TO: Jordan Peterson & John Rustad
Either I’ve made a large mistake in logic, or you have.
Some of the biggest mistakes in logic occur when you believe the big bad wolf, or, when you drink the Kool-aid in today’s idiom.
Another large area for mistakes lies in taking the word of credentialed “experts”. Or, of sales people – – if it’s done without your own independent research and critical thinking.
A Mistake in Government Policy can have huge implications for me, my friends, relatives, and community – – in the short, and in the long term. For Seven Generations, in fact. It’s worth my while to tell you what I know.
A brief story illustrates a slick manoeuvre with accounting (or not accounting, to hold people to account):
The 1990’s, Regina, SK. Provincial Budget time. The Govt of Sask pie graph for Expenditures appeared in the Leader-Post newspaper.
What the heck? “Government Programs and Services” showed Education, Health, Roads . . . but nothing for Servicing the Debt.
It had been running annually at 33% – – 1/3 of every tax dollar I gave to the Provincial Govt benefited the banksters, the money-lenders. I didn’t much care for that! Where did the piece of the pie graph go that represented what we were paying for servicing the public debt?
Sleight-of-hand
The Deputy Minister of Finance agreed to meet with me. . . . A good guy, forthright. He explained that the pie had been RE-DEFINED. (My translation – a professor waved a magic wand in a Task Force; the cost of servicing the Provincial Govt Debt disappeared.) Never mind that the money paid to the Banksters reduced the amount available for “Government Programs and Services”. I wanted to know how much we citizens were paying for debt servicing. It’s an indicator of sound, or UNsound Financial Management.
Debt costs were re-defined after a period of mergers and take-overs in the business sector led to big increases in the costs of debt servicing. Corporations wanted and got a change in Accounting Principles to slide the costs off the front page.
Tax-payors Be Ware of: a similar sleight-of-hand when evaluating the uranium-nuclear industry.
The accumulated liability for waste disappeared. Where’d it go? . . . An accounting sleight-of-hand moved it off the books of Cameco, Bruce Power, Point Le Preau. It was re-defined with legal papers to belong to the NWMO (Nuclear Waste Management Organization).
You can see the problem if it DIDN’T get RE-DEFINED. My numbers are old, but one sure thing: the numbers haven’t gone down in the meanwhile!
Using the industry’s own numbers: 2009. The estimated cost of building a deep geological repository for nuke waste disposal is $20 BILLION dollars. The cost of transporting 20,000 truckloads of the stuff (not counting all that has been produced since then) was, in 2009,
YOU CAN SEE HOW IT WORKS: (which is maybe why Premier Danielle Smith of Alberta is encouraging continuing and more research into innovative technology like electricity from hydrogen.
As long as the public continues to finance the uranium-nuke industry, there isn’t anyone who’s going to stop it. More waste is going to be produced, to be added to the mountains of waste that have already been produced.
What/Who does not have to be responsible for the waste they generate?
I don’t know if I can get as stupid as you think I am.