex couples, we should have taken the opportunity to define a clear cut separation between church and state. We should have dropped marriage as a government recognized institution in Canada.

All marriages should have become legally recognized as domestic partnerships.

This doesn’t actually mean that you wouldn’t be able to get married in Canada today, far from it. It would only mean that as far as the government was concerned, your religious practice, in this case marriage, would be of no consequence to them. The law would be blind to this religious practice.

How would this affect your taxes? It wouldn’t. You would still file joint taxes with your spouse, but as far as the government was concerned, you would check the box for “in domestic partnership”. How would this affect the validity of your marriage? It wouldn’t. That would be between you and your church. Why involve the government? If your church believes in same-sex marriages, then it performs them. If it doesn’t believe in it, then it doesn’t. No government involvement.

As an atheist it seems funny that I have to be involved in what is essentially a religious institution for my spouse and I to have the rights afforded to each other that we want to have. Yes, there is such a thing as registering a common-law relationship in Manitoba, but realistically it is not the same. Despite having had a civil marriage ceremony with a marriage commissioner, the institution itself is still very rooted in religion.

And because of that, we don’t actually want to be married anymore.

We’ve discussed it. There is no marital breakdown, we probably love, respect, and understand each other more than we ever have before. She is my best friend, and I am hers. We just don’t believe in the institution anymore. We enjoy the legal protections that marriage affords us when it comes to healthcare, property rights, and child rearing. We have a greater commitment than a common-law relationship, and we recognize that. We just do not want to call it marriage. It’s a loaded word and we don’t like it anymore.

So we’d like the government to get out of the marriage business.

And it’s not just a matter of our relationship.

We’ve seen a few couples’ marriages break up in the last few years and the fact that it takes at least a year to get un-married when there is only a waiting period of 24 hours to get married in the first place seems ludicrous. I understand that there are legal challenges when it comes to separation of assets, custody of minor children, and income support in instances where it is required. What I don’t understand is why these civil responsibilities get tied up with the religious institution of marriage. I’ve watched people remain married for years, as the monetary and custody battles ensue, to someone they despise. If we separated the legal from the religious, these people could be “divorced” in the eyes of their religion, if allowed by that religion, while the legal issues wind their way through court.

Marriage and divorce should be in the hands of religion. Domestic partnerships and their dissolution should be in the hands of the government and the courts. The two do not need to be entwined together. They are separate issues, despite many people’s belief that they are inexorably linked.

It is also my feeling that this is possibly the only solution that would put the matter to rest in the United States. The establishment clause in the Constitution prevents the government from passing laws that favour the establishment of one religion over others. Recognizing the Judaeo-Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman to me is a clear violation of that clause. The fact that the government recognizes marriage at all, in my mid, may be a violation of the clause. The American government especially, since its enshrined in the Constitution, should be blind when it comes to religious practices. This is clearly one of them.

The whole idea that the government needs to legislate people’s relationships seems more and more foreign to me as I get older. The government really has no business in the bedrooms (or churches) of the nation, just as true today as in 1967.

A private firm’s garbage truck ran into the Eighth Street Bridge yesterday. From a layperson’s perspective the damage looks horrible. Assiniboine Avenue goes under what appears to be the 1934 portion of the bridge. The support structure at this point is much lower than that of the 1968 portion. The street is split into two lanes under that portion of the bridge. It appears that the truck hit in the westbound lane.

Judge for yourself, but that looks like one very damaged bridge.

Now back to my thoughts on the future of the bridge itself. In a previous post I put forward my reasons for thinking that the city can do without the bridge as a traffic bridge, which when I look at the above images I tend to think that the current bridge may have just reached that state. I wouldn’t drive a car over that bridge today even if it wasn’t closed.

The thing I fear is this. A sudden closing of the bridge is not a good test of my claims. We were not prepared for this, and the Daly Overpass at Eighteenth Street has not been adjusted to this new reality. We do not have a bus route planned for this.

People are going to have delays and frustrations trying to get around during high traffic times on 18th Street, and their one conclusion, the wrong conclusion, is that we need the 8th Street Bridge.

We don’t.

What we need to do is get traffic from the west end off of 18th Street. It is really that simple. If we do something with the tracks on 26th Street and hook it up to Hilton Avenue then we lessen the traffic on 18th. If we lessen the traffic on 18th, then we get rid of the bottleneck on the Daly Overpass. If we get rid of the bottleneck on the Daly Overpass, then the 8th Street Bridge becomes unneeded as a traffic bridge. Do we add a fourth lane to the Daly Overpass. Perhaps, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the problem. However, if we do add a fourth lane that means a new bridge most likely, built by the province, not the city.

And we don’t spend twenty to thirty-four million dollars on a bridge we don’t need.

I fear that this accident is going to cost us more than we ever would have thought, because it will lead people to a conclusion that they should not come to.

I want to see an active transport bridge built there, not a traffic bridge. Even after yesterday it is the only fiscally responsible option.

One further point. What the hell were we doing letting traffic go under a bridge which we know was near end-of-life and which we knew could not take a hit? The fact that we had put up signs shows that we knew a truck hitting the bridge was a possibility. Assiniboine Avenue is not so busy there that we could not have closed it under the bridge. Hindsight is 20/20, but it now seems silly that traffic continued going under that bridge.