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The race is on. What a relief to know that no candidate wants to increase crime, waste or taxes.

Published

7 years ago

4 minute read

Wow what a relief, I was worried that a candidate in the next election was running to increase crime, waste and taxes.
Apparently they are all concerned about the current issue of crime.
I understand that our Crime Severity Index is the second highest in Canada, second only to Grande Prairie and it has hit main street media. But what about the root causes of these crimes?
Why is our severity index so much higher than Lethbridge? Is Grande Prairie’s so high due to isolation issues and high unemployment. Does Lethbridge have a more diversified economic base and not so oilfield dependent as Grande Prairie and Red Deer?
Lethbridge has invested heavily in recreational facilities and attracting young people, would following in those steps lower our crime index?
Isolation issues. Red Deer has maintained an unequal distribution of schools and recreational facilities in a north/south matrix.
North of the river where 30% of the population lives they have just the 1 recreational facility, the Dawe Centre, initially constructed in the 1970s and there are no plans to build another.
While south of the river there are 10 recreational facilities ; the Downtown Recreation Centre, Michener Aquatic Centre, Downtown Arena, Centrium complex, Collicutt Recreation Centre, Pidherney Curling Centre, Kinex Arena, Kinsmen Community Arenas, Red Deer Curling Centre, and the under-construction Gary W. Harris Centre.
The city is also planning on replacing the downtown recreation centre with an expanded 50m pool, in the $100 million range.
This may not seem related but 60% of facilty users use the Collicutt Center which is in the south east corner of the city. A person or family living in the north west may not have the time or can afford the long commute across the city. Isolation from peers is indeed an issue.
Schools. There are no high schools north of the river, now and there are no plans for any high schools to be built, north of the river. There are 4 high schools now, south of the river, and 2 more in planning for the south side of the river with 5 high schools along 30 Ave. Teenagers need to commute to their high schools for classes, sports and other extra-curricular activities. Often times it is too long a commute for those living north of the river to attempt to return home for supper then back to the school for activities with their peers. Isolation from their peers and idle hands need to be addressed.
I would be interested in hearing any candidate talk about why our city’s population is declining while the province grew, Blackfalds grew, Penhold grew, and Sylvan Lake grew. The city lost 975 residents, 777 from north of the river while Blackfalds grew by 700 residents. Would it be because they built the Abbey recreation centre away from their downtown and is expecting a new high school to start being constructed in 2018. Penhold grew and would it be because of their new recreation centre and secondary school? Will any candidate talk about this?
Over the campaign period I will offer my thoughts and ask questions. Issues cannot be addressed only in isolation. I look at crime not only in punitive measures but in preventive measures. The discussion may seem disjointed but in each way contribute to increased crime. Any parent can tell you what would happen if only some of your children can do something or go somewhere with their friends. Just widen the scope.

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Contagion: How Celebrating Trans Has Created Fear, Not Understanding

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Contagion: How Celebrating Trans Has Created Fear, Not Understanding

Published on January 27, 2025

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The campy, trashy ceremony celebrating dysphoria at last summer’s Olympics spoke to how pervasive trans politics has become. So it’s no surprise that amid the avalanche of policies enunciated by Donald Trump in his first week as president is a ban on biological male athletes competing against women. Depending on the sports body this practice has already either been accepted wholeheartedly (swimming) or banned completely (world athletics). The recent Paris Olympics said they went by passport designation when they let Algeria’s Imane Khelif pound real XX biological females in boxing.

Trump’s EO mirrors the newly elected U.S. Congress which passed legislation banning trans athletes from competing against women. It also dovetails with orders that ban all U.S. passport applications with ‘X’ gender marker after Trump’s executive order.

As expected the trans lobby cranked up the outrage. Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., the only woman in Congress who played Division I college sports, said Republicans were using the measure to “inject themselves into decisions they have no business making.” She had company as 106 DEMs voted against the bill. Along with the industry that has made children’s author J.K. Rowling a pariah for dissenting.

Society’s recent obsession with gender dysphoria would have been an unimaginable development even a decade ago for a community that’s a rounding error in the census. Monty Python hilariously spoofed a man wanting to have a baby in Life of Brian. The cool kids loved it. Then.

Now trans-as-victim is embraced by radicals in academia and media— and championed by the Trudeau prime ministership and the Obama and Biden presidencies. Such is the hysteria surrounding the issue that it was headline news that future Canadian PM Pierre Poilievre insisted to a CTV interviewer that there are only two genders. Blockbuster stuff in CDN media.

While Canada remains mired as deeply as ever in DEI politics conservatives and evangelicals in Trump’s base are demanding that the trans movement be treated as a manufactured crisis created by radical left-wing elements. Is it real or is it a product of social engineering gone bad? The Salem Witch Trials ? The dawn of a golden age of dysphoria or a hysteria like the McMartin Pre-School witch hunts ?

MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes has charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….

“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way.

“Bulimia entered the lexicon via women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which ran stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions

“In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion. A rights movement that started out with the aim of improving the lives of transgender people has given rise to a new type of gender dysphoria with all the hallmarks of a social contagion

“Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010, and then, all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialized world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender. [Ed.: statistics show it rising by 500 percent] It was the perfect storm. In the 2010s, the media fascination with transgenderism began with ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner and I Am Jazz; the political left became infatuated with trans rights, and schools started teaching gender ideology to children as young as kindergarten.

“Social media came on the scene and provided the perfect super-spreading environment. Teenage girls are now just one click away from 1000s of TikTok and YouTube videos of young women proudly showing off their mastectomy scars and extolling the joy of taking testosterone.

“Just as this new, atypical type of gender dysphoria was emerging, gender clinics, at the behest of activist groups, abandoned the psychotherapeutic approach of watchful waiting and adopted the affirmative model – fast-tracking these teens to irreversible medical procedures.

“We’re in the eye of the storm right now, so most people can’t see the damage being done. But soon, all the young people emerging from this contagion sterile and missing body parts will be visible for all to see, and people will be horrified that they supported such evil.”

Knowing the lunatic left’s penchant for denial the trans contagion evil will be suppressed and forgotten. The young women who lost Olympic medals and world records to biological men will be memory holed. The social suffocation employed to defeat its critics will be re-defined as an attack on the proponents of the movement. Not convinced? Veterans of the McMartin travesty in Los Angeles still remain astonished by the complete lack of accountability of those who perpetrated this fraud.

Hughes may be right that, just like bulimia, the trans contagion has peaked and is diminishing. But the people who cultivated it as.a tool to punish their enemies will still be in place, waiting for social media to embrace their next campaign of punishment. Their ruthless, recklerss grasp for power is the real contagion of modern times. Solving that will take more than a Donald Trump executive order.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Artificial Intelligence

World Economic Forum pushes digital globalism that would merge the ‘online and offline’

Published on January 27, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

If we do not limit the freedom of reach of AI now, we will have neither liberty nor security. The digital world is already here. Who will watch whom, and according to whose rules? With the World Economic Forum, you get policed by liberal extremists.

The real-world influence of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is certainly waning – which may explain a fresh report of its push towards digital globalism.

A white paper published by the WEF last November is a roadmap for a transition from the real to the virtual world. This transition is not only about methods of governing, of course.

It means the mass migration of humanity into a virtual world.

As the document says, the World Economic Forum is calling for “global collaboration” to “redefine the norms” of a future digital state, which it calls “the metaverse.”

Merging online and offline

Titled “Shared Commitments in a Blended Reality: Advancing Governance in the Future Internet,” this agenda presumes a borderless reality for humans in which “online and offline” are merged.

As usual, there is a disturbing method in the diabolical madness of the WEF. Saying that the required technology has already arrived, it urges “aligning global standards and policies of internet governance” to moderate our increasingly digital lives.

Yet this is not about policing online speech. It is about ruling the new “blended reality.”

Mentioning mobile phones, virtual reality and the refinement of artificial intelligence in predicting and reproducing human activity, the WEF report states: “These technologies are blurring the line between online and offline lives, creating new challenges and opportunities … that require a coordinated approach from stakeholders for effective governance.”

Stakes and their holders

Yet the people holding the stakes in this online and offline game of life are not only globalists like Schwab and Soros. The vampire hunters of populism are all strong critics of globalism – the replacement of all nation states with a single world government.

It would seem that the WEF’s dream of digital globalism may be terminally interrupted by the new software running through the machinery of power.

Yet digital globalism is not the only game in town.

Amidst the welcome relief and tremendous hope sparked in the West by Trump’s “Common Sense Revolution,” there is a devil in the details of the death of the liberal order.

The algorithm of power is not going anywhere. It is here, now, and it is simply a question of how far it goes.

Digital globalism, or national digitalism?

Digital globalism may simply be swapped for national digitalism – government by algorithm in one country. Its values are not liberal, which is a change. Yet neither are the values of China, where a form of digitalism has been long established.

It is worthwhile taking a look at the community whose guidelines may rule your “online and offline” life in the absence of those of the globalists.

Here is an announcement from one globalist “datagarch,” Oracle’s Larry Ellison, one of the billionaires whose monopoly of your data enriched their lives at the expense of the capture of yours. Ellison says “citizens will be on their best behavior” with an all-pervasive AI surveillance system. 

 

Oracle’s founder CEO has said a government powered by AI could make everyone safer – because everyone would be under permanent surveillance. Comforting, isn’t it?

Ellison was named after his place of arrival in the U.S. – Ellis Island. In 2017 he donated $16 million to the Israeli army, calling Israel “our home.”

Wikipedia states, “As of January 20, 2025, he is the fourth-wealthiest person in the world, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with an estimated net worth of US$188 billion, and the second wealthiest in the world according to Forbes, with an estimated net worth of $237 billion.”

In 2021, he offered Benjamin Netanyahu a “lucrative position on the board of Oracle.” That seems to partly help understand why Netanyahu, with such friends in very high places, has such an extraordinary influence on almost every single member of the U.S. Congress and Senate.

Ellison’s Oracle was named after a database he created for the CIA, in his first major programming project. In fact, “the CIA made Larry Ellison a billionaire,” as Business Insider reported.

What kind of values inspire his vision of digital governance? His biography supplies one answer:

“Ellison says that his fondness for Israel is not connected to religious sentiments but rather due to the innovative spirit of Israelis in the technology sector.”

Israel has a massive, lucrative, military-industrial complex and related software industry as revealed in “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exported its occupation to the world“ by Antony Loewenstein, one of many Israeli Jews who have become highly critical of the surveillance industry.

Israel’s “innovation” includes the use of predictive AI to identify, target and kill people, and systems like Pegasus – which can enter literally any phone or computer undetected and read everything. It is an astonishingly powerful program that sells for a high price and earns Israel a lot of income.

The company which makes the “no click spyware” Pegasus is called NSO. This Israeli company was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2021 to prevent its undetectable intrusion into phones and computers being used on Americans by any company, or agency, which buys it.

On January 10, an Israeli report said that Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal could see these sanctions lifted.

Do you buy the idea that this will make you safe? Do you think AI will be effective? Ellison thinks so. He says AI can produce “new mRNA vaccines in 48 hours to cure cancer.”

Do you want to live in his world? 

Buyer beware

Buyer – beware. The algorithm of digital power is here, and it is powered by data mined from your life.

People like Oracle’s Ellison, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin are all data miners. So is X’s Elon Musk – who is the only one of the data oligarchs warning you that AI needs to be controlled by humans – and not the other way around.

 

Two forms of digital tyranny

So what are the dangers? Under the “metaverse” proposed by the WEF, your life can be partnered with a “digital twin.”

This is the symbiotic merger of human with machine presented as the vision of our future by Klaus Schwab and the digital globalists.

Of course, your online life can be suspended or even ended if you violate the community guidelines. These rules are not written by people who agree with you.

Some people you may agree with are proposing quite the reverse. Under the algorithm of the “national digigarchy” – you will be watched, recorded, filed, and assessed for the potential commission of future crimes. You will be free to say what you like online, but depending on what you say, maybe only the algorithm will see you.

And what it sees it will never forget.

Limiting the reach of AI

If we do not limit the freedom of reach of artificial intelligence now, we will have neither liberty nor security.

The digital world is already here. Who will watch whom, and according to whose rules? With the World Economic Forum, you get policed by liberal extremists. You will be free to agree with Net Zero, degeneracy, denationalization, and a diet of meat-like treats supplied to the wipe-clean mausoleum in which you will cleanly and efficiently live.

Yet the alternative emerging also says that the rule of machines will make everything safe and effective.

Safe and effective AI?

Alex Karp sells his all-seeing Palantir as the only guarantee of public safety. He also says your secrets are safe with him – because he is “a deviant” who might like to take drugs or have an affair.

After years of crisis manufactured by policy, and with the West sick of liberal insanity, this moment of tremendous relief contains a serious threat. More people than ever have the number of the globalists, and it is not a number most faithful Christians would want to call.

People generally have seen what the WEF is selling, and they are not buying it. The danger presented by the likes of Schwab is now out in the open, shouting the quiet part out loud.

As liberal-globalist bureaucracies like these become more isolated in the Trump Revolution, they will fight for their lives. In doing so, they are displaying their true intentions. This is the only thing they can do to survive.

Everyone will see what is really on offer, few will want this devil’s bargain, and so the business model will go bust.

Yet this is not the only dangerous game being played with your life.

Beware the specter at the feast

The data miners whose programs refine the algorithm of power are selling you a new digital reality. They are telling you that it will make you safe – because everyone will be watched, forever, by machines which have no values and no heart at all, whether liberal or otherwise.

If we are not watching out, no one will notice that the new algorithm of digital power has simply been limited to the West.

In Shakespeare’s play it was the guilty man, Macbeth, who saw the specter at the feast he held for his coronation.

The ghost in the machine is not dead. The danger is that the innocent may not see it or may foolishly not want to see it. Yet it sees you. This is the algorithm of power, and for now – but not for long – we still have the power to say who it watches – and where.

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