Month: July 2018

Bus Driver Doug

Update on June 1/2022 from July 31,2018 post

So will Doug Ford continue driving the ONTARI ARI ARI O !bus for the next four years?

Excerpted from Paul Wells July 30/2018  Macleans’ article
Watching Doug Ford drive the bus

…the spirit of freedom has not often shone brighter in Ontario than the willingness to go along to get along. Ontario is a deeply legitimist polity. It put up with film-board censors and pursed-lipped liquor-board monopolies long after such excesses were laughing stocks in other parts of the country. It tolerated darker excesses of authority, like the gay bathhouse raids of 1981 or the draconian crushing of the G20 riots in 2010—not all Ontarians, not by any means, but more than civil libertarians or other flavours of idealists would have hoped.

Selections of  Doug Ford images from the archives!

 

Oh For F**k Sake

Pittsburgh Penguins owner Mario Lemieux has listed his Quebec mansion for a whopping $21,999,066, an apparent reference to the former superstar’s famous jersey number 66.

How f**king  cute!

Lemieux’s 50-room home, named the Chateau Fleur de Lys is currently the most expensive Canadian house available through luxury real estate firm Engel & Volkers.

The home measures just shy of 17,000 square feet and sits on 5.25 acres of land. The property has eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, 17 fireplaces, a wine cellar, gym, spa and four and half garages. The castle is also relatively new, having just completed construction in 2012.

Lemieux won two Stanley Cups and notched 1,723 points over 17 seasons as a player with the Pittsburgh Penguins. He entered team ownership in 1999, where he’s since won another three NHL championships.


Meanwhile also in Quebec

Homelessness

Sourced from official website of the Gouvernement du Québec.

Homelessness is characterized by the inability to have or keep a home. A home is more than just a shelter. It is a place where one feels comfortable and protected. It is one’s own place, a place that others recognize as such. It is a place where one goes to rest and find privacy.  Not having a home is much more than just being without shelter for the night.

Types of Homelessness

There are generally 3 types of homelessness:
  • Situational homelessness: A situation in which people are temporarily without a place to live but who manage to find one after experiencing some time without shelter. This is the most common type of homelessness
  • Cyclical homelessness: A situation in which people alternate between periods of having a place to live and living on the street
  • Chronic homelessness: A situation in which people have not had a place to live for a long period of time. This is the most visible type of homelessness. Although less common than situational homelessness, it generates a lot of interventions and significant social costs
Places Where Homelessness Exists

 Montreal has the highest concentration of homeless people in Québec. Homelessness can also be found in cities that are far from major centres and experience rapid economic growth, like Sept-Îles and Val-d’Or. There is a shortage of housing, people’s lifestyles change and the gap between the rich and the poor widens. As such, building a united community is more difficult.

Just When You Thought the News Couldn’t Get Any More Surreal

It should be noted that Court Painter does not use artificial intelligence widgets or gizmos in the production of his works.Every work is hand rendered ,often in the dead of night from fresh ground pigments mixed with the sweat of his brow and applied to imported Irish linens supported on stretcher bars of the finest locally sourced balsa wood.

In the July 10,2018 issue of Foreign Affairs, : Nicholas Wright, a British neurologist who studies AI and politics writes,”Just as competition between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist social systems defined much of the 20th century, so the struggle between liberal democracy and digital authoritarianism is set to define the 21st.”

The Coming Competition Between Digital Authoritarianism and Liberal Democracy

The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military to healthcare.

There is also a third way in which AI promises to reshape the world. By allowing governments to monitor, understand, and control their citizens far more closely than ever before, AI will offer authoritarian countries a plausible alternative to liberal democracy, the first since the end of the Cold War. That will spark renewed international competition between social systems.