Tag Archives: city of calgary

Mob mentality is winning.

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The cowardice being shown by institutions when confronted by threats of violence from mobs is distressing to say the least.

The hysteric left has been increasingly using violent mob actions in order to shut down speakers or gatherings of people that they disagree with lately. The reason that these violent protests are increasing is simple. THEY WORK!

Rather than increase security or call the police when threatened by protesters, venues whether municipally owned or whether on University campuses generally take the callow path of cancelling the event and claiming safety issues as a rationale for their caving to the screeching minority. It is a path of perceived least resistance and it is emboldening people who feel that violence is an appropriate response to contrary thought or speech.

Alas, using the threat of violence to hinder others is not unique to left wing folks.

Today the City of Calgary cancelled a private nude swimming event that had been booked at a leisure center. It was not a walk in event. There was going to be no more exposure of nudity to minors than happens every day in public changing rooms. It was simply a group who like to gather and swim nude who wanted to book a facility for a private party.

Don’t like it?

Don’t go! This shouldn’t be so damned complicated people.

Despite this being harmless, Calgary’s neo-puritan population was enraged. Social media was afire as keyboard evangelists predicted that this will surely lead to mass Satanism and potential child abuse. Petitions exploded as an increasing number of prudes felt justified in telling other people what they may or may not do with themselves.

The righteous ire was palpable.

When it looked like this harmless event was going to happen despite the mass indignation demonstrated through internet petitions, some nutbars decided to threaten violence. Guess what? It worked! 

The City would not point to a specific event but referenced “volatile public commentary” and vaguely spoke of some communications.

I am sure the irony will be lost on the uptight fools who went haywire about this event, but I suspect that many if not most of them are folks who speak out against the garb worn below.

The rationale behind the burka is that men will become uncontrollably aroused by the sight of female flesh and will be forced into committing a sin. That is why rape victims in Islamic nations are usually convicted. Surely they tempted those men into raping them. Perhaps they showed some public ankle!

The anti-nude swim gang in Calgary went one step farther. They felt that there are numerous pedophiles lurking around every corner who will become hopelessly aroused and will molest kids at this event. As an organizer pointed out, if a man becomes aroused at a nudist event it becomes rather evident and will be dealt with rather quickly.

You can’t go to a public change room and start snapping pictures of nude children nor can you at these private events. There really was no issue here.

Back to the initial point of this post, we have allowed threats of violence by protest groups to succeed yet again. The gravity of this precedent can’t be understated. This will of course only encourage more violent people to use this as a tool to get their way when they find themselves in an aggrieved minority. This is not how a civilized or democratic society is supposed to act.

Yes. The safety of the swimmers is paramount as the City of Calgary said. Instead of cancelling the event though, they should have sent police and security. Anybody threatening violence should be immediately arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We can’t let extremists know that threats of violence are effective.

This applies to speeches and gatherings whether in community halls, campuses or any other venue. In a free society we have to protect free assembly and speech with all that we have or we will surely lose both to the mobs.

The City of Calgary’s cowardice in this issue has only invited more violent responses to events in the future. Sad.

Gian-Carlo Carra’s $100,000 “high-level rendering”

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OK, it is hardly news when Gian-Carlo Carra and other members of the Flakey Four on Calgary city council waste the tax dollars and time of Calgarians. It is no shock that Carra want’s to transform a portion of his ward into some unpronounceable European modelled walkway at the expense of automotive infrastructure.

Gian-Carlo Carra has really outdone himself this time though when he went begging to city council for $100,000 to study this inane proposal a year ago and we are now presented with the “high-level rendering” below.

rendering

bathers

Yes, $100,000 and one year to create drawings that look like they were done by a 6 year old.

The rest of the “high-level” renderings can be found in a Metro article here. The quality and depth rivals the picture above.

Simple words such as “picnic” apparently are beyond the spelling ability of these folks doing this fine study and they depict nude sunbathers in the pictures too (not well drawn unfortunately).

There really is little more to be said about this. It is just another gross example of finite city of Calgary tax dollars being wasted on the whimsical notions of a city councillor. I really wonder what the tendering process is (if any) to do these six figure studies that take a year to draw stick people.

Just wanted to document this beauty so people have yet another thing to point at when Nenshi and his Flakey Four allies on Calgary city council (Druh Farrell, Brian Pincott, Evan Woolley and of course Gian-Carlo Carra) try to claim that we need to keep imposing record high property tax increases as there simply is no waste to be cut in city hall.

Calgary’s war on cars now targets suburban park-and-ride users.

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The ideologically driven transportation department in Calgary is hitting new lows in their war on cars as they now attack folks who park their cars in order to use transit. That’s right, it’s not good enough that people park their cars at LRT stations in suburban communities and take the train to work. These people are expected to walk, ride bikes or somehow find one of those rare, crowded and often pungent busses that will take them to the station.

The City of Calgary plans to remove 1250 stalls from Anderson LRT station!

Councillor Brian Pincott is of course absolutely giddy with this notion. He feels that the parking lot is not “walkable” enough. No surprise that he is one of the head members of the “Flakey Four” on city council.

I stopped by the Anderson LRT station today to take a few pictures. As can be seen below, the lot is already full beyond capacity to the point where people are desperately double parking and hoping to get overlooked by Calgary’s finest ticket issuers.

Anderson stationIMG552

It should be noted though, that the bike racks at the station languish empty as usual.

IMG553

So where are these 1250 commuters going to go? Whether Nenshi’s council like it or not, citizens simply are not going to abandon their cars no matter how hard they are pushed. This was proven with recent numbers showing that the vast majority of Calgarians prefer personal autos despite years of an anti-auto agenda from the Nenshi administration.

Cars are already overflowing into neighboring communities as the picture below demonstrates. Residential permit parking and mass enforcement may drive out these commuter refugees but they will still have to go somewhere.

IMG554Commuters can’t go one more station South as the Canyon Meadows park and ride is already full to overflowing (likely spaces next on the city hit list).

IMG555

The sad irony is that many of these displaced commuters will throw up their hands and just drive the entire way downtown rather than ride the train.

This sort of planning idiocy will also of course contribute to the growing trend of businesses relocating to areas like Quarry Park and up near the airport as downtown becomes increasingly unviable for employees. This of course increases the ongoing exodus of citizens to bedroom communities and the ever demonized “sprawl” accelerates.

To remove 1250 spaces from a lot that is already filled beyond capacity is a whole new level of stupidity from our city planners but I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

This is the city that is letting a homeless charity lose $350,000 per year purely due to their anti-auto agenda.

Eventually Nenshi will move on to his federal ambitions and the city will tire of his allies in the “Flakey Four”. How much damage will these ideologues cause to the city before they leave though?

Quick posting on Naheed Nenshi and ImagineCalgary

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I have ranted many times at length on that ridiculous, tax-funded document that we not so fondly call “ImagineCalgary”. Naheed Nenshi was one of the contributors in the creation of that mad plan and today I see that Nenshi still sees it as a plan for Calgary’s future as he tweeted as much.

 

Since I began writing a small series dissecting that oddball plan, many people have said to me “Wow, I never actually read that thing before. It’s nuts!”

As ImagineCalgary so clearly reflects Naheed Nenshi’s ideology, I thought that I had better organize my postings on it a little better so I have created a page with the handy dropdown menu at the top of this page.

One can simply click here to see the listing of postings on the new main page too.

I really suggest people give ImagineCalgary a good read and then think long and hard about supporting Nenshi and some of his allies on city council in Calgary.

Be green and save Calgary money! Throw your glass in the garbage!

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Yesterday while listening to the Rutherford show, I was reminded of one of our many examples of Calgary City Hall putting the cart before the horse in their pursuit of high density city where people ride bikes to work and recycle damn near everything. What I am on about today is glass.

While the city of Calgary is asking us to spend time and water washing and separating our glass products so that they can be put into our blue bins for recycling, they really have utterly no idea what to do with the glass once they get it. Glass is really a generally unrealistic product to recycle at this time. It is hard to work with and clean and there is no cost effective use for the end product. Glass is relatively cheap to produce new and used glass is simply too impure and expensive to try and form into new glass products.

While Calgarians have been diligently washing their old jam jars and setting them aside in their blue bins, unfortunately all they have been doing is participating in one of our more expensive and egregious forms of greenwashing.

Calgary’s sorted, cleaned, crushed and transported glass has been sitting in a 10,000 tonne mountain at the Spyhill landfill!.

It is one thing to make a recycled product, it is a whole other ballpark to create a demand for it.

The energy, water and labor involved in recycling our glass in Calgary brings us a near useless end product at a cost of $29 per tonne which now is languishing at the dump. A good make work project I guess but I would rather that labor had been dedicated to patching potholes.

But wait!! In a brainstorm city engineers have found a use for all this glass!! They are going to bury it!

Um, isn’t that what would have happened had we simply put the glass in the garbage in the first place? Tell me again why we are spending all this money, water and energy to clean and sort the stuff?

Yes, the city is going to use the pile of glass as aggregate for roads within the city dump (in other words, burying the glass at the dump). While they do speak of using the glass for other aggregate projects, it really means little as 10,000 tonnes is actually a relatively small volume in the aggregate world. What is not small about 10,000 tonnes of crushed and cleaned glass is the cost.

Gravel which is typically used as road base aggregate can run around $6 per tonne as compared to the $29 per tonne for cleaned crushed glass. This means our mountain of recycled glass is worth about $60,000 but came at a cost of around $290,000. That is an expenditure of $230,000 of taxpayers dollars for actions that used extra water and energy for utterly no use thus making it actually more environmentally damaging than simply tossing the glass in the trash in the first place.

It is very simple to see what is worth recycling. Just look for whatever the private market is willing to pay money for. Metals are well worth recycling thus many businesses that buy scrap metal. Bottles and cans have deposits on them that fund the recycling. Only the cans are really viable on their own. The bottles just make more crushed glass. Some paper products are worth recycling into shingles and such. Plastics are pretty much better in the landfill with the glass.

If we are truly interested in being “green” let’s start to focus on reality with what we are doing then.

Calgary’s (and many other cities) mountain of glass is simply an embarrassment and a testament to people in power who have let their ideals override reality.