Opinion

Reginald “Red” Deer wants to build a lemonade stand but is not sure where to put it.

Published

6 years ago

2 minute read

Reginald “Red” Deer was enduring another hot pre-summer day in the backyard with his family and friends when he decided he would build a much needed lemonade stand, in his backyard.
The cost of the build would be $70 for plywood and nails. He decided that with a daily average of 4 people per day in his backyard each buying 1 glass of lemonade each day with a $0.25 profit he would make $10 before school starts.
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? His friend disagreed and suggested that if he moved the location to the front yard, spent $25 on a sign and some paint he do a lot better. Sure his family and friends may resist walking around the house to get a lemonade but there is 100 times more traffic in front and with all the neighbours and with the playground across the road, you should sell a lot more lemonade. Right?
The friend did not stop there, his vision grew even more. Lemonade is a great product on hot sunny days, what about the colder days? How about offering hot chocolate?
You could play it safe and spend $70 and build in your backyard, you could spend $25 more on advertising and exposure and do better or you could spend another $20 on a hot thermos and serve a wider audience on more days.
What do you think “Red” Deer should do?
By now you know I am talking about the Multi-use Aquatic Centre that the city is recommending building in the north-east corner of Red Deer in Timberlands.
I am suggesting you build the Aquatic Centre in the north west corner facing the QE2 near Hazlett Lake Park and incorporating the proposed “Dawe” ice rink, to draw in more traffic. It may cost more and take a little longer but this is a generational project, so what’s a few more months?
Or we could simply build the lemonade stand in the backyard.
The decision is ours. Just saying.

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Texas offers land for use for Trump deportations

conflict / 29 mins ago

Colonel Macgregor warns of world war, urges Trump to ‘tell the truth’ about Ukraine, Israel

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conflict

Colonel Macgregor warns of world war, urges Trump to ‘tell the truth’ about Ukraine, Israel

Published on November 22, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Colonel Douglas Macgregor has warned that Biden’s authorization of long-range missile attacks by Ukraine has resulted in ‘the highest state of nuclear alert’ in Russia and that the U.S. faces ‘the storm of the century’ in the Middle East.

In a powerful, sobering appraisal of the escalating danger of world war, Colonel Douglas Macgregor has warned that Biden’s authorization of long-range missile attacks by Ukraine has already resulted in “the highest state of nuclear alert” in Russia, and that the U.S. faces “the storm of the century” in a direct conflict with Iran.

Following months of pressure by the U.K. government to permit the firing of NATO-guided and supplied missiles “deep into Russian territory,” outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden green-lit the strikes on Monday.

The following day, the U.S.-guided and supplied ATACMS missiles were fired 70 miles into Russia. Following this, despite U.K. government ambiguity on the issue, U.K.-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles were also launched into pre-2014 Russian territory for the first time.

Described as sign that “the West wants escalation” by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the strikes were followed by the use of a novel Russian hypersonic missile known as “Oreshnik” (“Hazelnut”). The previously unseen weapon delivered multiple warheads on its Ukrainian target and “cannot be countered” – as Russian President Vladimir Putin explained.

Putin has repeatedly warned that Russia will strike any military installation from which strikes on its territory originate, promising a “mirror-like” response to future attacks.

Putin also updated Russian nuclear doctrine following the Biden authorization. The revised doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons in response to an attack on Russia by a non-nuclear power – but “backed by a nuclear power” – like Ukraine.

Macgregor said the moves by the U.S. were reckless and had resulted in the “highest state of nuclear alert” in the Russian military. He condemned a statement made by U.S. Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan, which claimed the U.S. was prepared to fight – and even win – a nuclear war with Russia.

Such remarks “convince the Russians we are preparing for nuclear war,” said Macgregor, stressing that this U.S. officer could not have made this irresponsible and dangerous remark if his senior officer did not support it.

“Generals do not make policy,” he said, as he bemoaned the absence of visible leadership in the U.S. at a time of mounting crisis. “Who is in charge?” he asked, arguing that the Department of State – whose brief includes foreign and war policy – appears to be itself being led by “generals who act like Caesars.”

With NATO faced with a drawdown of U.S. commitments to European security under Donald Trump, moves towards war hysteria is one means of securing its future.

The entire liberal-global order faces a hard reckoning following defeat in Ukraine, as this promises to reveal the deep corruption, money laundering, human trafficking, and immense damage to the European economy partnered with the “hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians,” which Macgregor says the media is simply refusing to report.

“The media have never told the truth,” Macgregor said angrily.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on November 11 that “corporate media is a propaganda vessel for Big Pharma and the war machine,” summarizing his long-held position that the Ukraine war is a vast “money laundering scheme” involving the military industrial complex – and companies like BlackRock.

“The big military contractors want to expand NATO. Why? Because nations have to conform their military purchases to NATO,” he said.

Kennedy recalls Senator Mitch McConnell’s stunning response to the question of whether the U.S. can afford sending “$113 billion to Ukraine.” Kennedy explained, “He said, ‘Don’t worry,’” and then showed McConnell saying, “It’s going to American defense manufacturers.”

Kennedy’s claim that the media runs advertisements for the war machine is not a “conspiracy theory.” It is a matter of congressional record.

Kennedy has also stated that the United States blew up the Nordstream pipelines, destroying German gas supplies – and resulting in the destruction of the economy of the former powerhouse of Europe.

He said in March 2024, “It’s amazing how some refuse to admit that we sabotaged Nordstream even after Biden stated on camera that if Russia invades Ukraine, ‘there will no longer be a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.’ This is a matter of public record.”

“There is indeed propaganda at play here. But it isn’t Russian and it isn’t coming from me. It’s the war propaganda of our own government and their collaborators in the media.”

This propaganda machine is now pushing the West towards a war with Russia which cannot be won. A nuclear exchange, as Putin, Macgregor, and Trump have said, would produce no winners. Conventionally, European nations have spent so little on defense that they have no effective counter-force to a Russian land invasion – which Macgregor says the Russians “have no intention” of launching anyway.

Dr. Sumantra Maitra, the author of the “dormant NATO” policy behind Trump’s move to scale down U.S. commitments, yesterday said the result is “a very, very risky moment,” saying “Putin argues that the line of ‘strict or qualified neutrality’ is now blurred” by the authorized NATO weapon strikes.

President Putin announced on November 21st that “we reserve the right to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”

“In the event of escalating aggression, we will deliver a decisive mirror-like response.”

Why is the regime escalating to a “blurred” line between proxy conflict and nuclear war?

It is an insane gamble to prevent the U.S. from drawing down from NATO in Europe, and to prolong a war whose end would reveal the deep corruption in and around the proxy war in Ukraine. Peace would spell doom for the liberal-global order.

Nuclear war for Israel?

Hopes for another payday for the war machine are still alive, however, in the strong U.S. backing of Israel.

In his November 21 appearance on “Judging Freedom,” Macgregor describes continuing U.S. support for a nation whose leaders are now named in arrest warrants linked to genocide as a “tragedy,” saying of the announcement of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, “It’s a sad and tragic day for Israel and I think for the United States because we are complicit” in the charges made against both men.

Israel is another example of a leadership whose tenure can only be secured if the wars never end. Benjamin Netanyahu is accused by many, including his fellow Israelis, of keeping the wars going to avoid jail. Even Joe Biden agreed with this assessment.

With Netanyahu urging the U.S. into a war with Iran that Israel cannot win alone, Macgregor asks “four questions on Iran,” namely how such a disastrous war could ever be argued to be serving the interests of the United States.

It would, Macgregor said, see the “U.S. sleepwalking into disaster” so colossal as to be “the storm of the century” – and all to keep a criminal out of prison.

Macgregor has stated that all Trump has to do to stop the war in Ukraine is “tell the truth” about the corruption, lies, and reckless escalation which have sold this war to the West. On the grave matter of human losses, he said:

“We don’t know how many have died. The media have never told the truth. It’s 600,000, 700,000 dead Ukrainians at least and hundreds of thousands more wounded who will never recover. No one is telling the truth. It’s time for the truth. If President Trump does anything he’s got to tell the truth – and throw out anyone who doesn’t provide him with the truth.”

The same can be said of Netanyahu himself. If Trump were to tell even some of the truth about this man, neither Americans nor anyone else outside his influence would be willing to stand with him.

Netanyahu has urged all of the “regime change” wars which have driven mass migration into the West. The war in Iraq killed “a million historic Christians,” as J.D. Vance has said, adding that if Americans had been told this instead of WMD lies, they would never have supported Netanyahu’s call for the U.S. to go to war in Iraq.

Netanyahu has pushed the false line of Iraqi WMDs since 1990. He called for the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, whose demise smashed open the floodgates of African mass migration.

Regime change is the business model of neocons whom Trump vowed in February 2023 to remove from the U.S. government, and Netanyahu is the man who has urged regime change on the U.S. for at least 20 years. Trump made this statement almost two years ago in a video recently recirculated as if it were current news. It is to be hoped that Trump’s resolve on clearing out the “Deep State neocons …who seek confrontation” has not weakened.

Regime change has ruined the West, changing regimes at home into a permanent state of emergency governed by censorship and lawfare against critics of godless liberal-globalism. As a result, we are now morally and financially bankrupt, our isolation sealed by steadfast support of a nation whose leadership is now credibly accused of obvious war crimes.

At home, Netanyahu is accused of having backed Hamas for years, of ignoring precise warnings of the October 7 attacks, of relentlessly blocking every hostage deal – to prolong the wars which keep him in office.

His former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman also warned that “Israel will not exist in 2026” if Netanyahu remains in power, saying in June that the Netanyahu government is “only concerned with its political survival.”

Israelis themselves recognize that Netanyahu cannot survive the outbreak of peace, and “has never wanted peace,” as Donald Trump said of him in 2021. Netanyahu’s entire career is based on permanent war. He now wishes to drag Americans – and the rest of the world – into another.

To tell this shocking truth to Americans could not only save Israel from a coalition the former head of Mossad warned in 2022 was “leading Israel to self-destruction” – but also save us all from a devastating global conflict, which Macgregor says would be sparked by attacking Iran.

The U.S. faces a stark choice between oblivion and restoration. It cannot have both, as others have pointed out. So far, Trump has remained silent on Israel while Putin has signaled he is open to Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine.

With war being the lifeline of the Deep State that Trump has vowed to defeat, is he willing to tell Americans the truth to keep their dreams – and themselves – alive?

Energy

Global fossil fuel use rising despite UN proclamations

Published on November 22, 2024

Duane Rolheiser

From the Fraser Institute

By Julio Mejía and Elmira Aliakbari

Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades… the first global energy transition—from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels—started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about 7 per cent of the world’s energy supply (as of 2020).

At the Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan, António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, last week called for a global net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, which requires a “fossil fuel phase-out” and “deep decarbonization across the entire value chain.”

Yet despite the trillions of dollars already spent globally pursuing this target—and the additional trillions projected as necessary to “end the era of fossil fuels”—the world’s dependence on fossil fuels has remained largely unchanged.

So, how realistic is a “net-zero” emissions world—which means either eliminating fossil fuel generation or offsetting carbon emissions with activities such as planting trees—by 2050?

The journey began in 1995 when the UN hosted the first COP conference in Berlin, launching a global effort to drive energy transition and decarbonization. That year, global investment in renewable energy reached US$7 billion, according to some estimates. Since then, an extraordinary amount of money and resources have been allocated to the transition away from fossil fuels.

According to the International Energy Agency, between 2015 and 2023 alone, governments and industry worldwide spent US$12.3 trillion (inflation-adjusted) on clean energy. For context, that’s over six times the value of the entire Canadian economy in 2023.

Despite this spending, between 1995 and 2023, global fossil fuel consumption increased by 62 per cent, with oil consumption rising by 38 per cent, coal by 66 per cent and natural gas by 90 per cent.

And during that same 28-year period, despite the trillions spent on energy alternatives, the share of global energy provided by fossil fuels declined by only four percentage points, from 85.6 per cent to 81.5 per cent.

This should come as no surprise. Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades. According to a recent study by renowned scholar Vaclav Smil, the first global energy transition—from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels—started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about 7 per cent of the world’s energy supply (as of 2020).

Moreover, coal only surpassed wood as the main energy source worldwide around 1900. It took more than 150 years from oil’s first commercial extraction for oil to reach 25 per cent of all fossil fuels consumed worldwide. Natural gas didn’t reach this threshold until the end of the 20th century, after 130 years of industry development.

Now, consider the current push by governments to force an energy transition via regulation and spending. In Canada, the Trudeau government has set a target to fully decarbonize electricity generation by 2035 so all electricity is derived from renewable power sources such as wind and solar. But merely replacing Canada’s existing fossil fuel-based electricity with clean energy sources within the next decade would require building the equivalent of 23 major hydro projects (like British Columbia’s Site C) or 2.3 large-scale nuclear power plants (like Ontario’s Bruce Power). The planning and construction of significant electricity generation infrastructure in Canada is a complex and time-consuming process, often plagued by delays, regulatory hurdles and substantial cost overruns.

The Site C project took around 43 years from initial feasibility studies in 1971 to securing environmental certification in 2014. Construction began on the Peace River in northern B.C. in 2015, with completion expected in 2025 at a cost of at least $16 billion. Similarly, Ontario’s Bruce Power plant took nearly two decades to complete, with billions in cost overruns. Given these immense practical, financial and regulatory challenges, achieving the government’s 2035 target is highly improbable.

As politicians gather at high-profile conferences and set ambitious targets for a swift energy transition, global reliance on fossil fuels has continued to increase. As things stand, achieving net-zero by 2050 appears neither realistic nor feasible.