River Run Vistas Investors Group Meeting

The following is a tape recording of the meeting between Jon Mintoft and River Run Vistas investors which was held on Saturday, November 26 at the Fish Creek Public Library located in Calgary.

River Run Vistas Investors Group Meeting

For more on the background of this meeting go here.



The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.

Something to keep in mind when going to church tomorrow

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Black Friday (because television says so)

Black Friday. Because in America and Canada, you can pitch a tent for capitalism but not for democracy...

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Some folks have posted on our page asking where it’s ok to shop and other questions along the lines of 'should I do this, or should I do that?'. Others, enraged that we would dare question their practices, tell them what to do or where to spend their money. Our page is not here to tell you what to do or where to spend your money. What we are telling you to do is to practice self-reliance. Think for yourselves and stop looking for indisputable answers tailored to your life on a Facebook page. We are a world of 7 billion people all with our own thoughts, feelings, and opinions so there will always be someone to dispute what we say. The answers you seek are inside of you. Human beings have forgotten their own potential due to a deliberate campaign waged against them by some members of the ruling classes. We need to respect every ones right to exist and have these opinions but opinions are now shaped and formed through mass psychological warfare techniques being deployed in nearly information outlet available to us. Don't be afraid to take the unpopular course if you feel in your heart it is right. An entire generation is waking up around the entire world right now because when they stop and observe the world around them, they know in their heart it is not right. What our page is ‘telling you to do’ is realize the impact of the choices that you make extend beyond you and are radiated out to the entire world like waves from a pebble dropped into a pond.

This movement may be new but it has always existed because it is based on the creative guiding principle that governs all things. What started as a flickering idea in the mind of a single human being has now grown into a worldwide movement. This is how energy works; it is the basic guiding principle of creation in the known universe. It cannot be stopped. As Albert Einstein said...this is not philosophy, this is physics. Like a few small burning embers scattered throughout a forest, each individual focused on this positive change has sparked the flame in others around them. Those small embers begin to gain intensity as the energy spreads further to those around them and soon what started as a few small embers burning individually has amassed into a raging inferno which will continue to burn and spread long after the original ember has gone out. This is similar to the way thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle without shortening its own life. It can only be extinguished when all the fuel is gone, and our fuel is the human spirit which has burned deep in the hearts of all men since the dawn of time. So long as man exists, so shall this idea. The real 'Spirit of the Season' has always been, and always will be, the human spirit. This is the time, this is the moment, where we stand up united to return balance to the whole of humanity by welcoming the return of Truth to all mankind.

Occupy Christmas


Human need vs corporate greed.

THEY HATE US FOR OUR FREEDOM

The sweet irony of jingolistic Propaganda when it's used back on the oppressors...

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive???

Having read Joni McFarlane's editorial of this week in the Crowsnest Promoter Occupiers struck a nerve I was aghast at both the misinformation and her analysis that this movement was a done deal. While also suggesting that the protesters were behind the violence we have been seeing, rather than the police and authorities, in most cases.

First of all, Canada did not escape the financial collapse. In fact the Harper government gave our banks $75 billion of our tax dollars in bailouts, despite the fact they neither asked for it, needed it, or wanted it? And if she thinks our economy being a commodities based economy for the most part is stable and will remain so with everything that is going on in a world that is tightening its belts and cutting back, then I've got to assume she either does not know what is really going on, or more likely, part of the concerted effort by our media to 'spin' this global movement as nothing but hippies and the great unwashed belly aching about their collective misfortunes, only. Never mind our dependency on the U.S. market that is both in a major spiraling downturn and becoming more and more protectionist with each passing day. And in this regard let us also not forget the 'lag effect'. i.e. 'when America sneezes, we catch the cold' (usually about 6 months to a year later). Hard economic times are already here with 1 in 6 children going to bed hungry every night in this country, with things only going to get much worse. Seniors are struggling, with more and more of them relying on food banks like so many others in our society are now forced to do, homelessness is reaching epidemic levels, joblessness for youth and others is at record highs, growing inflation is hurting us all in our pocket books daily... the list goes on and on...

I suggest Joni and others of her ilk do some reading and 'edumacate' themselves in this area. Suggested reading:

• The Truth About Canada, by Mel Hurtig
• The Price of Citizenship, by Michael B. Katz
• The Working Poor, by David K. Shipler

Mel Hutig's book is especially relevant in that it shows quite clearly (Statistics Canada - is this why the conservatives want to get rid of this vital tool?) how Canada has been sold out and how poor we really are in so many ways that totally justifies Occupy movements in this country as well. Maybe, even more so than to our neighbour to the south, and elsewhere?

Unfortunately, media in Canada are the most concentrated in the world - and our laws to protect the public interest from excessive media power are the weakest anywhere. As a result, the message is not getting through to the people because of the conservative right-wings domination of mainstream media and control of the message, as evidenced by Joni's editorial... and so many others doing the bidding of the 1%ers.

Occupy: Canadian media turns its back on the homeless, the marginalized, the disenfranchised

Secondly, with Occupy movements taking to the streets in at least 1600 cities in the U.S. with at times tens of thousands marching at any given time in anyone of those cities, almost on a daily basis, it is laughable how the media attempts to dismiss this movement (especially here in Canada) as a done deal. "Lets go home and forget about all this nonsense." Continue being wage and debt slaves to a system in desperate need of an overhaul and/or replacement. No Joni, I don't think that is going to happen despite you and your masters best efforts at wanting it so, because "You can crush the flowers, but you can't stop the spring".

Occupy Wall Street: Civil society's awakening


Comment: As the quote below suggests, our country's media in the last few years has been hijacked by the far right to serve their interests at our expense, by attempting to change how we see ourselves.

Today, corporatocracy rules... that needs to change! Which in part is what the Occupy movement is all about. Building a better world for all, rather than just for a few. You are the 99%ers! The whole world is watching and soon the whole world will be marching too! Join in and be the change you want to see in the world.


You alter the character of a nation by changing how it sees itself. You change how it sees itself by changing the media.

What's the buzz? Tell me what's a-happening

Here's what's happening...

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

Moral dilemma for our times

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

VIDEO: For What It's Worth - Buffalo Springfield

For all of the Wall Street Movement protesters! "Young people speaking their minds, getting so much resistance from behind."

"Nobody's right if everybody's wrong" is my favorite line from this song.





We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.

Mr. Mayor, 50% of nothing is still nothing

A few days ago I read somewhere that mayor and council are wanting to raise the penalty for not paying your property taxes on time from 10% to 50%. To me this is the epitome of suits having no idea of what is going on in their own neighbourhood, or in our case, municipality.

I mean, it would stand to reason that people who do not pay their property taxes on time cannot afford to. Increasing their penalty during these tough economic times will not change the fact that when someone can't pay, they can't pay, and therefore should not be taken further advantage of because of a cash strapped and morally deficient mayor and council.

Council's decision is no different than cops who give people tickets (fines) for panhandling. Obviously the person panhandling is doing so because they got no money... especially for tickets! Unless this is a government make work project to get those panhandlers out there 'hustling' for the man, so they can pay more and more... tickets?

Or is this council's way of getting back at one of their own (I remember a news item a few months back stating one of our councillors had not paid his property tax bill for this year by the June deadline)? If so, then many innocent residents will be hurt in the name of political opportunism. Hope you are proud of yourselves, Boys!

Either way our local government should be looking at helping people by lifting them up, not weighing them down by taking advantage of them in order to fill their coffers that them and their kind emptied in the first place.


p.s. Maybe we need an Occupy Municipal Hall to get the message out to mayor and council about those who are not of their class who are going through tough economic times right now, with even more to come? This lack of public awareness by council is appalling and goes to show once again that the elite here look after the elite only, and f--k everybody else.


They are all masters at pissing on our leg, and then while smiling, tell us "it must be raining!

Message to my blogging buddies

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

VIDEO: Occupy Wall Street Declares Goldman Sachs Guilty

General Assembly holds mock trial and journalist Chris Hedges reads indictment accusing Goldman Sachs of financial crimes against humanity.

To watch this video in full-screen mode click here.



Comment: Just finished Chris Hedges book Empire of Illusion: The end of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle which has been a very good read on our modern new world of illusion that has eery similarities to Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Recall movie on corporate fascist totalitarianism.

For an excellent synopsis on this book go here.

For a review go here.

What is most people's reality today... but that of illusion? Wake up people! Read the book.


Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

OCCUPY THE MEDIA

BE the media. Anyone with a cell phone camera can do a more thorough and honest job of reporting than any of the old media outlets we can think of... especially our local ones here in the Crowsnest Pass.

p.s. do you think they even know there is a world-wide (Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global) public consciousness awakening going on right now, called the Occupy Movement? Even our one and only independent newspaper here in town engages in a media blackout. Some independent, hey? Then again, we all know by now that both papers are nothing more than corporate and establishment hacks and therefore are always on the wrong side of the issues with respect to the needs and wants of the people, especially those on the bottom rungs of societies ladder, that now with every day that goes by is starting to include the middle and higher rungs too.

Today on a 10 rung ladder it is only the top rung that counts. The Occupy Movement is all about changing that. Be the change you want to see... get involved! Do something!! Even if it is only cancelling a subscription or ad, sharing a paper instead of buying one, or reading them for free like I do at my local grocery store :-) Seriously, support those who truly inform and tell the truth and boycott the rest!

More for the needy, less for the greedy.

Comment: Here's an idea whose time has come. Thanks Jeff!


In a world where media set the public agenda and drive the dialogue, those things media ignore may as well not exist.

Too important to fail: Gratitude for the Occupy movement

By Lawrence Lewis
for Daily Kos

At the end of this month, many Americans will gather for ritual celebrations of gratitude for blessings real, imagined and mythical, but this year there is reason to celebrate something spontaneous and unexpected, something still emerging and unpredictable, something that has awakened long dormant ideals and dreams that transcend both history and politics and that speaks directly to the fundamental core of the human spirit. This year there is reason to celebrate a reawakening of hope—a hope not grounded in one person or one political or social faction, but a hope in the possibility of the triumph of the best that humanity can be. And this is a pure secular or non-denominational prayer or expression of gratitude to all who have participated or in any positive way contributed to the Occupy effort.

From one small band of activists on one small street, we now see a movement gone global, both inspired by and now inspiring other similar movements all around the globe. The world's most powerful aristocrats, politicians and presumptive royals of industry would have us believe that certain artificially concocted and often nefarious economic structures are Too Big To Fail, but the reality is that both the world and humanity will survive just fine without any single corporation or any conglomeration of corporations and industries. But the human race cannot survive without its basic sense of humanity. Only that is truly Too Big To Fail. And with politics and industry too often serving no positive purpose or common good, it is not those who have accumulated various forms of power that are coalescing to save us; it is people. Seemingly nameless, seemingly faceless, rising in the streets, armed with nothing but an accumulated outrage at the failures of our politics and industry and a profound sense of shared responsibility and determination in proving that things can be made better. That people can be better. That societies can function better. That the pretty words bedizening the entablatures and cathedral foyers of superficially glittering institutions prove incompatible with how those institutions function.

The Occupy movement has succeeded not only in changing the national economic dialogue from the callous abstractions of Austerity Summer to the reality that tens of millions of innocent people are being ground down by the gears of a political and economic system that seems immune to the human capacities for sympathy and empathy and community; the Occupy movement has succeeded in awakening those who retain the human and social capacities that the political and economic system apparently are incapable even of recognizing.

But the Occupy movement also has demonstrated that even the wounded, the dispossessed, the marginalized, and the forgotten are still capable of those human and social capacities. Without overt or explicit leadership or hierarchy, living in crudely constructed camps in parks and urban plazas, with little external and no institutional assistance, the Occupy movement has spontaneously self-organized into diverse and highly individualized communities. The Occupy movement has demonstrated the very meaning of community. While the powers that be would have us believe the Hobbesian conception of human beings as by nature cruel and selfish—thereby apparently hoping to justify the repetitive demonstrations of their own cruelty and selfishness—the Occupy movement has revealed something else. The human spirit can be crushed but it will not be broken. The atrophied sense of basic human decency that drives so much of our our political and economic system and so many of those that have clawed their ways to the penthouses of its hierarchies does not define human nature. It defines a type of human nature. But however much that type of human nature succeeds in hoarding the nation's and the world's material wealth, it remains, in every meaningful sense, destitute. The Occupy movement is there to remind us. To reveal us. To revivify us.

From my own personal experiences with those living in the Occupy communities, it seems obvious that different people have arrived for different reasons. Some in the media want to concoct a false conflict between the explicitly politically motivated and those who already were homeless and hungry and alone, as if there is a meaningful human difference. Because just by showing up, just by participating in and abiding by the emerging ethos of non-violent and mutually supportive community, those not previously politically motivated also are providing living, breathing proof of the larger premise. Things in this country do not have to be the way they are. This is not who people are. This is not genetic or glandular or otherwise hardwired into human nature. Even people with the least reason to be so can be better than some would have us all believe. If you don't believe it, go visit your local Occupy camp. I have witnessed first aid tents, organized sanitation, and patience and mutual respect even as people distribute and share limited supplies of food. I have heard or read of people training each other in non-violence, and of cleaning up the messes made by the relatively tiny number who have succumbed to their baser natures. And all of this in the face of threats and abuse and other forms of disregard and maltreatment by authorities and propagandists of authority who apparently feel threatened by the concepts of democracy and justice and community and humanity.

At the beginning of this month that will end with many Americans gathering for ritual celebrations of gratitude for blessings real, imagined and mythical, I want to express my own gratitude to all living in or participating in the Occupy movement. It doesn't matter what brings people to the movement. What matters is that they are there. Living it. Experiencing it. Making it happen. Making it matter. If you are camped in the parks and plazas, if you are lending support by bringing food or shelter, if you are writing about it, speaking about it, or otherwise bearing witness to it—I want to thank you. This is from me, personally, to each of you, personally. Because this is about issues so enormous, but it is also about the importance and dignity of every single person on the planet. It could not be more global, and it could not be more personal. In a world politically and economically dominated by those Too Big To Care, the ostensibly small have proved once again the greatness that resides, albeit sometimes dormant or latent, in every one us. If we only awaken to the possibility of realizing it. If we only awaken. I want to thank every individual who is creating a collective human movement that is Too Important To Fail. It's not only what you're doing, it's how you're doing it. Because the present does not have to be what it has been. The future is still ours to invent. With a world around us and within us in so many ways imploding, the Occupy movement has revealed and opened a path forward. It may be the only path forward.


The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.

BCMI (Rusty's) Fire burns down local hotel in Blairmore (Crowsnest Pass)

One of my facebook friends just posted spectacular pictures of a fire at the Best Canadian Motor Inn (BCMI) in Blairmore, in the Crowsnest Pass.

Click image to enlarge

Check them out here at Sasha JaegerBaird's FB page.


UPDATE: Nov. 06 - 1:11 pm: My wife and I went down to take a look for ourselves as to how bad the fire was and it was pretty bad. The rooms area has pretty much been spared but the front lobby, kitchen, dining area and lounge are a complete write off. Spoke briefly with Jamie Margetak, our Blairmore Fire Chief and with Jim Drain who was there with a crane to take the air conditioner off the roof before it caves in, possibly endangering the firemen who are still working in the building trying to determine the cause of the fire.

Also, while there, I and at least one or two other locals were interviewed by Alesia Fieldberg from CTV Lethbridge who should be running this as a news story on tonights news.

Meanwhile, here are some more pictures that I took myself with my cellphone while down there today...

Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

Saturday night humour: the bouncing breasts that couldn't anymore

Click image to enlarge.

No matter how far you go... there u r....

VIDEO: Oakland General Strike draws tens of thousands in protest

Haven't been able to blog much in the last week or so as I have been working hard again as a trucker, and nigger for the man, in order to feed the machine run by the banksters and corporations (with backing of our police state government) that exploits my kind (99%er) in every way imaginable... each and every day. But I am encouraged to see the Occupy Movement is gaining steam, especially in the states, like this one here in Oakland on Wednesday...

Make sure to check out the first minute or so of this video to see the vast numbers of people taking part in this general strike in support of the Occupy Movement. Pretty impressive!




Comment: Meanwhile, MSM in Canada pretends none of this is happening with their ongoing blackouts of the Occupy Movement events happening around the world, including Oakland, and especially those in Canadian cities from coast to coast to coast. Fortunately for me and those like me I don't rely on our local corporate hacks at CTV and CBC with their lies, censorship and propaganda to tell me what is really going on at home and around the world. Today there are so many other reliable news sources such as Democracy Now for one that do a very good job at full-filling my needs for knowing the truth about the world around me.

MSM paints reality as an illusion and illusion as reality, and therefore should be avoided at all costs. People need to use their power in numbers to effect change much like what this young lady has already done successfully...

Victory over debit fee is a sign of consumer power

Money movers and Occupy Wall Street shakers rattle US banking world

Boycott MSM and hurt them where it counts... in their pocketbooks. That's how to effect change in this area. Be a force for good against evil. Fight back against the slave masters and reclaim your freedom. Its not too late to change your world for the better, but it will be if you don't get involved now, while the iron is hot... tomorrow may be too late...

"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."



The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

VIDEO: Minister Farrakhan Blasts Media & Reporters During Radio Interview Commercial!

Its not a black vs white.

Its not rich vs poor.

Its not old vs young.

Its not Communist vs Capitalists.

Its banksters vs the people.

These banksters have been playing this game for centuries.

They loot the economy and then rush in and buy it all up for the cheap.

Lets get it right this time people, we must.





Mr. Farrakhan has every right to be in a foul mood.

Hell, every rational, logical, thinking human being should be in a foul mood right now. The suffering this planet has continually been subjected to is NOT a fact of life. War is nothing more than a tool for bankers to plunge both nations into debt and enslave their people to a central bank.

Iraq and Libya said "no" to the bankers, and look what happened. Iran has consistently said "no", and the lies flow nonstop about Iran seeking WMDs.



When the media refuses to inform and the public no longer questions, that truly is the beginning of the end of democracy.

Occupy Movement: a picture is worth a thousand words

... this proves it.

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.