Electric Cars Still Need Energy

In the rush to go green, people have lost sight of common sense.

Investors.com: Not So Fast With Those Electric Cars

It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else.

"If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

The GAO report says a plug-in compact car, if recharged at an outlet drawing its power from coal, provides a carbon dioxide savings of only 4% to 5%. If the feeling of saving the environment from driving an electric car causes people to drive more, that small amount of savings vanishes entirely

Sorry to spoil the party.

Reusable Bags Are Great for the Envirnoment Going to Make You Sick

I'm happy about this scientific finding that reusable bags suck.

The study found that 64% of the reusable bags tested were contaminated with some level of bacteria and close to 30% had elevated bacterial counts higher than what's considered safe for drinking water.

Further, 40% of the bags had yeast or mold, and some of the bags had an unacceptable presence of coliforms, faecal intestinal bacteria, when there should have been 0.

"The presence of faecal material in some of the reusable bags is particularly concerning," Dr. Summerbell stated. "All meat products should be individually wrapped before being placed in a reusable bag to prevent against leakage. This should become a mandated safety standard across the entire grocery industry."

Hopefully somebody sends a memo to snarling, anti-plastic bag, fascist, grocery clerks.

Nanny State Imposing Classes, Fines on Parents for Child's School Behaviour

Absurdity reaches a new height in the UK. The Daily Telegraph reports on new legislation regarding your children's behaviour. Parents to be hit with penalties if children misbehave at school

They can apply to courts for a "parenting contract" requiring mothers and fathers of wayward pupils to take parenting classes - with fines of up to £1,000 if they fail to attend.

Under laws - first announced in legislation in 2007 - parents can also be hit with penalties of £50 if their children are found in a public place without justification in the first five days of an exclusion. The fine will rise to £100 if it is unpaid within 28 days.

Parents must also be interviewed by headteachers before their child is allowed back into school, outlining the standards expected of pupils.

In the past, it has been feared head teachers were reluctant to take such hard-line action for fear of souring relations with parents.

"Parenting class." My God. Can you imagine? Some board of education, leftist type teaching a class to you, against your will, on how to raise your kids? Oh boy!

Lucky they didn't have this in my day, in Canada. My parents would have had to declare bankruptcy, with all the fines I would have generated.

Big Brother Tracks Booze Purchases in the UK

There are closed circuit cameras all over the UK filming the streets, supposedly to help fight crime. Now the cameras are going to be used to monitor your purchases of a legal product:

Big Brother CCTV cameras are to be fitted inside shops and supermarkets on the orders of the state to keep track on anybody buying alcohol.

A law is being quietly pushed through Parliament giving councils the power to order licensed premises to fit the surveillance cameras. Pubs will also be covered.

The footage of people innocently buying a bottle of wine in a shop or a pint of beer in a bar must be stored for at least 60 days, and be handed over to the police on demand.

Critics say it will mean that citizens will now be tracked everywhere they go. The UK already has more than four million closed-circuit TV cameras covering the streets – the largest number in the world.

I wonder what's wrong with the British people that they let it get this bad? Some of it had to do with the IRA terror campaign, where people willing gave up some freedom to make it safer. Unfortunately, with the threat now gone, the cameras stay and are further expanded to monitor your law abiding life.

Just a note too, we all use plastic, and that too allows your life to be monitored. A friend of mine went to get a mortgage at her bank, and during the process they let her know disapprovingly of all the liquor store purchases that showed up on her debit card.

Lousy Comedian Begs for Can-Con on the Internet

I don't know if you've ever seen painfully mediocre comedian Colin Mochrie. He's done some improv that was on tv, and half the time you feel sorry for him as he fumbles his way through. I've also seen him on a few commercials, but today I found him writing in the Ottawa Citizen. In this piece, he asks for the CRTC to butt into the internet:

Unlike television, when you are broadcasting through new media, the space for content is practically endless. However, being endless, content can easily get lost. So how do we make sure Canadians can find our own content? How do we make sure Canadian content is featured and given "shelf space"?

Starting this week, our ability to watch Canadian programming when and where we want will be determined.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is undertaking a wide-ranging review of broadcasting in new media to determine whether it should be subject to regulation. Along with other ACTRA performers, I'll be there to urge the CRTC to provide a place for Canadian production online.

The CRTC must take measures now to ensure a place for Canadian programming online. If it doesn't create online space for Canadian programming today and provide a way to fund content, our culture and our industry will drown in a sea of foreign content.

Does anybody think it would drown or get lost if it was any good?

The bottom-line is, whether you are watching an episode of Corner Gas on your TV or ctv.ca, you are enjoying a "broadcast" and the CRTC is obligated under the Broadcasting Act to regulate it.

Here's how we can ensure that Canadians will be able to see and share Canadian stories:

Does anybody actually watch Corner f*cking Gas online? The whole premise of the show is deeply flawed. How many times on a road trip have you stopped in to fill up the tank and get a cup of coffee at some country truck stop? The locals are unattractive, over-weight, slow, and impolite to outsiders. It can be annoying. If you're paranoid like me, you might even get flashes of Deliverance or Pulp Fiction. When you leave, you thank god you live in the city and don't have to deal with these types of people. So what do the TV producing geniuses in Canada do? That's right, make a show featuring these people. Americans put on attractive, hip, young people living in New York or LA. Canada gives you fat, old hicks, cracking viagra jokes in rural Saskatchewan. Brilliant. More money for this valuable Canadian cultural contribution!

When I read Mochrie's rhetoric, I automatically think of Mordecai Richler's brilliant book, Barney's Version. The narrator is a producer of Canadian TV schlock.:

Whenever a government minister, a free marketer responding to American pressure, threatened to dump the law that insisted on (and bankrolled to a yummy degree) so much Canadian-manufactured pollution on our airwaves, I did a quick change in the hypocrite’s phone booth, slipping into my Captain Canada mode, and appeared before the committee. “We are defining Canada to Canadians, I told them. ‘We are this country's memory, its soul, its hypostasis, the last defence against our being overwhelmed by the egregious cultural imperialists to the south of us.” [p. 5]

LOL! How fitting is that.

It's an outrage that Can-Con nannies want to butt into the internet. I hope they are stopped. The beauty of the medium is that's it's unfiltered and unregulated.

Busted for Advertising Jos. Louis Cakes in Quebec

I used to love Jos. Louis when I was a kid. Little did I realize how sinister these snacks were. In Quebec, home of the Jos. Louis, the producer of them was fined for advertising them to children.

But now the cakes, found in virtually every grocery and convenience store in the province, have been targeted by a health-conscious group worried about growing obesity, and put on notice that they cannot be advertised to children.

Saputo, the giant food multinational behind Vachon, pleaded guilty in a Quebec court yesterday to violating Quebec's law prohibiting advertising to children younger than 13 years old for commercial purposes.

Saputo must pay $44,000 in fines.

You can't advertise to childern younger than 13? Send a memo to Captain Crunch and My Little Pony.

This can't go over very well. Pepsi, poutine and Jos. Louis are the three pillars of Quebec cuisine.