Candyman..... Candyman...... Cand........agggghhh

Hat Tip to Are We Lumberjacks....
Are we?

“All 50 States are coordinating in this – as we fight back against our own Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process, whipped to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for their treacherous leaders.”


Eh?

Things We Can Do Without

As the calendar turns day after day one thing that remains constant is the diligence and professionalism of the MSM.



In an overly obvious attempt to instruct their readers in the matter of what to think the Ottawa Citizen offers the following... complete with a headline that was edited with such reassuring competence.



"Internet-based school comparison took stirs controversy in Ontario"
Screams the Ottawa Citizen !

I'm not posting a screenshot.... you can take my word for it. That is exactly what the headline says.... at least until they correct it.

Aside from that just who are these so called "education watchdogs"?

" People for Education, called on the minister to take down what they believe is “polarizing” information contained on the new web tool."

In spite of the very clear message that Ottawa Citizen wishes to convey about access to public information, the story actually does have some interesting content.

The irony is that when the Liberal Nitwits of the Ontario Government actually DO something that makes sense they get hammered for it from ALL quarters.

Heaven forbid that people should be provided with easy access to public information that might allow them to actually make informed decisions.

As for the reporter and the rag that put out this story .... I suppose it would be asking too much to provide a link to the site ‘school information finder' ... !!
Like This!

Or better yet maybe a few examples of how this TOOL works.

Like THIS! ... see a nice working class neighbourhood with a pretty solid reputation.

What's wrong with that?

OMMAG

More Nugent

I like Anthony Bourdain and his wandering gastronome show "No Reservations" ... the guy really does go where no man really should go in the quest to learn and share a little bit about what people really do eat all over the world.

I especially like his sojourns into rural America or even inner city urban America for that matter where he proves a sort of courage that I would not even consider to challenge for the simple reason that I am not willing to face hours and days of gut wrenching agony for a few moments of over amped salivary gland spasms.

But I digress.....

I am also somewhat of a Ted Nugent fan and have been since I saw him hijack the stage for 90 minutes of guitar thrashing back in 1968 with the Amboy Dukes.

Now to say that the Nuge is a bit radical and knows his own mind and is not likely to put up with any shit from anyone is like saying the 44th president is a third rate politician.

However the prospect of seeing Ted Nugent the staunch individualist and libertarian on a show with the decidedly Disaffected East Coast LIberal Anthony Bourdain is just too entertaining.

Expect fireworks.

Here's the Benign Clip On Obesity

Here's Another Just for The Heck of It


I'm still searching for the bleeped out rant by Nuge .....


And Here's a Blind Ally to a LIberal bitchfest

OMMAG

Canadians Not As Smart As They Think

Certainly not when it comes to money.
The product of our educational system exposed to a lifetime of contamination by the ignoramuses of the MSM.

Considering where most of us get our information about the economy why would that be surprising?

OMMAG

No Criticism of Obama Allowed

In the Colorado school system !

A fifth grader was suspended for refusing to remove a T shirt that read " Obama aterrorists best friend".....

Best part is this quote from his father :

“It’s the public school system,” Dann Dalton told Fox31 News, “let’s be honest, it’s full of liberal loons.”

Full story at STACLU ...

Heheh!

Now there is a man who knows whereof he speaks!


OMMAG

The Rise and Decline of Education

An Op-Ed from the New York Times looks at the trends in attainment in our education systems over the last century. Yes I know that it's the USA he is talking about specifically .... but the same problems and conditions apply to Canada.

The Biggest Issue Looks at how these trends impact our future.....

Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.

I've been saying the same thing for years and the plain truth of the matter is that so many of my own generation were happy to set their children up for failure.
With the willing help of meddling nurse nanny social engineers using YOUR money and your children to test out their half baked theories of "Progressive" education coupled with the never ending mantra of the "Entitlement" culture ... we have seen our educational institutions gutted from the inside and the outside.

The failures are NEVER about money and educational costs ... they are ALL about misplaced priorities and the intrusion of ideologies into what should be a clear and uniform process.

Want to know who's to blame?

Look in the mirror.

With a H/T to yargb.com (Flares Into Darkness)


OMMAG

There's Trust Issues !

I am at a loss to understand or explain this fiasco...

Imagine if you will* a parent called to school to be to be told that Child And Family Services had been called to investigate a report that her child may be sexually abused!

Now imagine that you already had more than enough on your plate with that same child being autistic.

Now imagine that the basis for this complaint is that an educational assistant assigned to baby sit your child at school made this report based on something her PSYCHIC told her during a "consultation" !

Well .... that's what happened to Barrie Ontarion resident Colleen Leduc.

From the Barrie Examiner ...

" The mother of an autistic girl says the public school board was "completely unprofessional" to formulate a theory that her daughter was being sexually abused based on a psychic's perception.

Barrie resident Colleen Leduc wants an apology from the Simcoe County District School Board, which called in the Children's Aid Society (CAS) to investigate. According to the board, the case is still under investigation, although Leduc says it was closed.

Leduc immediately pulled her 11-year-old daughter, Victoria Nolet, out of Terry Fox Elementary School in north-end Barrie."

"I have trust issues now," Leduc said. "What are they going to concoct next week?"

I'd say you should have trust issues! Like why should you trust your child to a school who's teachers, staff, administration and board are all so thoroughly incapable of differentiating between an episode of "Medium" and reality that child welfare officials are called upon to investigate your family.

This does not speak well either for the level of sense being used at CFS either.

You should be demanding a lot more than an apology Colleen!

h/t to commenter talnik who tipped me off to this bit of hysteria in moonbatland!

* thanks to Rod Serling "The Twilight Zone"

OMMAG

What Passes for Scholarly Research?

In the world of Arab Islamic revisionists there is literally nothing that cannot be warped in the vain effort to create a greater history than what the facts tell us.

Consider Abdul-Rehim Rihan, head of Dahab Antiquities an Egyptian archeologist ....

"....some of the antiquities unearthed in Sinai Peninsula revealed that the Star of David was created as an Islamic decoration. The six-pointed star was found at the entry of Al-Gundi fort, founded by Saladin from 1183 to 1187 along the military route connecting the Suez and Aqaba gulfs."

And

"....the Menorah, the seven-branched and nine-branched candelabrums, has no special Jewish base."

Now I'll concede that either symbol may well have originated elsewhere than in the peoples of Judea .... however a cursory examination of the timelines of Judaism versus Islam tells a very different story to that which Abdul is trying to spin.

Crash Course in History of Judea Begins about 1800 BCE
Crash Course on The Timeline of Islam Begins about 570 BC (= AD)
That shows in FACT that Judaism was a well established 2300 years before existence of Mohamed.

Islamist revisionism at work!


One thing for sure is that Neither Symbol the Magen David (six point star) or Menorah ( seven branch candelabra) are the creation of Arabs or other followers of Mohamed.

h/t The Gates of Vienna

OMMAG

What Are We Funding Universities For?

Is it this:

In York University’s campus newspaper The Excalibur, contributor Lama Aggad yesterday justified the deadly terrorist attack at the Mercaz Harav seminary in Jerusalem while accusing the Israel Defense Forces of carrying out a “Holocaust in Gaza.”

The attack, whose victims were mostly children under the age of 18 engaged in religious study while murdered, left a 14-year-old Israeli-Canadian boy in critical condition with multiple bullet wounds and two broken ankles.

According to Aggad, “it’s no wonder” the students were attacked, because they may eventually serve in the Israel Defense Forces -- even though they were in civilian clothes, studying in a religious institution in Jerusalem, far from combat zones.

The full column can be read online by clicking here:

Honest Reporting Canada

Lowest Common Denominator!

Comprehensibility tools are used to determine whether the written material you produce is suitable for the audience you are trying to communicate with.


Words such as - Haecceity or defenestrate or encapsulate or abstruse or assay or unequivocal - tend to push up the level of incomprehensibility. So do complex sentence structures and large paragraphs as well as the use of devices such as footnotes and reference identifiers.

Depending on the characteristics of the incomprehensibility tool technical jargon may be weighted as high or may be ignored.

In any case, the primary reason the tools are used is to facilitate better and more effective communication.
That's the business world.

In the bloggosphere they seem to be used as a measure of how intelligent or erudite the author may be or visa-versa.

Someone who copies and pastes or simply quotes a lot of verbose essays or editorial material may be recognized as an upscale wizard of words or someone without any sense no education or intelligence may get what appears to be a much better evaluation than they really deserve.

On the other hand a fellow with a wry sense of humor and some wit can elevate his standing by a little creative splattering of multi-syllabic verbs and adjectives.

You can try it yourself! Rate your favorites or rate yourself. Try a few of your least favorites.

It's called the Blog Readability Test and anyone can use it.

Draw your own conclusions!

OMMAG with a H/T to AWL-Jacks?

P/S - I found an unlikely way to skew the results! My level of comprehensibility is actually as low as she goes , which in this context means completely understandable! That's so whenever a liberal comes by they may get the point!

The Theory of Everything!

Awesome.....

String Theory In 2 Minutes or Less H/T to Rodger at the Lumberjacks!!


OMMAG

The Current Truth?

What better way to spear the hypocrisy and stupidity of the left than to mock them to death!

The People's Cube gets it done......



A true quote....... From Lee Bollinger ....... OR IS it?
"only an anti-intellectual bigot would oppose a speech by a distinguished Islamic scholar whose metaphysical insights into holocausts illuminate the massive genocides of the 20th century for all of us."

This is your institution of higher learning! On Crack!

OMMAG

This Is Education?

From the land of Fruits and Nuts - Kalifornia.... (H/T to Stop the ACLU)

"One often hears that government schools in totalitarian nations brainwash their children to love the government. People in free nations decry that as oppressing the free will of innocent children, and rightly so. In American schools, however, just the opposite is true as with the case of an anti-American teacher in a public school in Chico, California who hates this country so much that he sent a letter home to his student’s parents urging them to renounce their citizenship in the U.S. as he announced he was so doing."

This Disgrace will not be the only case you hear of this sort of Leftarded proselytizing ... everything that begins in Kalifornia ends up finding acceptance with some people and happening here....... everything!

OMMAG

Too Many Humps to Get Over!

Wednesday is Hump Day and I thought that I had the will to blindly ignore all those irritating people who insist on being as boils on the ass of humanity for this week!

Then I got bored and went looking for trouble .... of course finding it too! .... On the pages of various bloggers. Which led me to this:

Anti Semite Professor calls critics - Ignorant Illiterate Islamophobes

An excerpt:

"He wrote that the university administration uncritically accepted the Holocaust-denial label “concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center [a Jewish human-rights organization] and the [U.S.] Jewish Defence League and peddled by media outlets such as The Globe and Mail.”"

Of course it couldn't have anything to do with all the "Ignorant- Illiterate" bloggers who took the time to write to ST. Francis X to let them know what WE thought!!

Your "reputation" has been impugned you say?

I'd say more like "Well Clarified " !!

Poor Poor Victim Prof. Dossa! I say that you deserve every bit of scrutiny and criticism that comes your way.
For You I proclaim are "Hump of The Week!"

LGF - "Because if you don’t hate Jews with a blind unreasoning passion, you must be Islamophobic. And if you criticize someone who does hate Jews, and doesn’t even try to hide it, you’re just like Joseph McCarthy."
Some Writing of Dossa

Irony from the PoliSci Faculty of StFX

H/T to
LGF

OMMAG

For Wednesday! In Our Happy Socialist Paradise!

The Happy Workers Enjoy a Communal Day of Celebration!





Pleased with their labours they revel in the ascendence of the State!

Meanwhile in our Sister State of Venezuela:







OMMAG

On Would Be Parenting Hipsters - Because It's Hump Day!

I caught a bit on the TV news about this guy Neal Pollack and his book " AlternaDad: The True Story of One Family's Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America.

I was intrigued by the catchy title and followed the interview a bit until Pollack had this to say:
" I'm going to do my best to see that my son does not have the traditional American childhood experience." Or something to that effect!

Now I do not have a problem with that idea at all but there was something else in his ongoing comments that got me thinking about it.

Isn't it the Kids who ultimately define what's the viewpoint of "Cool" for themselves?
Isn't it the next generation that seeks to define themselves?
Isn't it the natural order of things to see the youth of the nation move away from what they see as the constriction imposed by their parents?
Is being cool really a good thing to base your moral foundation and world view on?

Now, I have not read this guy's book and maybe there is a lot of honest effort on his part to raise a responsible person who is capable of making adult decisions based on reason and some sort of moral foundation. But I do not get any sense of that from what Pollack had to say!

So I've been looking around to find out what it's all about and came up with this interesting article: From Austin Momma

The more I look into it the more it seems to me that Neal Pollack is too interested in his own image and shallow world view to even understand the fundamental need of children to be raised with structure and moral guidance in their lives. As bad a parent as the authoritarian dogmatic adult might be I think that the "Hipster" is in danger of creating a whole new level social misfit.
Kids always do seem to have a way of coming out just fine regardless of the best intentions of misguided parents however so maybe it's not too much to hope for.

I'm going to give Mr. Pollack and all other supposed hipster parents a special Wednesday award for being selfish and stupid! Wednesday is Hump Day and you are today's Hump!

Oh! By the way hipsters - 100% of the language you use, the POV you espouse and the style you put on is derived from the 1950's - That's MY Day man and you are truly a group of uncool and unoriginal posers. You're still copying other generations Music, Ideas and fashion without adding anything new! You are the children of the Boomers so it's probably difficult to understand how your so lame but you could try a little harder NOT to be categorically ignorant.

OMMAG

Water Water Everywhere!

But how much does it cost???

Near and dear to my heart is the subject of Clean Water and since today is "World Water Day" it seems appropriate to comment.

First, I'd like to say that there is apparently a plethora of groups and agencies that have decided to concern themselves with water quality. Some are interested in protecting existing sources. Some are interested in cleaning up already polluted bodies of water. Some are interested in getting water to where there is little or none. Some are interested in making water safe to drink.

It's the last one that has my interest more than anything because we have developed right here in Canada a few systems that use very simple and very old methods that can be combined with some new and sophisticated technologies to take just about any crap infested water and make it safe to drink.

The first is what is known as bio-filtration and it was originated by the Romans as far as I know.
In any case the principal is that there are organisms in all water that is contaminated that live off the contaminants in the water. It is so stupifyingly simple that I cannot see any reason that this approach is not used globally. You make a container and you put a drain in the bottom with a screen. You put some gravel on top of the screened drain and then put some sand on top of that! You put water in the top and wait for it to percolate through the sand. The water that comes out is nearly pure right from the start and in most cases safe to wash in if not drink. The next thing that happens is a bit of natures magic. As the system works over the next few days to weeks it becomes a prime habitat for those organisms that were mentioned previously. These little friends are presented with an over abundance of their favorite foods and besides growing in number from the steady arrival of newcomers start to multiply exponentially in their newly enriched habitat. The good organisms grow to such a mass that they will eventually plug up the tank but the water coming out gets more pure all the time! The mass which is called a schmutzdecke is easily cleaned up by scraping off the top of the tank and the flow through the system can be restored by taking some clean water that's been saved and pumping it back through the sand tank. Very little work for the benefit of sustaining clean potable water.

The true beauty of the bio-filter is that for low tech environments the whole thing can be done using manual water handling!

Now! I ask this: With the millions upon millions of dollars being spent to improve conditions in undeveloped regions of the world, WHY is this technology NOT being taught and deployed across the board?

Where are the NGOs and other supposed helpers and what are they doing?

Look up - Slow Sand water filter- or - Bio-filtration-


OMMAG

CBC News - Low Point of the Week ( so far )

Use the link to see this!

Heather Mallick the beacon of journalistic integrity lets her rabid political sentiment get in the way of yet another story. Taking the high minded attitude that a simple entertainment is somehow supposed to be something more then colouring it with her own prejudices. She hits rock bottom with the assertion that the Bush administration is somehow responsible for either the failure of the contestants or other participants!

Got news for you Heather dear!

The educational system in the US and Canada has been "Gutted" as you like to call it not by Conservative governments but by liberal ideologues who are more interested in social engineering than in education while protecting union jobs of teachers by removing them from responsibility and accountability

In fact it is the likes of you who are largely responsible for the dumbing down of the world.

OMMAG

We Don't Need No Education ! - Well don't expect much of one either!

I recommend "The Gates of Vienna" for many reasons... but mostly for well written essays.

The Title of this one is only a teaser....the substance is very real!

What's happening to our institutions of higher learning?

Dymphna picks up on a theme from Victor Davis Hanson...
"........What are we to make of this increasingly corrupt institution, whose health is so necessary to the welfare and competitiveness of the....."


OMMAG