Your Sarah Palin fact of the day

Post #2300, Baby!

Wow, that didn't take long at all, did it? 2200 posts was just a mere month ago, and now we're at 2300 and going strong.

This blog isn't going anywhere. It's going strong, and it's not moving.

As we're here, let's direct our attention to a Third Edge Sword feature I like to call "pathetic sniveling chickenshit liberal of the month". The title may change as contributors to this blog sober up.

Today's coward? Leslie Bush (yes, he has a girl's name. He has a vagina instead of balls, so it fits)

His hobbies include defacing public property, driving like he's a 75 year old woman, trashing the Greatest 21st Century US President, and the Alberta Party.

Leslie Bush is a pathetic coward. If you beat him in an argument, he hides under the covers like he's a woman. I just thought you should know that.

Stay tuned for next month's cowardly chickenshit liberal, and more posts as The Third Edge of the Sword aims for 2400!

The National Post isn't an expert on Islam

“Decorum is important. Hats and sunglasses, for example, are not allowed, and I don’t see why scarves on the head would be. The same rules need to be applied to everyone.”

With that line, another battle is brewing over head scarves being worn in a courtroom, as a Montreal judge refused to hear the case of one Rania El-Alloul who was in the docks over a car seizure. What was she wearing? Well, the article calls it a niqab.

But Judge Marengo refused to hear the merits of the case, citing a regulation governing court decorum that states simply, “Any person appearing before the court must be suitably dressed.”

She noted Ms. El-Alloul had said her hijab was a religious requirement. “In my opinion, the courtroom is a secular place and a secular space,” she said. “There are no religious symbols in this room, not on the walls and not on the persons.”

Canadian courts have wrestled with the issue of a witness wearing the niqab, which covers the entire face except for the eyes. The concern then was the right of an accused to assess a witness’s credibility by seeing her face. In 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada established a framework to be applied case by case to determine whether a witness could wear a niqab in court.

Seems all fine and good. I mean, of course, about the part banning wearing the niqab in court. Don't ask me, ask Salim Mansur. It's basically uncontestable.

So of course, that notorious Zionist National Post screws this article up by posting a completely misleading and irrelevent photo with the article: which it also screws up the caption on.


The niqab, as mentioned in the article, covers the face except for the eyes. The headscarf shown in the photo, which is identified as a hijab in the caption, does not cover the face and is, in fact, a...headscarf. Posting this photo gives the casual reader^† the impression that the judge banned this item of clothing and not the niqab, the article of clothing actually banned. For those wanting to keep score, a niqab looks like this:


^† Even a non-casual reader can be confused. Just ask Disqus commenters SMA or Lagoonatic.

RIP Leonard Nimoy

As you read this I'll be enjoying Leonard's favourite foods: steak and blueberry pie with ice cream.

Where? Smittys, I imagine, is the only place that offers both.

We don't need water, just a calendar

Notice something odd about this story?

I'll let you read it.

No? Okay, go read it again.

Still no?

The province is preparing firefighting crews, aircraft and other equipment for immediate deployment as the wildfire season begins on March 1.

Pace Jerry Seinfeld and milk expiration dates, has anybody told the wildfires yet?

Latest threat to West Edmonton Mall

Is there a terrorist threat at West Edmonton Mall? Colby Cosh draws the interesting parallel between Edmonton and Minnesota, home of the Mall of America (also a target): both have lots of violent Somalis in the mix.

Meanwhile, your risk of injury at West Edmonton Mall is still more likely to be falling concrete. Or Vietnamese gangs.

There are only two genders and they pick you

As many of you may know, my Facebook account was suspended because conservatives aren't allowed to use nom de plume's like liberals are.

Yet today Facebook went completely off the deep end with the announcement that you can make up any gender you want. You know, in case the 58 "genders" already available (only two of which, men and women, are actual genders) didn't appeal to you.

It's patently ridiculous: I can't use anything other than my real name that, with the exception of 3 people, not none of you who read this blog know. However, if my Facebook account re-appeared tomorrow I could tell you that my gender was God Reborn and Facebook would totally sign onto this. It's patently ridiculous. These people are mentally ill, and men like Ari Chivukula and Mark Zuckerberg are their enablers.

Hint: if you're looking for a "59th gender" to put for yourself try Real Man, not a sniveling faggot

"He looked Swedish, maybe Dutch, and had a fondness for chicken"

Remember, Edmonton: if you think a white man robbed you, he probably didn't.

Of course, here's a crazy question. Why the hell hasn't this asshole been deported?

Defence lawyer Deborah Hatch said Teklie, originally from Ethiopia, came to Canada from Africa and was in a Kenyan refugee camp for years. He is currently a permanent resident of Canada.

Harper Derangement Syndrome

Here's a handy photo to send somebody the next time they're going off the deep-end with the Harper-hate.

SURMPOASMKYSO

You may remember ages ago Mark Steyn completely demolished the hideous "pink shirt day".

Now, on pink shirt day 2015 Steyn took the "LGBTTIQQ2S" narrative and flipped it on it's sexually deviant head:

With all this orientation creep, straights are at something of a disadvantage. "Straight" isn't even an acronym: How lame is that? Maybe they could add a few variations, and make it Straight, Uptight, Repressed, Missionary Position Only, Alternate Saturdays Mostly, Keeping Your Socks On, and hold a parade for members of the SURMPOASMKYSO community.

In Defense of the Chicken Finger

The CanWest newschain has declared war on chicken fingers. No, seriously. Click the link if you don't believe me. (But you shouldn't, not just because I've never lied to you but also because there's one of those obnoxious videos that auto-plays when you open the story)

Adam McDowell wants us to believe that the rise of the chicken finger is some nefarious plot to poison children -- or at the very least, that poisoning children is a ignored side effect of the nefarious plot to not let huge amounts of perfectly good chicken go to waste.

Chicken fingers, Allen says, were seldom seen before 1990 or so, but by the end of the 1980s, fear of saturated fats turned many North Americans away from beef and toward chicken. Increased demand meant billions of additional chicken breasts were processed — but what was the industry to do with the tenders? The answer is on children’s plates.

We can look at Allen’s mini-history of a mini-food as a metaphor for how cuisine has come to be divided in contemporary North America: The prime cuts go to the adults while the less healthy morsels — dressed up in extra salt, fat and sugar and processed almost beyond recognition — end up on the kids’ menu, both in the family restaurants that traffic in such fare, and at home.

Allen in this place is Gary Allen, a "food historian" who has been peddling this narrative that avoiding waste and fulfilling a market requirement is some sort of evil scheme that he wishes he could have gone back in time to stop. This is why Mad Men rots your brain, of course: it's a Hollywood interpretation of what business people act like, as defined by people who only interact with businessmen when they have a stupid idea (like a movie about a girl who fantasizes about beating people up because she doesn't think she's crazy).

But if Allen took this crazy concept up the long ladder, McDowell steampunked it into the stratosphere. There's nothing "less healthy" about a chicken tender than a chicken breast. Allen himself praises Jamie Oliver for his work getting healthy-cooked chicken fingers (finger and tender, if you didn't already pick up on it, are interchangeable terms) into school lunch menus. All that extra fat and sugar and processing occurs because kids like that kind of shit. Allen probably learned somewhere in his undergraduate studies into food history that food tastes change as we age, so that those Fruit Loops loaded with sugar that seemed to appetizing at age nine seem much less palatable at age twenty-nine. Feed Duck Confit to a Grade 7 student in a school lunch and watch the entire building burn down within the hour, but slide them a pizza pop and they are as happy as a pig in shit. McDowell seems to think its a new phenomenon of feeding kids stuff they like, it's been perhaps more of a gradual change over the last century than some inherent paradigm shift. This idea that we've been feeding kids healthy food for millennia and then since 1970 switched to feeding them processed garbage isn't even remotely true. We all ate shit for millennia. Nobody knew what healthy eating was in 1775. Scurvy was a thing. The plethora of treats available to the modern diet required the invention of the refrigerator: go back to where most copies of the National Post were sold and as recently as 1940 you had people who buried food in a pit in their backyard and hoped that the ice they tossed in there in February would be sufficient to keep it edible until the harvest.

For a generation, many North American parents have indulged children’s picky eating tendencies by sticking them in an endlessly repeating loop of chicken fingers, burgers, pizza, plain pasta, mac and cheese, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Anyone who has sat down for a meal with youngsters over the past 25 years will recognize this list of typical “kids’ foods."

Going back to the nonsense above about "prime cuts for adults, processed crap for the rest of us", half the menu items are for what is more commonly known as "pub food". Rather than being the ugly redheaded stepchild of the food family, these foods are just as "prime cuts" as any nice pork cutlet could be. We divorce ourselves, however temporarily, of adult contentions like "keeping our cholesterol low" or "not spending $18 on a hamburger" and just enjoy eating. You know, like kids do. Like we encourage kids to do. Like we (and kids) need kids to do.

McDowell has that all-too-common tendency of idealizing an occasional memory as the norm:

Mealtimes for children were quite different just a few decades ago. Over the past few months, I’ve spoken casually and in formal interviews with dozens of people about food and childhood. As a general rule, people who grew up in North America and are now over the age of 30 recall that when they were children, kids ate what the adults ate. Families usually dined together at the table. There might have been foods you didn’t like; depending on the rules of the house you might have been expected to try them or even finish them. Or you might have been free not to, as long as there weren’t too many foods you were refusing. Either way, it wouldn’t have occurred to you that an adult was going jump up from the table to prepare you something precisely to your liking. And if you didn’t eat, you might have to wait quite a while for the next opportunity: Studies show that North American kids snack more often and consume more calories than they did in the 1970s.

If you aren't careful there you might miss the segue into "snacking versus eating" that ignores something in these "dozens of interviews": kids eat what adults eat at the family sit-down dinners. However, adults only do this once or twice a day: when the kids are hungry they have a bowl of KD, or some mini pizzas. Kids, especially as they start getting into double-digit ages, want to eat all the time. This isn't "snacking" in the sense that McDowell wants to apply it: it's another meal. It's Merry and Pippin wanting a second breakfast. As food portions get bigger (as adults become busier) we start skipping meals because we no longer require them. Kids don't, so why wouldn't we specialize in their treats?

The busy house with a full freezer turns into something almost like a restaurant, and the kids get what they want, with the food industry playing an instrumental role in exploiting children’s preference for nutritionally dubious foods.

Can we play this game with Adam McDowell's industry too? The newspaper business plays an instrumental role in validating parents fears with hitpieces like "Death of the chicken finger", an intellectually dubious article that the Vancouver Province was more than willing to play along with.

For all these reasons, “I believe the children’s menu should be abolished — not by government intervention but by re-educating and making it culturally normal [for kids to eat adult food],” says Brian Tang, who runs a diverse-menued school-lunch catering company in Vancouver, Foodie Kids Inc., with his wife Michelle.

Hey look! Here's a capitalist trying to exploit the same fears as McDowell. Suddenly he's not nutritionally dubious or "willing to play along" with the hipster foodie revolution that decrees that kids should be joining in the "soy milk" fun when they'd rather have a grilled cheese sandwich.

For Christ's sake, he's telling us grilled cheese sandwiches weren't part of a kids' staple before 1970.

Of all the things that "death" needs to come to, people who try to feed you that line come long before people try to feed you chicken tenders. With plum sauce. And an amber lager.

Jim Prentice fiscal facepalm

I posted this to Twitter earlier today: a handy reminder that when leftists start bleating about the need to resume program spending (despite an $800M increase in spending from last year) just because of the news Alberta is expected to post a small "operational surplus" this year.

Conversation Graph

Mega News roundup

Al Jazeera examines corruption in Mexico, if you want an idea how bad things must be south of the Rio Grande

Four children have died in a fire in a rural Manitoba community. I don't even need to draw you to the obvious parallel, the commenters are doing that just fine.

Why do chicks want to join ISIS? Ask Spain, who just arrested four people involved in an online recruitment ring.

Spain has also ruled on Catalonia independence, saying the vote has to come from the central rather than regional governments.

Apple Computers have been ordered to pay up Smartfish who narrowly avoids the definition of a patent troll.

Of all the things that can kill you in Afghanistan, you may have forotten heavy snow, but 124 families never will.

Chris Brown has been barred entry to Canada while Drake is permitted to roam free?

What's being built at South Edmonton Common? Here's a possible candidate.

Target has turned a page in the United States as a result of many changes like free shipping, expanded digital sales, and getting the fuck out of Canada

What do a woman's hands say about her career? (insert dishpan hands joke here)

Benedict Cumberbatch weighs in on ruining Khan and playing a mentally ill faggy computer genius.

Birmingham (England, not Alabama, though they are similar) has just begun a massive tear-down and building project that will employ 1300 people and provide a shelter for 150,000 pigeons.

Are "The Troubles" really over? The son of a Sinn Féin activist was attacked with a bomb in what's said to be part of "simmering tensions in the Crossmaglen area

Drones have come to Paris. Authorities warn that you can tell a drone is nearby if you can hear a high-pitched really annoying whining sound and wait that's every populated area of France already.

Twitter coward and fake scientist Michael E Mann seems to associate himself with a statistically significant number of sex offenders.

Soccer teams in Greece are getting violent with each other in rashes of attacks that at the very least aren't austerity-related.

Roman Polanski isn't going anywhere anytime soon: the Polish judge has to do further study into the case before making any ruling.

Mega News roundup

A Calgary photographer catches an errant piece of Chinese rocket.

This is the lamest thing to complain to Gmail about ever

An exotic wasp is named after Tukka Rask. Its sting is almost as painful as being blown out in the third period of a playoff game

Facebook is the biggest drain on cellphone batteries, say researchers who don't play Simpsons: Tapped Out

Joan River's daughter says it would have been nice if the Oscars had bothered to mention Joan Rivers. I think it was just cover so they could avoid mentioning Finn Noergaard

Austrailian air traffic control technology can't even track planes right in front of them

Do the British get the best headlines because of their writers, or the best news?

• "Nutella jar fire: 'We've lost everything', say family after home destroyed and dog killed in blaze"
• "'Owl-themed cocktail bar' to open in Soho as battle of the single-issue venues continues"
• "Pictured: Super-rat 'the size of a cat' found in London garden as experts warn of rise of giant rodents"
• "Soho parlour feted by Nigella is closed down after mouse droppings found by ice cream pots"
• "Police appeal to trace man caught performing sex act on train"
• "Ex-wife of millionaire horse surgeon told to 'get a job' by judge in landmark divorce ruling"

That global warming pause has another 5, maybe 25 years left, max.
 
What do Keith Olbermann and Mark Steyn have in common? They're both in trouble for dissing Penn State 
 
Unions try to prevent new McDonald's in Brazil
 
Vancouver parents are shocked to discover the private school is...private?

Star Trek III wrapped up shooting several years ago. They mean Star Trek XIII perhaps?

Isn't globalization grand?

A child is dead and others are fighting for their lives after their mother smuggled Pakistani toxic chemicals into Canada to kill bedbugs in a plot that Larry the Cable Guy would reject as too loony.

Terrorist threats against West Edmonton Mall

Why is there always a big screen TV? (and a $26,000 cellphone bill)

I thought the boost from some #IdleNoMore folks angrily facebook-posting my Makwa pages was big, but SmallDeadAnimals just linked to it as well.

So greetings SDA readers! Last time Kate linked to one of my posts it set a record for comments that took a year to break. Let's see what you can get up to this time. Meanwhile, I already felt the need to pop in (to provide the liberal voice of reason, oddly!) to the thread at SDA, but I encourage everybody who comes here to go to so as well.

Tales from the comment section

As far as taxes go FIRST NATIONS pay the EXACT same taxes you do and yes on the cell phones purchased and pay 911 fees as everyone else in this country monthly, so the tax dollars everyone talks about First Nations pay the exact same taxes.

So says Patricia M on this post.Funny, when I tried asking why Makwa couldn't raise funds for their own fire department it was made very very clear to me that people on reserves don't pay the same taxes. You two need to coordinate your efforts.

Anyways, Pat isn't done.

The people of this reserve should ban purchasing or using any of you fine upstanding citizens businesses.First of all WHO sits there and says well the call came in lets just sit here and calculate DO THEY OWE US let me pull out the log books and calculate then MAYBE I shall call my local town of fine upstanding men of our beautiful community to see if we should MAYBE go support a local reserve who OH, MY GOD owes us a measly 3,200.00 dollars. Wow really this band should completely ban your God Loving, God Fearing Community.

I'm not sure where this false caricature of Mayor/Fire Chief Hess comes from, but a lot of the #ShutdownCanada morons are parroting it around so much they should be perched on a pirate's shoulder. Of course he wasn't sitting there calculating "do they owe us". He already had in his hands the signed contract where Chief Ben knew full well failure to pay meant failure to respond. Everybody knew what that meant, and everybody knew the bill hadn't been paid. The sum isn't "measly" either: it represents a whopping 22% of the Loon Lake firefighting budget. Seeing how Perry Bellegarde, President of the Canadian Red Indian Association (AFN) is complaining that Makwa Sahgaiehcan couldn't possibly afford to fight a fire with a mere 2% annual budget increase it's not unreasonable to expect that a $3200 chunk of missing dollars in Loon Lake would be missed.

Non Native peoples enjoy many other amenities that First Nations DO NOT, clean water, running water, proper housing that have furnaces vented properly as to not allow fires to happen as in this case, if anyone is to blame its the lack of funding, health First Nation receive the worst care across CANADA, education absolutely underfunded it all in the number check it out, roads ride on one, sewage enjoy the use of a pail on most reserves, facilities for children to be active are almost NONE your children enjoy safety local RCMPs and rec. centres, bowling alleys, movie theatres school gyms, etc. Access to healthy food in almost every community is a trip to such fine places as LOON LAKE, wow who would seriously want to go to a community filled with so much distain and arrogance audacity to feel they are privileged to be so determining who gets service and who doesn't.

Do you know why white communities have all these services? They went out and built them. Running water, furnace vents, recreational facilities: all of these aren't innate things the government just drops on your lap. You have to go out and create them. In some cases, we've created them and since passed their operation onto the government. I fundamentally disagree with doing this, of course, but they still had to be built from scratch by the men and women who care about the community they live in. These things were, of course, one of the many great things about the British culture that came over from Europe. They existed in many cases before Chris Columbus took a trip to Plymouth Rock, and almost certainly wouldn't exist in Canada today unless the Brits landed on these shores.

Patricia is one of those people who make you wish the Chinese had discovered North America first.

Okay, what other nonsense do we...no...you're joking...

Who's to say the fire truck they have may have had no gas due to theft from the surrounding area from one of your fine upstanding community members or a local member who needed gas to start a fire in home for warmth from this severely cold weather

I am. I'm totally going to say that this didn't happen. Seriously, of all the possible answers to "where did all this missing gasoline on the reservation go" the last possible answer you would come up with was "maybe people in the white town down the road stole gasoline from our trucks to start a fire in their home for warmth". Especially since this has been a relatively mild winter on the prairies.

Another scenario could have been what about a flat tire, also vehicles of this nature need a warm building to start immediately. Now, my personal truck cost 60,000. years ago needs to be plugged in and run awhile to get going thats outside. Insurance is over 1,000. a month maintaining it runs thousands a year. Gees I guess I could have bought a fire truck, built a building to house it, insure it, maintain it, purchase protective gear, train eight or so men what was I thinking I could be like a friggen Super Hero. if I could do all that on 41,000. plus 11,000. on maintenance. Main point is where is compassion even if the bill wasn't paid or fire truck available.

I already replied to her earlier spammy comment that no matter what her personal experiences are, Loon Lake's budget is available online and we've seen how much their fire services cost. By the way, that cost factors in the amortization of the equipment which Makwa got for free from the feds. Hey, do you know what else they got for free from the feds? A warm building to put their fire truck in. For those curious as to what happened to it, read on.

This community Loon Lake does not deserve the economic benefits the First Nations they have enjoyed in the past, millions of dollars spent, yes they payed TAXES the same as they did and in return no benefits what so ever only refused to help all over 3,000. Who sits there after a wake up call for help, oh,well let me see I need to wake up (or wake up from my last night beverages YA the alcohol you consumed could have made your head NOT think, well lets just sit here and disiffer oh yah they owe us, and crawl back to bed. WHO does that?????. Yes you may have been too late but at least you showed an initiative and compassion with a glass of water.

All the economic benefits from Indians we've enjoyed in the past? Well, those beaver hats were really nice, thanks. You showed up for the War of 1812, yes. Is there a more recent economic benefit Pat can share with us? I'm at a loss. Meanwhile, Loon Lake's money comes from the taxes raised on the residents of Loon Lake. That's 300 people. The 900 people on Makwa Sahgaiehcan don't pay taxes in Loon Lake. I'm pretty sure the mayor has to drink a lot more than in Pat's bizzar-o-world fantasy here to forget that salient point.

So Pat's out there, fine. It looks like a couple dedicated #IdleNoMore'ers on Facebook pushed for a rash of comments, by the way: this post is now the most commented post in Third Edge of the Sword history and it may not have escaped your attention that such a feat usually means a dedicated effort. Still, lots to work with.

Take Brenda, for example. No, literally, please, somebody take Brenda.

I think some one needs to take a history lesson... I will not deny that there "might" have been mismanagement of federal funding but this so called article does not explain why these issues keep coming up in the headlines.

She's right. This articled does, though!But Brenda probably wouldn't enjoy reading it...

I question why history cannot be the answer to numerous dysfunctions in the Indigenous communities. It was 150-200 years of complete and utter colonization of an entire race. Starvation, disease, lies, men and women of the Church having sexual relations with children, experimentation on Indigenous children, loss of language and culture...and on and on.

The reason history can't be the answer is simple: not a single thing that happened to the Red Indian was unique in human history. Europe was decimated by starvation, disease, and lies more than a couple of times: it motivated the people to build an empire. Sexual relations with children goes back to freaking Sparta. Loss of language and culture usually happens when an inferior culture butts up against a superior one. This argument would be rightfully thrown away as full of holes if we use it to describe, say, Morocco. Why would we accept it anymore about the Red Indian?

Families were sitting at home(stuck on the reserve) because they weren't allowed to leave without permission, and the representative of the government barges in (because he has a right to?) and rips a small child out of it's mothers arms, never to be heard from or seen again. I think that's called kidnapping. When Indigenous people were FORCED to stay on the allocated land the feds created as reserves, they could not hunt or sustain themselves because they were not allowed to! Given small pox infested blankets (on purpose, mind you).

It wasn't so much "kidnapping" as "education". I don't know if Brenda has clued in, but to be a successful functioning member of an advanced society in a civilized country in the 21st (or, indeed, the 19th) century requires education. If the "culture" of the Red Indian which didn't do any educating wasn't "broken" then none of its children would ever be able to function in an advanced and civilized society. We're seeing right now that kids on the reserves aren't getting this education and the cultural imperative to receive it (which, let's be frank, Muslim and Asian cultures do even better at than white cultures). In this context, of course education is something desirable, even if the parents disagree. As for the hunting and sustaining, the land that was negotiated to be reserve land in the various treaties was more than enough for the population to sustain fishing and hunting. The problem, of course, is the population grew and also wanted some of this cool new shit that all these Europeans had come up with, like pots and pans or rifles or snowmobiles or big screen TVs. Unfortunately, "sustaining themselves" evolves in time, and the reservations didn't evolve along with it. And smallbox blankets, Brenda? Seriously? There were never any smallbox blankets and the suggestion that before Louis Pasteur was even born his controversial Germ Theory of Disease was being applied by low-class folks on the opposite side of the planet is daft.

You can't get any worse Brenda can...ohgod...

Told that their culture, traditions and ceremonies were bogus and witch craft. An entire race told everything they know and believe is wrong! Indigenous people had governance, laws, and an amazing relationship with the lad and animals. A sense of spirituality, and I don't mean man made religion, I mean a true culture that has always been pure and simple.

That's right, folks, only the Red Indian has ever been told their culture/traditions/ceremonies were bogus and their beliefs were wrong. As for the "governance, laws, and an amazing relationship with lads" goes, I'm afraid Brenda is confused.

Okay, fine, she meant land, I heard you. Of course, she's wrong about that. They didn't have an "amazing relationship with land and animals", they had a brutal one where far-superior nature routinely kicked their ass. This has been a factor of much of human history, of course, but the tale of successful civilizations was one where we showed nature up: she was a whiny bitch, nature, and we smacked her until she was in her place. A skilled culture is really really good at raping nature. The Red Indian would have loved to rape nature just like every person in human history would have. Only lately have we really gotten good at it. To demonstrate the point, let's at some beaver. [okay, you may be taking the "raping nature" analogy a little past its tipping point. -ed]

Specifically lets look at beaver hunting. When Europeans began trading for beaver pelts, suddenly the Indians started hunting beavers lots more than they'd ever done. They now had an economic system that rewarded it: there was a market (most interesting to our point, alcohol and metal pots and pans) that motivated it. Unfortunately, the Indians started wiping out the beaver in areas that white men had never even come across. As a result of this unsustainable situtation, Europeans started teaching Indians how to hunt sustainably. Concepts like moving from area to area, and avoiding mothers with children, were things that the Europeans had had to learn centuries earlier when they got better at raping Mother Nature. Once they had the economic motivation to hunt more (and the technology to do so), it turns out Brenda's Indians had a shitty relationship with the land and the animals all along: they just hadn't been in a position to test it out.

So now today, we have entire communities dealing with a loss of identity. Imagine... just imagine being told that because you are brown or white or any color of the rainbow, that you are and always will be less than. Then imagine that you cannot give up. You can't end your pathetic existence because there is still a spiritual reason to persevere. All the while trying to learn the histories of your race and searching for some sort of break in a society that has been taught incorrect truths about the history of this so called great country. A country that was built on lies, murder, and Euro colonialism.

If you believe Canada was "built on lies, murder and Euro colonialism" than you have been taught an incorrect truth. Sorry, Brenda. You're gonzo even before these weird "imagine there's no heaven" bromides you're passing along as some sort of inspirational message.

British culture has property rights, the rule of law, and democracy. That is objectively better than collective tribal concepts, pseudo-spiritual claptrap, and rule by 'elders'.

Why did these Europeans come to Turtle Island anyways? When they got here; they were starved homeless and didn't know how to live on the land. Well it's a good thing the Indians help, being 2 million and more strong in population.

Wait, you don't know why Europeans came to North America? Well, after Columbus came back with the news, everybody got excited because we found more land. You know that phrase, "real estate: they aren't making anymore of it"? Well we just found more of it. We found 10.5 billion fucking acres of it. That's a lot of land. For context, the (2nd) Battle of of St. Albans took place in 1461, a couple decades before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. 25,000 men were involved in that battle, and there were 6,000 casualties. St. Albans was the lead city in what's now the county of Hertfordshire, and whoever controlled the city basically controlled the county. In other words, two forces (as a larger part of the War of the Roses) sacrificed 6,000 men just for a piece of land that totaled half a million acres. You don't think that they'd be putting any energy into getting almost 26,000 times more land? Seriously?

Yet... In my 36 years, I have only seen these Treaties broken. Not by the Indigenous peoples of the great Turtle Island, but by the government and the Crown.

Guess what, Brenda? Canada hasn't 'broken' anything, but as per the treaties Indians are not to rise up against Her Majesty or Her Majesty's government. So by initiating #ShutDownCanada, you've violated the treaties. You also mentioned earlier that people had to stay on the reserves because "they weren't allowed to leave without permission". That's also in the treaties. By leaving the reserves, you're also in violation. Guess what, I'm sure you've seen many such violations over the past 36 years. You just didn't recognize them as such.

There is a big shift that is happening and it's coming fast. As a descendant of Europe. You can sit and complain about it or you can help the process of this fact to move smoothly along. Regardless, It's happening.

We can (and should) stop it. We've seen at Makwa how these people run their lands. I don't want to see all of Alberta look like Hobbemma. If you do, you're insane.

You also have to question the federal government where the money comes from that the Indians receive annually. It sure isn't supposed to be taxpayer's money. But darn! that's what the feds keep telling citizens, isn't it. Like I said, go and do the research about the Treaties and learn that there is supposed to be specific Trusts in place pertaining to the Treaties, sort of like rent White people pay to live in Canada.

Yeah, guess what, you can read the treaties up and down. That isn't in there. I dare you to find that passage. Meanwhile, of course the federal government has taxpayer money. They don't, ultimately, have anything but taxpayer's money.

Speaking of money, let's move on from Brenda. Were there any other insane commenters in that post? Hey, welcome to Third Edge of the Sword new poster Sickofit! Come, tell us what you're sick of.

If your one of those people that think that Indians in Canada are free loading of your hard earned tax dollars you need to be educated! Seriously!

Indians do not need your money. They never needed it, they don't use it now and I can't see them using it in the future. Think I'm delusional, hardly!

Let's break your argument down into chunks.

1. Indians do not need my money.
   Funny then that Indians just demanded more of my money
   
2. Indians never needed my money
   Again, Perry Bellegarde is calling for an increase beyond 2%, which tells me that the money they got in the past wasn't as much as they wish it was. I'd say that disproves that theory.
   
3. Indians don't use my money now
   Well, seeing how Makwa Sahgaiehcan was given my money to pay for their firetruck and instead blew it on contract payments to Ronald Mitsuing, you may have a point with that one!
   
4. Indians won't be using my money in the future
   Oh, how I wish that one was true! But at the very least Makwa has finally paid their bill

Have you ever sat back and truly wondered why a government department like INAC has so many employees? As of March 31, 2009, INAC employed 4 967 employees, 46% of whom were employed in the National Capital Region, while the remaining employees were located in 10 regions across the country. Thats a lot of government workers to look after so few Indians.

It is a lot of government workers. Of course, bureaucracies like expanding, so you aren't telling me anything new. Also, we've seen between Chief Ben's inability to spend his grant money properly, and the pushback to publishing audited financial statements online, that it does take a lot of government workers to look after so few Indians, since the Indians aren't looking after themselves with anything approaching competence. You might think that Sickofit was done, but he did that charming reply to his own posts thing. I thought IntenseDebate gave my blog commenters a lot of room to run with. It seems not.

ndian Moneys generally represent all moneys collected, received or held by Her Majesty for the use and benefit of First Nations (FN) and/or band members. Indian and Northern Affairs Canada ("INAC" or the "Department") is responsible for the management of Indian Moneys in accordance with specific (moneys management) provisions of the Indian Act. Indian Moneys, held within the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF), are managed pursuant to specific sections of the Indian Act, the Financial Administration Act and associated regulations, which provide the legislative framework for the responsibility of the collection, maintenance, expenditure and accounting of Indian Moneys. Band trust accounts relate to two types of Indian Moneys held within the CRF, including: Capital moneys – Money derived from the sale of surrendered land or capital assets of a First Nation. This includes, but is not limited to, royalties, bonus payments and other proceeds from the sale of timber, oil, gas, gravel or any other non-renewable resource. Revenue moneys- All Indian Moneys which are not capital moneys. Sources of revenue moneys include interest earned on band capital and revenue moneys, fine moneys, proceeds from the sale of renewable resources, band leasing activities and rights-of-way. Indian Moneys are also held within the CRF on behalf of individuals pursuant to sections 42 to 52 of the Indian Act. Individual moneys include the administration of property of on-reserve minors, adoptees, mentally incompetent Indians (dependent adults) and decedent /missing heirs' estates.

Are you tired yet? I know I'm tired. He keeps going though. It's okay to skim through this.

At March 31, 2009, the Indian Moneys trust account represented approximately $1.2 billion in the CRF. This is one of five. Now this is amount is not that big I think but.......let's look deeper and see just how many different trust accounts were made to look after Indians, and you will come to the realization that billion dollars is only the tip if the iceberg! You have to remember The department of INAC sole purpose is to look after Indians, so any trust account administered and guarded by them is for Indians only! That being said, the First Nations Trust Fund isn’t the only money that belongs to First Nations peoples that is handled by the AANDC. This is the new INAC abbreviation. According to the website, the Department “may issue licences, permits, and other instruments to individuals and organizations that propose to undertake resource exploration and other types of development projects.” That money also belongs to First Nations peoples, doesn’t it? If the resource exploration and development projects weren’t on First Nations property, there wouldn’t be any need for AANCD to involve itself ergo the revenues generated from “licenses, permits and other instruments to individuals and organizations” is First Nations revenues, is it not?

Again, going with what Makwa has taught us, resource revenue from reserves had better go through DIAND, otherwise you'd sell the entire rights lock stock and barrel to China in return for a case of Tsingtao. You know what? You could just click here and read the rest of his rant. God, after all this I miss Patricia. Patricia, come back! Ah good, here you are.

Bitch and complain all you want about a little 3,000. dollars your community members decided to not go to a fire in a neighbouring community. LET'S JUST SAY, you came upon a road side collision and the person had no drivers license or they were drunk at the time of the accident, would you just walk away or would you assist or ask for their insurance policy or drivers licence while they were knocked out. Really thats how a community or a decent human being would respond.

First off, the assistance I could offer at the side of the road is pretty minimal. In fact, if I tried to do too much I could find myself in more trouble than even Agent Gibbs could help get me out of. On a similar vein, without a valid contract to cover them outside their jurisdiction, Loon Lake FD could find themselves in trouble as well. What if they failed to save the kids (highly likely) and some money grubber possibly named Mitsuing tried to sue them for harm? They aren't covered by their policy, and could be looking at ridiculous legal bills. Likewise, if a member of the FD got injured their insurance might fail to cover them. You may disagree with this being how the world works, I wouldn't say you were wrong. But there is some practical downsides to the level of help you're offering.

Our Oscar-night saviours

Redlettermedia has something interesting about movies to watch tonight so you don't have to settle for Neil Sodomite Harris and his Oscars.

Feygeles?

Blacks and the Domination of Social Space

A good read over at Ex-Army discussing why Canadians and Americans are "two solitudes" on the subject of blacks:

It's a strange theory, that. All races and ethnic groups exhibit identical behavior, but "bias" causes them to be regarded as behaving differently. It's bias, then, that makes us think that Muslims are into honor killing, when, obviously, an identical percentage of honor killings are performed by Norwegian Lutherans and Tibetan Buddhists, but the cops ignore all that and just report on the Muslims.

But I've found a dissenting view from this theory, that states that statistically, Blacks do behave in at least on small way somewhat differently than Whites, Hispanics, and Asians. This may be hard to believe, especially if you're a Canadian, but bear with me.

Speaking of fires on Indian reservations...

Apropos of nothing, here are a couple fun photos from my camping trip to Fort McMurray in 2013.

These were both taken just south of Gregoire Lake. Hey, would you look at that! The Willow Lake Reservation is there. What a crazy coincidence!

Everything old is new again

this story sounds familiar.

A northern Saskatchewan First Nation will now rely on its volunteer fire department to fight fires.

Buckland Fire and Rescue, a private firefighting firm located in Prince Albert, has terminated its services with Sturgeon Lake First Nation.

Fire Chief James Miller said Sturgeon Lake hasn’t paid its $8,000 fee from last year.

This is the first time that Buckland Fire has not been paid in 15 years of providing services, said Miller, but after the deadline passed services to the First Nation were ended.

It's not quite the same as the infamous Makwa case, though.

Without the services of Buckland Fire, the reserve will depend on its volunteer firefighters.

Sturgeon Lake has been connected with 9-1-1 services and established a schedule for the reserve’s 10 volunteer fire fighters, all of whom have been trained by the Saskatchewan Volunteer Fire Association, Ballantyne said.

SteynOnChamberlain

Chamberlain never hosted a three-day summit on "rearmament" in general whose entire purpose was to deny that "rearmament" and "Germany" were in any way connected.

The always-on Mark Steyn on how Giuliani hit a nerve and how you can't compare President Monkey to Neville Chamberlain -- because it's unfair to Chamberlain.

For my own part, I am way beyond that. By the way, I'm growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That's why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences. When he died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.

Also making the comparison unfair: Chamberlain couldn't look 60 years back in history to find some guy who made the same mistake he did, he was coming up with how to deal with Hitler all on his own with no manual and no way to know which was the "right" and "wrong" choice.

Everything wrong at #MakwaSahgaiehcan in one easy picture

To publish or not to publish

Steve Faguy goes round and round in circles over Charlie Hedbo.

Entrenched interests

Police in Saskatchewan charged a man with uttering threats after a post appeared on Facebook condemning Loon Lake, Sask., volunteer firefighters for not going to a house fire in which two toddlers were killed.

If you haven't already read my money and culture and truck posts on this topic, you probably should. Anyways, anger that the Village of Loon Lake didn't (again) send it's volunteer fire department to the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Reserve because the band council (again) had been delinquent in paying their bills has been brewing on social media over the past 48 hours. As can be expected, it's the hardworking white mayor/firefighter who's somehow responsible for the consequences of mismanaged band funds.

Again, have you read my money and culture posts? You should, there's some great stuff in them. Especially the money one, where I identify the people responsible for the disaster which is the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Indian Reservation.

Over in Loon Lake, the head of the volunteer firefighters is also the mayor: Larry Heon. He's paid a whopping $964 a year to be the mayor (plus $65 reimbursed to Larry, probably for petty cash purchases like running to Rona and picking up a can of paint since one of the walls in the office got scuffed). In fact, Larry and the other six councilors cost the Loon Lake taxpayer some $4,019 in total remuneration.

Over at the Makwa Reserve, that $4,000 covers the cellphone allowance for a single councilor! A total of $26,000 was spent on cellphone allowances alone. Chief Richard Ben is paid an $80,000 salary: 83 times more than Heon is paid.

But Chief Ben isn't the highest paid member of the band council over at Makwa, partly because apparently he's the only person in the entire town who's able to run his cellphone for less than $300/month. That honour goes to Ronald Mitsuing, who gets paid a total of $167,691 between his salary and his honorarium and his cellphone allowance and the $72,162 he collects in "contracts" which I assume means he's dubbed himself the town comptroller or something.

And they keep coming! There are two other councilors with the surname Mitsuing which would be pretty bizarre if they weren't related (imagine Jeb Bush running for President in 2016 but not being related to either of the two Bushes who ran for President). None of them are as handsomely rewarded as Ronald Mitsuing is, but the three Mitsuings manage to do well enough, I suppose.

$358,103.

You know that phrase "too many chiefs, not enough Indians"? Well the Makwa Sahgaiehcan live it! The six councilors plus Chief Ben combine for three-quarters of a million dollars in salary. You'd have to be completely insane to blame the volunteer firefighters for expecting that their expenses would be covered by such lavishly self-endowed men.

Well it turns out there are varying levels of insanity. There's the Lisa Sappier level of insanity. Let's call that Level 1.
Then there's the @earlofawesome Scott level of insanity. That's level 2.
Don't forget level 3, the Niki Ashton level of insanity.

Is there a level above that? Well, yes, of course: the kind of level that involves making threats of violence against volunteer firefighters. Spurned by the varying levels of rhetoric, Level 4 should be named after a person too, shouldn't it? Why don't we name it after the guy who made the threats?

Loon Lake RCMP got a report about a "threatening post on social media" at about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to a news release.

They charged Tony Mitsuing, 27, police said. He was released on conditions not to contact the target of the alleged threats and will appear in court March 26.

So there we go, we can name this the Tony Mitsuing level of insani...hey, wait a minute.

Yet another Mitsuing?

The population of Makwa Sahgaiehcan is 923 people, and I'm starting to wonder if 900 of them are Mitsuings.^† So we have three of them on council, and now a fourth (confirmed to be on the reserve) making violent threats against Loon Lake Mayor Larry Heon, the guy who is able to care for the citizens who elected him in a way that a band council made up of Tony's fellow Mitsuings have utterly (and lavishly) failed at.

If you didn't think band mismanagement was a problem before, methinks the lady doth protest too much.

^†Patrick Ross is apparently from the Meadow Lake area been close enough to the Meadow Lake area to give him some personal contacts and has dealt with some subset of the Mitsuing clan, so I expect we'll be seeing some more from him on this topic once Moms start chatting with Moms, that sort of thing.

A broken down truck for a broken down people

We found the truck!

Earlier I ruminated on the missing fire truck that the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Indian Reservation was provided by the federal government:

Is that truck still there? Is it derelict and being used to sniff gas and drink Lysol? Has it, in a fit of irony but totally normal for abandoned vehicles on reserves, been set on fire and left as a burnt husk? I put the question to the readers of SmallDeadAnimals, but especially with this recent incident I'm sure the band will be making sure nobody ever sees or hears from this truck again.

Well, it happens on occasion: I was mistaken. The band wasn't hiding their truck, they were trying to reframe the story as another "woe is me" tale.

Chief Ben says Makwa Sahgaiehcan's own fire truck & hall, bought with federal money, are not in working order. #cbcsk pic.twitter.com/JV1M73FW43

— Madeline Kotzer (@MadelineKotzer) February 19, 2015

That's it right there: the truck

It looks exactly as forlorn and pathetic as one might imagine.

@MadelineKotzer @JohnnieOil does it Idle at least? Or no more?

— elton morrow (@eltonmorrow1) February 20, 2015

Toddlers didn't burn to death because of Whitey

A devastating fire on the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Indian Reservation caused the death of two toddlers early on the morning of Tuesday February 17th.

I just posted a bit about the finances that you should probably read up on. That post's all about the dollars and cents.

This is all about the dullards and sense.

Specifically, about the greater political and social implications of the nonsense going around by the #IdleNoMore defenders when they try to attack the Village of Loon Lake Volunteer Fire Department for not providing a free service to a much larger community down the road that (as I did note in that post you really need to read) has money to burn (no pun intended) on literally everything else you can imagine.

Firefighting is a service that is provided in Loon Lake by the municipal government. Over in Makwa Sahgaiehcan, the "municipal government" (nobody ever refers to it as such, even though it clearly is) doesn't bother. Yet oddly, they seem to have a lot of fires.

Between March and May 2014, the Loon Lake fire department attended calls to the First Nation for brush and structure fires. By September, Lehoux said the village hadn't received its fees, despite calls and notes to the First Nation.

How many fires does a community of 923 people have to fight, anyways? I asked Leduc County on Twitter about the village of Thorsby (population 951), which doesn't even have a fire department but rather a station for the larger Leduc County Fire Department. The firefighters from that station have roughly a call a week, though usually larger fires and/or false alarms from elsewhere in Leduc County.

Over in Makwa, Chief Ben (of the $100,000 salary) is outraged.

However, Chief Richard Ben of Makwa Sahgaiehcan said the First Nation always pays the fire department after the call is finished.

"It was more or less they come, and we pay them and that was it," he said.

"I'm pissed off because we've always paid them," Ben said. "They can't say we haven't put thousands of dollars into that department. And they've always showed up at every incident. We're just pissed off."

He's "put thousands of dollars" into the department. Loon Lake used to charge them $5,000 a year plus a per-attendance surcharge. Then they agreed to go from a subscription model to a "pay as you go" model, which I assume meant a higher per-event charge and wait don't you guys have a lot of fires in your community of lazy bums who don't seem to produce anything but decay? Again, this is the same level of decrepit culture where burnt cars dotting the landscape are a common sight, where houses with plastic on the windows decay in one of the least humid climates on earth as a brand new pickup truck and snowmobile sits in the front lawn smashed beyond all recognition. They get money from the band, they get money from the government, but just like the overpaid band council that wouldn't dream of becoming a volunteer firefighter, the rest of the populace doesn't earn any money and doesn't produce anything of value, so they don't hold anything of value.

Not even the lives of toddlers.

As mentioned in the "money post", Richard Ben obviously doesn't care about the safety and security of people who live on the reserves: otherwise he'd be willing to forego his salary in order to pay the bill for fire services. But there's somebody else who apparently doesn't care about the safety and security of the two toddlers who died. And unlike you or me or the Mayor of Loon Lake or even Chief Ben, he won't be referring to them as "the two toddlers" but rather referring to them by name.

RCMP said officers were dispatched around 1:30 a.m. CST Tuesday to the Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation, where they found a home engulfed in flames.

They said a man, who had gone to the home and found it was on fire, came out carrying two small children.

According to RCMP, the man was the father of the two-year-old boy and one-year-old girl. Both children died at the scene.

RCMP said the children's grandmother was also in the home, but no other injuries have been reported due.

Did the father care about the welfare of those two little kids? It's not easy to say, mainly because we aren't getting much information as to grandma's condition. It's possible that this is just the sort of terrible tragedy that can happen anywhere: you don't ask "will the house spontaneously catch fire?" when deciding if an elderly relative is suitable as a babysitter. However, we've seen far too many negligent fathers on reserves to discount the probability willy-nilly.

But though nobody on Makwa Sahgaiehcan seems to be cool about fire safety there are certainly more than enough online Concern Trolls to make up for it. A 27 year old man was arrested for threatening the volunteer force over at Loon Lake, and Twitter is awash with people who can't believe that fire services were revoked over a $3400 bill. They never do answer, of course, how many free fires Loon Lake is supposed to put out over at Makwa Reserve before they finally cut off services? Ten? Twenty? Ten thousand? What happens when the level of fire care that's supposed to be paternally provided for free reaches the point that the Village of Loon Lake can no longer receive enough money from its tax base to keep it running? Chief Heon addressed this:

"I spent 23 years in the military to protect people in this country," he said. "And now to have this thrown back at me that we just let people die in my own country is very saddening to me."

"We have a very small department. How do you operate?" he said. "How do I protect the rest of the community if I burn everything, my resources, and not get paid for it?"

That things cost money is sometimes a hard concept to get across to the liberals so worked up that innocent kids died over a $3400 bill.

It's apparently impossible to get across to the Indians over at Makwa Sahgaiehcan.

Lehoux said she sent the reserve another letter in January stating that its fire services had been cut off. But Makwa Sahgaiehcan Chief Richard Ben said he wasn’t aware of that. He also said that his community has not been a priority for the volunteer fire department.

“It just makes us go back and rethink, why aren’t we put up in the same level as everybody else?” he said.

The federal government says it allotted $34,000 per year to Makwa Sahgaiehcan to operate and maintain a fire hall and fire truck on the reserve. But the fire hall was converted to a youth centre and the fire truck is only operational in the summer.

Ben said the money is not enough to train firefighters and operate the necessary services. He said most of the funds have been spent on fireproofing dilapidated homes.

I'm sure every once and a while somebody in Loon Lake has had a dilapidated home that requires a little renovation to make it a little less likely to go up like a tinderbox. Then again, when it's your home and you own and cherish and care for it, maybe you decide that putting a couple fire extinguishers by the door and getting the flammables out of the laundry room is worth more than a youth centre and a fire truck only good for parades and hot boxing. But despite all this talk from Indians that this country is "their land" they show absolutely no pride in it, and no interest in building it up.

Loon Lake has a volunteer fire department and their mayor mans up to be the fire chief. Chief Ben throws money away on his salary then turns the fire hall into a youth centre. Whether or not a youth centre is of any value to the community (it probably isn't, but let's play along) is irrelevant: the Canadian taxpayer provided money for firefighting. Why isn't this a priority? If Chief Ben and his overpaid cronies over at Makwa Sahgaiehcan aren't interested in spending tax money where the givers of said tax money wish it to be spent, then why are we even giving the money out?

Going back to Chief Dances-With-Buffet, Atawapiskat famously failed a tax audit (I wrote a bit about it at the end of this post). Makwa Sahgaiehcan did not, though all that means is that the auditor didn't find any slush funds or hidden monies being squirreled away by the band council. It doesn't preclude the money being spent poorly, though again when it comes to Indian Reservations the money is spent poorly because generations of paternalist welfare has created a pathetic infant-child race, unable to understand the value of money and understanding how it's a way to obtain resources to be levered for a benefit. On the rich oil-funded reserves in Alberta, an Indian turns 18 and gets a cheque for more money than many Albertans pull down in a year. That money is wasted on a trivial things and is gone before you know it. The firetruck only works in the summer? Is that because the Indians have already cabbaged it for parts? Is it missing a heater, perhaps, since somebody's old F-350 needed it? Is it, as I asked in the money post, off being used as a hotbox somewhere? Or straws in the fuel tank?

But to obsess over how better to spend the money is almost to miss the point. We just need to stop giving these Indians the money in the first place: this isn't a Makwa Sahgaiehcan problem, that's only the most recent flare-up. Enoch Reserve did this exact same "don't pay for fire services" gag once to the City of Edmonton. Atawapiskat is mismanaged so the buildings are falling apart while the Chief's fuck-buddy gets to cash a paycheque and pretend he's the CFO for a Fortune 500 company. Davis Inlet had so many kids sniffing gas they moved them to a new town so they could sniff gas in cool new surroundings. Hobemma changed its name to remove the "stigma" that was causing gang violence that left little kids in its wake and the stigma-free town saw a youth murder within hours. Enoch in Edmonton is so incompetent they couldn't run a casino that receives 566% more revenue than the white casino down the road (while they get a smoking bylaw exemption). A Saskatchewan Indian gets so drunk he lets his kids freeze to death. There will be another heartbreaking story tomorrow and the day after and the day after.

Bad things happen, they make white voters feel guilty so they give more money, but money begets even more bad things and the cycle -- no, the death spiral -- continues ad infinitum. We don't have to do this anymore. So long as failures are our failures and successes (well, there aren't any but fingers crossed!) aren't our successes, we need to pick up our football and not play anymore. Maybe if we do that, the bill for fire services will actually get paid. Maybe if we do that, the 900-plus residents of Makwa Sahgaiehcan might get enough civic pride together to form their own volunteer fire department, at which point they may ask why Loon Lake down the road pays so much less in property taxes and their mayor earns 1/42nd the per capita amount. Maybe when their houses need "fire suppression" they'll just pull up their sleeves and install some fire suppression.

We can't spend the money better. If the people in charge could spend money well, they wouldn't need the money.

And they probably still don't need a youth centre.

Why couldn't Chief Richard Ben pay his reserve's bills?

A devastating fire on the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Indian Reservation caused the death of two toddlers early on the morning of Tuesday February 17th.

It has since come to light that the Indian Reserve had lost its firefighting protection last year, when the much smaller white village down the road got tired of them reneging on the bills. CBC has now posted some of the correspondance between the Village of Loon Lake and the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Indian Reserve on this issue. January 30th was the letter where Loon Lake specifically told the Indians that when a fire occurred, not to call it in.

Let's be perfectly clear on this: the Village of Loon Lake (population: 390 people) doesn't owe anything to the Makwa Reserve (population: 923 people) in terms of fire response services. That is, just as its name implies, a service. Services can and must be revoked in the event that the recipient doesn't pay the bills, and continues to not pay the bills. The relatively low figure in this case ($3,380.89) is ultimately irrelevent to the overall principle.

Why did the Makwa Reserve fail to pay the bill? It's only $3,400, and...

A recent access-to-information request by The Canadian Press shows Makwa Sahgaiehcan was given just over $11,000 for fire protection in each of the 2012-13 and 2013-14 fiscal years.

So the Indians were given money by the Canadian taxpayer for their fire protection, which they apparently kept for themselves rather than spending the money on what they were supposed to spend it on: services for their municipality. It turns out that they even have their own fire truck!

But the head of the volunteer firefighters in neighbouring Loon Lake -- who up until last year provided fire services to Makwa Sahgaiehcan First Nation -- says he has never seen the truck in commission.

Larry Heon told QMI Agency the last time he saw the truck, a few years ago, it was "sitting in the bush."

Is that truck still there? Is it derelict and being used to sniff gas and drink Lysol? Has it, in a fit of irony but totally normal for abandoned vehicles on reserves, been set on fire and left as a burnt husk? I put the question to the readers of SmallDeadAnimals, but especially with this recent incident I'm sure the band will be making sure nobody ever sees or hears from this truck again. It drives home the larger point, though: the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Indian Reserve has been provided resources in order to provide fire response to their community. And they've squandered it. Thousands of federal dollars to pay for fire services that apparently were spent on other purposes.

Due to the Federal First Nations Financial Transparency Act, Makwa has been required to post their expenses online, and let me tell you it makes for some interesting reading! Loon Lake apparently can provide fire services to their tiny village for $14,500 while Makwa blew $60,000 on "fire suppression" in a single year and yet managed to not pay the bill for the firefighting services that they received. Where'd all that money go?

Over in Loon Lake, the head of the volunteer firefighters is also the mayor: Larry Heon. He's paid a whopping $964 a year to be the mayor (plus $65 reimbursed to Larry, probably for petty cash purchases like running to Rona and picking up a can of paint since one of the walls in the office got scuffed). In fact, Larry and the other six councilors cost the Loon Lake taxpayer some $4,019 in total remuneration.

Over at the Makwa Reserve, that $4,000 covers the cellphone allowance for a single councilor! A total of $26,000 was spent on cellphone allowances alone. Chief Richard Ben is paid an $80,000 salary: 83 times more than Heon is paid. And that doesn't even count his $18,655 travel budget, his $3,500 "other payments" [that's a lot of cans of paint for the office! -ed]...but at least the Makwa Reserve doesn't pay for his cellphone. Total payments to Chief Ben -- who cannot provide fire protection to his citizens -- is $102,155. That's $110.67 per resident of Makwa just for the Chief. Larry Heon costs each of his residents $2.64 a year: that's 1/42nd the per capita cost.

Larry Heon puts in his own time to be a volunteer fireman. Why can't Richard Ben do the same thing? He could even pay himself the $18,655 he usually spends on travel and be the paid fire chief, it still means at the end of the day Makwa Reserve has fire protection. The real killer is despite how much of a bargain Heon is compared to Ben, Chief Richard Ben is a bargain compared to his councilors!

Remember when Chief Dances-With-Buffet was found to be paying her boyfriend to be the "co-manager and director of finance"? Well apparently Councilor Ronald Mitsuing is giving himself the same deal: along with his $39,000 salary and his $24,000 honoraria and his $24,445 travel allowance and his $4,000 cellphone allowance and his $4,084 "other payments"...(pause to take a deep breath)...Ronald Mitsuing also receives $72,162 in "Contracts" payments likely due to him also having a role as a director or manager or some shit. Walter Mitsuing (another Mitsuing? What a coincidence!) receives $3,675 in contract payments which looks completely reasonable by comparison. Sure, Walt's contract payments alone represent 91% of the cost of the entire Village Council of Loon Lake, but let's not quibble. Mitsuing must be the Plains Cree version of Smith, since there's a third Mitsuing serving as a town councilor. You know how whenever you find three brothers, one's always the "junior" brother who's a tagalong to the other two who really run the show? Dean Mitsuing must be the tagalong: poor bastard gets no contract payments and his total renumeration is a mere $94,483 (compared to Walter's $95,929 and Ronald's $167,691).

The Mitsuing family costs Makwa Sahgaiehcan $358,103 every single year. And for what? What value do they get out of it?

They certainly don't get any firefighting out of it! None of the Mitsuing Clan are volunteer firefighting out of a civic duty. Donovan Fineblanket [you made that name up. You had to have made that name up. -ed] gets a $6,000 cellphone allowance. For $500 a month in cellphone bills, all Makwa reserve gets is the ability to phone down the road to the guys who actually fight fires and help their community. In return for having at least two of the three Mitsuing boys share a single cellphone, they could have paid their delinquent bill to Loon Lake and had a fire truck that wasn't a burnt out husk drive over and try to save two boys in a fire.

There are angry calls on Twitter that Larry Heon's volunteer fire department should be "ashamed" that they refused to respond to the emergency call that ultimately killed two children. No. The shame rests entirely with the Makwa band council, who has no problem collecting $744,186 for their "management" of the reserve, but balks at paying $3,380.89 when the good men at Loon Lake ask to be paid for the wear and tear on their equipment and bodies when they put their own lives at risk responding to one of the reserves many fires.

Loon Lake is not responsible for the welfare of Makwa Sahgaiehcan. Makwa Sahgaiehcan is. That they have shirked their duty, that they have decided to take fat paycheques instead of providing the services they are supposed to be providing, that all rests entirely on them.

If any councilors who run a community "killed" two toddlers, it's these guys:
Richard Ben
Walter Mitsuing
Ronald Mitsuing
Donovan Fineblanket
Derrick Cantre
Frank Kytwayhat
Dean Mitsuing<sup>†



†</sup> See? He's even at the bottom of the list. Tagalong brother, I'm telling you.


Update, February 20 2015 1:53pm: Lots of additional material on this issue. The decrepit reservation culture is examined in more detail, we've located the hilariously useless truck, and the Mitsuing family continues its shameful behaviour: only this time he's going to be facing a judge.

What's the name of the Somalian who the Fort McMurray gunman meant to mow down?

Last weekend I wrote about Mustafa Mattan, the latest round in the ongoing "safe haven" series where Somali Muslims bring their sick pathologies with them across the globe, showing up in Alberta where they keep murdering each other and wondering why the west isn't the peaceful paradise that they were hoping that it was (and, indeed, it was before they showed up).

Also last week, news broke late at night that three Muslims in North Carolina were gunned down. Immediately Twitter broke out with #MuslimLivesMatter, and early reports on the ground were that the perpetrator was white. Right from the get-go, the story smelt weird to me though, and within hours and long before the facts came through, I warned that "Islamophobia" didn't look to be a reliable culprit to explain the deaths. Of course, we now know that the dispute was over trivial matters unrelated to the colour of the victim's skin, and inasmuch as it was about their "religion" their killer was a violently dangerous athiest who couldn't tell the difference between Osama bin Laden and Mother Theresa.

Pakistani newspaper "The International News" is all over a connection between the two deaths though. In their analysis of the two shootings, Khaled A Beydoun and Margari Hill write:

While #MuslimLivesMatter trended for Deah, Yusor and Razan, there were sporadic tweets linked to Mattan’s story, and few questions as to why Mattan’s death received little attention. The Chapel Hill shootings have inspired a broad, diverse and lurid chorus of support and solidarity; Mattan’s name, however, has been met with relative silence.

The "relative silence", one supposes, is partly due to the much more muted media culture in Canada (recently losing one of the outlets that would cover these cases). Also because if the Americans went nutso every time some Somalian came to Alberta and was murdered, you'd need to build another cable network.

Still, the coverage discrepancy may also stem from the fact that in the States the killer is identified and has a clear (though obscurely insignificant) motive. In the case of Mustafa Mattan, we don't know why he was gunned down through his door (though random act of violence is still the dominant narrative, with the victim being such a beautiful peace-loving soul etc. etc. etc.. Beydoun and Hill, oddly enough, seem to already know a little more about the case than the Edmonton SUN or the CBC have come across.

What, if anything, colours the disparity in alarm and organising, amplification and action encircling the two tragedies? The curious case of Mustafa Mattan is as much a story of intra-racial division and anti-black racism within the Muslim population as it is a narrative about the neglected death of a young man seeking a better life far from home.

Wait, hold on.

Anti-black racism within the Muslim population? Is this tied to the "disparity of alarm" in the Mattan slaying? Or is this identifying a possible motive for his killer? The International News article also mentions that Mattan was staying at his brother's place. The Edmonton SUN only mentions that he had roommates. So is this mistaken identity, as I alluded to over the weekend? Are both of the Mattan brothers "giving, loving, caring, helping people" or does that only apply to the one who died? What do we know of Mattan's roommates? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they are also Somali Muslims from Toronto. If Mattan was with his brother, we know at least one of them was.

Of course, we can't talk about this murder (likely committed by another Somali Muslim, just like all the other Somali Muslims in Alberta killed by their brethren), without hearing about good ol' "Islamophobia":

Despite a few vocal critics, Mattan’s erasure in the discussion of Islamophobia in North America is evident. The exclusion of Mattan and Sheikh-Hussein perpetuates a harmful hierarchy that privileges Arab narratives and excludes black/African Muslims.

I can't speak much to "harmful hierarchy", that's a construct that needs to be addressed if at all by the derka derka crowd themselves. But to immediately think that Mattan's death, distinct from Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha, is a sign of "Islamophobia" is optimistic at best. The victim card, despite their best efforts, just isn't one that any Muslim can get away with playing.