Porcupines? Spiders? Canadian inside baseball politics stuff? Yes!
Ok, here’s the porcupine (video)
Pumpkin, pumpkin, and more pumpkin! What respectable porcupine could resist this Halloween feast?
For some reason, probably related to the proximity of Halloween, my blog post about the Goliath birdeater spider received an inordinate amount of attention, and has been republished, reinterpreted, outright stolen, and vilified all over the Internet. This one post on my obscure blog is now receiving in excess of 120,000 unique visits every day, and comments are pouring in. Alas, most of them are somewhat less than positive, and I am beginning to wonder if I really am a “HORRIBLE person” who “will destroy the earth.” (I must admit that some of the trolls were touchingly tactful – they might have said ” F&*K you, a$$hole”, but they modified the foul words as not to offend my sensibility.) But why the vitriol?
Trust me on this: Canadian politics are interesting
Forty-seven years ago, perhaps in the outsized spirit of Expo 67, the retired major general and author Richard Rohmer put forward a bold proposal in Mid-Canada Development Corridor: A Concept. It described a vast landmass stretching from Newfoundland and Labrador across Quebec, Ontario, and the Prairies, to British Columbia and up through Northwest Territories and Yukon, occupying the area between southern settlements and the treeline—a band dominated by boreal forest. His idea was to implement a national strategy to develop and populate it.
What about those red states? Texas does have a lack of people being vaccinated, but defenders of anti-vaccine progressives are choosing to skew the statistics there. We want to think about people exempting their kids, not to try and claim that poor people whose children did not get a Hep B vaccine at 19 months of age is the same as Jenny McCarthy. Legitimate medical exemptions are why we want herd immunity for people will immune issues and Texas leads in those. California, on the other hand, has 8X as many ‘philosophical’ exemptions as Texas has medical ones. There is a big difference between a school-age child whose parents have chosen not to get a vaccine and an illegal immigrant or a poor person who cannot afford it.
“Antisocial networks” (video)
You need not delete your social networks or destroy your cell phones, the message is simple, be balanced, be mindful, be present, be here.