Mike Dempsey

Former Union leader, forest ranger, Public Service Pension Board Director. Be the change you want to see. Help those you can, and be kind.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@adamemedia1 Bread and circus’s. Are you not entertained?

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@JohnCleese Bread and circus’s

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@JoshReynolds24 From Wikipedia….

[Alberta NDP @albertaNDP]

Danielle Smith appointed Jack Mintz to a panel making the economic case to remain in Canada. The same Jack Mintz who said Alberta has more reason to Albexit than Britain did for Brexit.

It’s just another example of Danielle Smith emboldening and empowering the very people who want to tear our country apart.

https://t.co/dMPNGGb7xD

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@CSLewisDaily The guy who introduced Brussels sprouts into our diets..

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@yegwave Half of Pierre’s constituents are separatists and he’s trying to pull a Danielle and appease everybody. That usually doesn’t work.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@weatherchannel Beaver Lake, Alberta.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@AnnieJacobsen I’m sure that they will name the app that can do that “Dr. Doolittle”. 🤔

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@JonathanJColton A.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@albertaNDP @MerlinofCanada Of course she’s a separatist. This “sovereign state” within Canada BS is precisely that. Same as the old sovereignty association nonsense of the 1990’s Party Québécois.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

Ditto.

[Mario Manelli 🇨🇦 @MarioManelli_]

If Danielle Smith announces a referendum on separation tomorrow, despite all that has happened, with stolen voter data and lack of First Nations approval, I will start making plans to leave Alberta. It's that simple. I think many others will as well. #abpol

[🇨🇦Wayne🇨🇦 @Reil76]

I’m going to say what everyone is too scared to say.

Canada is under attack. Not with missiles. With data. With money. With useful idiots waving provincial flags while American operatives pull the strings from Michigan boardrooms.

3 million Albertans doxxed. The US Ambassador’s fingerprints on the weapon. UCP insiders in the room watching it happen. Trump officials holding secret meetings about carving up this country like it’s a real estate deal. Because to them? IT IS.

Trump said it himself. 51st state. He wasn’t joking. He never jokes.

And while all of this is happening, @PierrePoilievre , the man who wants to lead this country, is hiding under his desk hoping nobody asks him which side he’s on. PIERRE.

The guy who built his entire career screaming about government overreach can���t find his voice when a foreign government is actively funding the dismemberment of Canada?
What do you know, Pierre? What are you afraid of?

Because here’s what I see. A movement that appeared out of nowhere. Fully funded. Fully organized. With American tech. American strategy. American money. And an American ambassador running interference in plain sight.

This isn’t Alberta vs Ottawa.
This is foreign acquisition.
They’re not trying to free Alberta.
They’re trying to own it.
The oil. The land. The leverage.
And some of our own politicians are either too compromised, too cowardly, or too bought to stop it.

Canada is not for sale.
#cdnpoli

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@AnnieJacobsen Well, that’s going out with a bang.

[🇨🇦Wayne🇨🇦 @Reil76]

Lets actually sit down and do the math on Alberta separation, because it seems like nobody else wants to.

Right now, Alberta’s budget is roughly balanced. About $70-75 billion in, same amount out. It’s not perfect, but it works. The second you leave Canada, you don’t just stop sending money to Ottawa. You inherit the whole damn machine they were running on your behalf: borders, military, pensions, Employment Insurance, courts, federal policing, Indigenous obligations, foreign affairs, currency, central banking, all that shit.
That’s not some rounding error. That’s an extra $30 to $60 billion a year in new costs slamming onto a province that was already spending every dollar it made. So now you’re looking at $105-135 billion in annual spending against $75 billion in revenue on a good year. That’s a $30-60 billion hole every single year, and nobody in the separation movement wants to talk about it.
And it gets worse. You’re also picking up $120-150 billion in inherited federal debt. That’s another $4-6 billion a year just in interest payments before you’ve even hired your first border agent or opened a single embassy. Where the hell is that money supposed to come from?
How do you close a gap that big? You’d need brutal spending cuts, a new sales tax, higher income taxes, higher corporate taxes, and you’d better pray oil stays above $80 a barrel. Even then you’re white-knuckling it.
The real kicker is the oil revenue swings like crazy. Your new government costs sure as hell don’t. You can’t call up the military or the pension guys and say “Hey, prices are down this month, take some time off.” The bills keep coming whether WTI cooperates or not. And now there’s no Bank of Canada to bail you out when shit gets sideways. You’re on your own. Good luck with that.
This isn’t about politics or which team you’re on. It’s just arithmetic. You want to be pissed at Ottawa? Fine, there’s plenty of reasons to be fucking pissed. But don’t confuse being pissed off with actually having a plan. Right now the separation crowd is long on anger and real short on math that adds up.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@AnnieJacobsen In order to beat a foe, one must “ know thy enemy”. Thx for this, Annie.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@JonathanJColton A. Jack Kirby

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@pratikdunya A professional wears safety equipment. A professional would not waste that much wood. A professional would cut that tree no more than 30 cm above the ground. Sorry, that’s ‘not’ a professional.

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@catholicpat Nothing in the NT talks about angelic /demon battles when Jesus descends to the dead to preach the gospel. Mel Gibson is a MAGA supporter and I fear this movie will be the violent kind that Trump and Hegseth would approve of. And “acid trip?”

[Mike Dempsey @Maytheforest]

@_BattleForTruth White Jesus isn’t historically accurate. Is this MAGA Jesus?