I took this picture when we were back to Indian Head for a visit a few years ago but the look of the building including that 1980’s colour scheme hasn’t changed. (The playground however has changed quite a bit.)
We went past my elementary school during a more recent visit and when I pointed the school out to Pace, he asked “Did you take the bus to school like I do?” Nope, city kid, we had to walk to school when I was a boy – only the lucky farm kids got to ride on a bus!
There are a whole host of interconnected reasons why this is the case. But I think one of the largest is the fact that gun ownership is enshrined in the US Constitution. That makes it extremely difficult for their society, even anti-gun activists, to change a deeply held belief, even though the rule was written 300 years ago in a time of muskets and meant to defend against an enemy that was an ocean by sailing ship away.
No matter your politics, the late Jim Flaherty (who was Stephen Harper’s Finance Minister) is widely regarded as a stand-up guy – honest, sincere, and reliable.
Tim Powers, vice-chairman of Summa Strategies and a Conservative strategist, had this to say after viewing the video: “If a picture tells a thousand words I imagine many of Jim’s would have been ‘holy’ and ‘shit’.”
Our new research leaves little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session. The impact of viewing biased rankings repeatedly over a period of weeks or months would undoubtedly be larger.
The article touches both on search engine optimization techniques but also Google’s potential ability to manipulate results under the guise of giving the best results but how that is always subject to interpretation and if Google happens to favour a candidate seen as better for powerful tech companies so much the better.
This is one of my all-time favourite pics of my mom (and a cropped version remains as her Facebook profile picture since I first helped her set-up an account on that site!)
The photo was taken during a Long Term Service Awards dessert banquet for Regina-Qu’Appelle Health Region Employees.
Although I wish I could take credit, I think the photo was taken by either the official photographer for the event or possibly the spouse of someone we were sitting with.
The Federal Election was called nearly three weeks ago and I haven’t written about it nearly as much as I thought I would.
I mean, if you’ve read this blog for more than a couple days, I think my politics are pretty clear. Beyond that, there are tons of others who are covering every aspect of the election in great detail and although I’m reading these sites voraciously, I haven’t been adding my own voice.
But this is also the longest election campaign in modern Canadian history so I suspect I’ll be doing more blogging about things over the next couple months.
