Allan's Perspective
First of all we have some news from the town of Kitimat, way out in the wilds of British Columbia.
You know about Kitimat, that’s the place where the XL pipeline is supposed to feed into a marine terminal for shipping oil overseas!
Well, the tree huggers have been poring all sorts of money into shutting the whole thing down, in spite of the almost 200 high paying jobs it would provide in a town of only 10,000 that is wracked with unemployment!
Residents of Kitimat will cast votes in a local plebiscite Saturday for or against the multibillion-dollar Northern Gateway pipeline. (The District of Kitimat has remained neutral on the $6-billion project, but the vote will decide council’s position.) “We’ll see what the people of Kitimat want,” said Mayor Joanne Monaghan.
(Kitimat residents are being asked: Do you support the final report recommendations of the Joint Review Panel (JRP) of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and National Energy Board, that the Enbridge Northern Gateway project be approved, subject to 209 conditions set out in Volume 2 of the JRP’s final report?)
Now this is where it gets interesting kids. First of all, Enbridge is spending big bucks:
It’s a question about “as hard to nail to the wall as a bit of Jell-O,” said Murray Minchin, a volunteer with the grassroots Douglas Channel Watch.
He describes a campaign that has been outspent, outmanned and outmanoeuvred from the outset. Enbridge’s campaign started months — if not years — ago, Minchin said.
He describes a campaign that has been outspent, outmanned and outmanoeuvred from the outset. Enbridge’s campaign started months — if not years — ago, Minchin said.
They faced no spending limits, as provincial election laws didn’t apply to the municipal vote. Northern Gateway had paid canvassers, full-page ads, glossy brochures, a new website and billboards, Minchin said. They ran an annual campaign for youth that saw 50 iPads distributed to essay contest winners, he added.
And yet, Minchin is hopeful the vote will go his way.And well he should be!
Environmental groups from across the country, (and especially the United States) have been throwing money, time, and effort into defeating the proposal!
NOW, THIS BRINGS ME TO THE REASON FOR THIS ARTICLE, BUNKY!
Why are environmental groups in Canada and especially the U.S. so dead set AGAINST this pipeline, and yet you never hear a peep out of them about the oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico and up in Alaska! (SEE MAP!)
Just to refresh your memory:
1.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP oil spill, the BP oil disaster, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the Macondo blowout) began on 20 April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. It claimed eleven lives, and is considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry Following the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a sea-floor oil gusher flowed for 87 days, until it was capped on 15 July 2010. The US Government estimated the total discharge at 4.9 million barrels (210 million US gal; 780,000 m3). After several failed efforts to contain the flow, the well was declared sealed on 19 September 2010AND
2.
The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989, when Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker bound for Long Beach, California, struck Prince William Sound‘s Bligh Reef at 12:04 a.m. local time and spilled 260,000 to 750,000 barrels (41,000 to 119,000 m3) of crude oil over the next few days. It is considered to be one of the most devastating human-caused environmental disasters. The Valdez spill was the largest ever in US waters until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume released. However, Prince William Sound’s remote location, accessible only by helicopter, plane, or boat, made government and industry response efforts difficult and severely taxed existing plans for response. The region is a habitat for salmon, sea otters, seals and seabirds. The oil, originally extracted at the Prudhoe Bay oil field, eventually covered 1,300 miles (2,100 km) of coastline, and 11,000 square miles (28,000 km2) of ocean. Exxon’s CEO, Lawrence Rawl, shaped the company’s response.THE POINT IS THIS KIDS, On the grand scale of things, Oil Sands product is far safer than shipping it down from Alaska, or putting up (thousands) oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
Oh, we can give in to the demands of the tree huggers folks, but first I want their names and addresses …………………….., so that when the oil starts to run out, they’re the first one’s that have to walk!
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/kitimat-residents-to-vote-on-northern-gateway-pipeline-1.1771214#ixzz2yg3rsAuN
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P.E.I. REPORT!
The Opposition had more questions Friday for P.E.I. Agriculture Minister George Webster over whether he charged his expense account $37.88 US for a hotel room movie.
Questions about the expense, incurred while Webster was at an agricultural conference in Texas in November 2011, first came up Thursday.Progressive Conservative MLA Colin Lavie asked Webster if he intended to repay it.
(Agriculture Minister George Webster speculated he may have sat on the remote, and so ended up being charged for the movie at the hotel.)
Once again folks, we don’t make this stuff up!
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Radio host Rush Limbaugh is deeply concerned about CBS’s decision to install Stephen Colbert as David Letterman’s replacement.
According to Rush Limburger, the only kind of bullshit that is acceptable is HIS particular brand of bullshit!
(No shit!)
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Some strange news in my e-mail this morning: First of all some bank in the Caribbean informed me that my account is “locked,” (and I don’t know what I’m going
to do) and then somebody else wrote to tell me they were sending me a “second notice” ……………, again!
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I don’t know what the big deal is with the Oscar Pistorius trial, OF COURSE HE’S GUILTY …………………………., just like O.J. Simpson was guilty!
(Oh, wait a minute!)
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I was just reading about Patrick Brazeau and suddenly realized the “REHAB” is the greatest “get out of jail free” card there ever was!
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EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT: BAKING and home-ware bible Good Housekeeping is shocking readers with a saucy consumer test on sex toys.
The staid 129-year-old magazine – better known for kitchen gadget trials and cake recipes – has given its verdict on which bedroom aids hit the spot. (G?)
And testers crowned the $64.99 Je Joue Mimi the champion with 77 out of 100. –>
They said the pebble-shaped device was “cute, feminine and not a bit scary”.
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Andy Yan, a senior urban planner and adjunct professor at UBC, stood in front of about 50 American developers and planners at a workshop this week and watched their jaws drop. He compared Vancouver’s median household income, about $57,000, alongside the average detached house price – $1.36-million.
“They were floored,” Mr. Yan says. “We have profound economic challenges.”
Mr. Yan was one of the presenters as the U.S.-based Urban Land Institute held its annual meeting this week in Vancouver, with 3,000 delegates from around the world descending on the convention centre.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/real-estate/international-builders-soak-up-the-vancouver-model/article17933284/?cmpid=rss1
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Competitive walking in the 1870s and 1880s, for instance. “In the decades after the Civil War there was mass urbanization in the United States,” Matthew Algeo — author of Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport — recently told NPR. Millions of people were moving into cities “and there wasn’t much for them to do in their free time, so pedestrianism — competitive walking matches — filled a void for people. It became quite popular quite quickly.”Such pedestrian contests were rather, shall we say, pedestrian when compared with other peculiar North American pastimes of the past.
Herewith we proffer a quartet of odd sports:
Gander Pulling
The following account will indeed offend modern sensibilities; no doubt, it also disturbed some citizens at the time of the abhorrence. But it is what it was.
When Thomas C. Fletcher was but a young lad in mid-19th century Missouri, according to the Atlanta Constitution of 1894, he observed rustic gentlemen competing in a sport called “gander pulling.”
This was in the days before organized football and baseball, said Fletcher. A group of two dozen or so men would convene at a crossroads store “where 18-cents-per-gallon corn whisky was dispensed.” The men contributed $1 apiece to a kitty. They then obtained — by hook or crook — a tough old gander, plucked the feathers from its neck and covered the shorn neck with soap and grease. Then they suspended the goose by its feet from a tree — so it was dangling.
On horseback, the men rode in a circle, and each attempted to grasp the gander’s slippery neck — as if it were a golden ring. The man who grabbed the goose from the tree took home the pool of money.
“It was a little rough on the fowl,” said Fletcher, who was governor of Missouri in the 1860s, “but as a feat of strength and horsemanship, it was worth seeing.”
Mimic Pistol Dueling
Nearly a century before paintball or laser tag, there existed the exotic endeavor of mimic pistol dueling. As reported in the Chicago Tribune in 1909, a French inventor created bullets made of wax that worked in dueling pistols and the Army’s standard-issue revolvers. Duelists wore loosely fitting garments and wire-and-glass masks for protection; pistols were fitted with hand shields. Opponents faced each other, at a distance of 25 paces. A director barked the command: “Fire!” Officials were on hand to judge the accuracy of the shots. That same year, there was a New York Times account of a bloodless duel at the city’s Athletic Club. Two men — wearing long black gowns and protective masks — faced each other in the gymnasium. “All agreed,” the paper reported, “that it was a fine shooting game.”Centipede Vs. Tarantula
At a Columbus Avenue bar in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reported in 1894, men liked to gather and tongue-wag and wager as they watched a battle-to-the-death between a tarantula and a centipede. “The strange contest takes place, as a rule, in a circular box about two feet in diameter, such a box as cheese is generally shipped in,” according to the reporter. “A large pane of glass is laid over the box to prevent the escape of the contestants.” During one such contest, 10 men watched as the tarantula killed the centipede — and then died from battle wounds. All of the spectators “were pledged to secrecy,” the reporter noted, “as the S.P.C.A. might have concluded to interfere had they learned of the affair.”
By the late 19th century, athletes in America were combining sport and technology in creative ways. Newspapers reported “telegraph bowling” matches between teams in two distant cities. Seattle and Spokane, for instance. Boston and Brooklyn. Buffalo and Chicago. Officials in each city marked the frames and relayed the scores to the opposing team.http://capeandislands.org/post/4-strange-sports-americas-past
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