By Chris Fell -

The Municipality of Meaford has a new fire chief.

Mike Molloy officially took the reins of the Meaford Fire Department on Thursday, September 30. He is replacing former chief Steve Nickels, who is retiring after nearly five years as the municipality’s first full-time fire chief.

Molloy is a 16-year veteran of the fire department, and before becoming chief, he served as the municipality’s fire prevention and training officer. He is also an instructor with the Ontario Fire College in Gravenhurst.

While Molloy is now a career firefighter, it wasn’t a path he had originally considered, he said. After moving to Meaford in 1993, a neighbour convinced him to apply for the volunteer department. He was accepted, and immediately discovered something he enjoyed about the being a firefighter.

“To me, it was the ultimate way of giving back to the community. I couldn’t think of any better way,” Molloy said.

The more involved he became, the more interested in training he became. He said a small department like Meaford’s requires firefighters that are multi-faceted, and as such he looked to broaden his training. He became certified in fire prevention, incident management and other leadership skills, and still continues to upgrade his training.

That focus on continuous training is something he wants to carry forward to the department. He said the department is already hosting in-house training seminars, which not only improve Meaford’s firefighters, but also attracts firefighters from surrounding departments. Molloy plans to continue and expand that program further, he said.

“I’m excited about the direction we are going and I want to keep going,” he said.

The Meaford and District Fire Department moved into a new building last year, which offers them more space, better amenities and the opportunity for improved training, Molloy said. The department is also expected to take delivery of a new tanker truck within the coming weeks.

via Simcoe Article: New fire chief in Meaford.

Notice of Road Closures Friday October 1, 2010

DETOUR NOTICE & ROAD CLOSURES

In preparation for the OPP Golden Helmets & Rotary Club Parade, barricades will be set up at 3:00 pm to exclude vehicular traffic along the parade route and surrounding streets.  This allows for the Golden Helmets to practice & perform, and for the parade to take place. The barricades will be removed when the parade is over (approximately 6:30 pm)There will be detour signs to guide affected motorists to alternate routes.The purpose of this flyer is to alert you to the temporary road closures. Should you need to enter or exit from the affected areas during this time, parade marshals will direct you to alternate routes.If you have questions please direct them to the Meaford OPP.

Mid September- Mid October Location: Entire Municaplity of Meaford . Downtown Meaford & Harbour Pavilion Thousands of scarecrows descend upon Meaford from mid-September to mid-October for the annual invasion. Come out on  October 1st for a great night of family fun! The OPP Golden Helmets Motorcyle Precision Team kicks things off from 5:00 to 5:45 on Sykes Street. The Rotary Club parade procced the Golden Helments from  downtown at 6pm ending at the Harbor Pavillion followed by the Scotiabank Family Festival from 6:30 to 9pm at the harbour. Enjoy scarecrows, bands, floats, cars, motorcycles,food,contest and much more! Contact: Meaford & District Chamber of Commerce Phone: 519-538-1640 or 1-888-MEAFORD Email: tourism@mdcc.ca Website: www.visitmeaford.ca

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 6:30pm – 9:00pm Location: Meaford Hall North Gallery

Annual General Meeting featuring guest speaker Anna Bradford – Director of Culture for the city of Hamilton – speaking about Municipal Cultural Planning. She will be providing insight into how best to utilize and include community consultation and decision making, creating social and economic benefits and providing a framework for a culturally sensitive approach to urban planning and informed environmental, social and economic policy-making.

Also demonstrations by ShopMeaford.com throughout the evening.

Contact: Jamie Pettit or Sheila Ross
Phone: 519-538-1640 or 888-MEAFORD
Email: business@mdcc.ca
Website: http://www.mdcc.ca

www.meaford.ca

Amber Easton has gone from $80,000 a year in salary to scrambling for work. At a time in her life when she should be scaling the corporate ladder, she has instead spiraled into a deep depression. She recently lost her car and now faces eviction from her apartment.

Just last week, the 35-year-old longtime working professional attended two job fairs with friends in the Detroit area. They stood in line for over three hours with hundreds of professionals of all types.

“It was a real eye-opener to see the caliber of people we were in line with — very educated with vast skill sets,” Easton said in an e-mail. “Afterwards, we went to the restaurant located in the same hotel and it was filled with unemployed professionals sharing their story, from engineers to graphic designers to marketing professionals.”

Easton’s saga began in July 2007 when she traded in her job as a corporate compliance officer to attend law school, what she thought would help advance her career. But after a year of law school, she decided it wasn’t for her. By then, her old job was gone and the job market had shrunk.

“It’s hard not to be depressed during a time like this,” she wrote iReport.com. “I never imagined in a million years that I would be in such a situation at my age and at this point in my career. I am humiliated. I am praying for everyone else out there is who are facing the same problems.”

She has applied to 70 different companies but gotten few leads. She recently went through a rigorous interview process for one job in another state, but to no avail. Share your economic survivor story

Every day, she searches for new job possibilities and every day results in more desperation. She estimates she’s making $20,000 — “if that” — as a contract employee working from her home. “I just haven’t made enough to keep up.”

Her Detroit neighborhood a couple years ago was booming, she said, but now “it’s like a ghost town around here.”

“It’s bad everywhere, but it’s so, so bad here,” she said.

Across the nation, people like Easton are feeling the pinch. Good jobs have evaporated. Former full-time employees are now working part-time contract positions just to get by.

Nearly 2.6 million jobs were lost during 2008, the highest yearly total since the end of World War II in 1945. This week alone, major corporations have announced more than 80,000 job cuts, bringing this year’s total to well over 200,000…

Continue Reading  www.cnn.com

 Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor, was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee on Friday.

“This is our opportunity. I cannot do this by myself,” he told the crowd at the annual RNC meeting Friday. “God bless you, and God bless our party. … It’s going to be a new day.”

Steele also told his fellow party members that it will be a “great honor to spar” with President Obama.

For the duration of his campaign, Steele fought perceptions that he was too moderate to lead the party because of his blue-state roots and his former membership in the Republican Leadership Council, a group that sought to curb the influence of social conservatives in the party.

“For so long, we’ve allowed the Democrats to define us, we’ve allowed the media to define us, and so it’s important for us to begin to establish with clarity who we are, what we believe as we begin to go out and take, I think, a brand new message to the American people,” he said Friday. Watch Steele’s remarks to the RNC »

Steele brings a national profile to the committee, having shot to fame in the political world during an underdog Senate bid in 2006 distinguished by a series of clever TV commercials. He has since become a fixture on cable talk shows, experience that boosted his reputation as the best communicator among the field of RNC candidates.

Earlier Friday, Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan, who was elected to lead the committee in 2007, dropped his re-election bid, telling committee members: “Obviously the winds of change are blowing here at the RNC.”

Duncan rose to address the committee after three disappointing rounds of balloting in the chairman’s election. He bled votes on every successive ballot, his support trickling to the other candidates in the race.

Despite the sometimes contentious nature of the campaign and criticism that the party suffered with him at the helm, Duncan told the crowd the race had been worth it.

“I thought this would be good for the party,” he said. “And I think it has been.”

Duncan earned a noisy round of applause when he said running the committee “has truly been the highlight of my life.”

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell also ended his run Friday, throwing his support to Steele, a fellow African-American candidate.

Blackwell had been in last place after four rounds of voting…

www.cnn.com

NATO representatives and lawmakers from alliance nations will meet in Iceland Thursday to discuss security challenges that are likely to arise as the Arctic Circle thaws.

“The economic interests are reflected in … competing claims by relevant stakeholders, and resumed military presence in the area,” NATO said on its Web site. “As it is a region of enduring strategic importance for NATO and allied security, developments in the High North require careful and ongoing examination.”

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 90 billion barrels of oil, 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are recoverable in the frozen region north of the Arctic Circle.

At the same time, Arctic water is warming so quickly that the entire region could be ice-free by 2013.

Already Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland are fighting to lay claim to the Arctic’s icy real estate.

Unlike Antarctica, which has a treaty that prohibits territorial claims, there is no agreement for the vast expanse of the Arctic. So questions about drilling rights and shipping lanes are somewhat murky.

According to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries are entitled to exclusive economic zones up to 200 miles from their shores. But some countries are trying to extend that zone….

www.cnn.com

Kofi Annan says the United Nations needs to be reformed.

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The worldwide economic recession has exposed a “crisis of global governance” that can only be addressed by the radical reform of the United Nations, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday as the World Economic Forum got under way in Switzerland.

“The current architecture of managing global affairs is broken and needs to be fixed,” Annan said on the opening morning of the five-day annual meeting of global political and business leaders. “We have major new players coming on the scene and they need to be integrated and given a voice.”

Referring to the U.N. Security Council, which gives permanent places and vetoing powers to the U.S., the UK, Russia, China and France, Annan said: “We cannot continue to run the world based on countries that won a war 60 years ago. It’s either destructive competition or cooperation. We live in an interdependent world and the only way to move forward is to cooperate.”

Annan is one of six co-chairs at this year’s WEF gathering, along with news tycoon Rupert Murdoch, HSBC Chairman Stephen Green, Werner Wenning of the German chemical group Bayer, Indian industrialist Anand G. Mahindra and Maria Ramos, Chief Executive of the South African transport group Transnet.

He also urged delegates to address three interconnected challenges: the global recession, energy and security, and climate change.

“It is important leaders work on ways of finding effective, far-reaching policies — even if they are radical — that will allow us to create sustainable economic growth and create jobs for those who are out of jobs,” Annan said.

Newscorp. CEO Murdoch said delegates needed to be “absolutely honest about where the world is at this point,” warning that the consequences of $50 trillion being wiped off personal fortunes had left people feeling “depressed and traumatized.”

“We’ve been living in the Western world way above our means. We’ve been on a great binge and it’s come to an end and we have to live though the correction,” Murdoch said.

But he said the downturn offered a chance to set about tackling issues of energy sufficiency and pollution.

“We must treat this crisis, whether it lasts for a year or five years, as an opportunity to set goals for how we want to come out of it. This is a time to shape the policies to help to solve some of those problems.”

HSBC boss Green said the banking industry needed to admit that it had not “covered itself in glory” in contributing to the collapse of the financial industry and called for continuing government intervention to “stop a nasty recession spiraling down into something else.”

But he said the major banks could contribute to solving the crisis as well: “I do not believe for a moment that you can have a successful economy without successful and properly functioning international capital markets.”

Wenning said he didn’t expect any solutions to emerge from this year’s meeting, but hoped delegates could achieve “a joint understanding of the reasons for the financial crisis” and called for a return to “the basics of sustainable behavior.” …

www.cnn.com

Every life is a book of secrets, ready to be opened. The secret of perfect love is found there, along with the secrets of healing, compassion, faith, and the most elusive one of all: who we really are. We are still mysteries to ourselves, despite the proximity of these answers, and what we most long to know remains lodged deep inside.  

We all want to know how to find a soul mate, what career would be most fulfilling, how to live a life with meaning, and how to teach our children well. We are looking for a personal breakthrough, a turning point, a revelation that brings with it new meaning. The Book of Secrets–a crystalline distillation of insights and wisdom accumulated over the lifetime of one of the great spiritual thinkers of our time–provides an exquisite new tool for achieving just that.

Because answers to the questions at the center of life are counterintuitive, they are often hidden from view, sequestered from our everyday gaze. In his ongoing quest to elevate our experience, bestselling author Deepak Chopra has isolated fifteen secrets that drive the narrative of this inspiring book–and of our lives. From “The World Is in You” and “What You Seek, You Already Are” to “Evil Is Not Your Enemy” and “You Are Truly Free When You Are Not a Person,” The Book of Secrets is rich with insights, a priceless treasure that can transport us beyond change to transformation, and from there to a sacred place where we can savor the nectar of enlightenment.

“The Book of Secrets is the finest and most profound of Deepak Chopra’s books to date. Want the answers to the secrets of life? Let me recommend that you start right here.” — Ken Wilber, author ofA Brief History of Everything

excerpt

Introduction: Opening the Book of Secrets

The greatest hunger in life is not for food, money, success, status, security, sex, or even love from the opposite sex. Time and again people have achieved all of these things and wound up still feeling dissatisfied—indeed, often more dissatisfied than when they began. The deepest hunger in life is a secret that is revealed only when a person is willing to unlock a hidden part of the self. In the ancient traditions of wisdom, this quest has been likened to diving for the most precious pearl in existence, a poetic way of saying that you have to swim far out beyond shallow waters, plunge deep into yourself, and search patiently until the pearl beyond price is found.

The pearl is also called essence, the breath of God, the water of life, holy nectar—labels for what we, in our more prosaic scientific age, would simply call transformation. Transformation means radical change of form, the way a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. In human terms, it means turning fear, aggression, doubt, insecurity, hatred, and emptiness into their opposites. Can this really be achieved? One thing we know for certain: The secret hunger that gnaws at people’s souls has nothing to do with externals like money, status, and security. It’s the inner person who craves meaning in life, the end of suffering, and answers to the riddles of love, death, God, the soul, good and evil. A life spent on the surface will never answer these questions or satisfy the needs that drive us to ask them. 

Finding the hidden dimensions in yourself is the only way to fulfill your deepest hunger.

After the rise of science, this craving for knowledge should have faded, but it has only grown stronger. There are no new “facts” to discover about life’s hidden dimensions. Nobody needs to peer at more CAT scans of patients undergoing a near-death experience or take more MRIs of yogis sitting deep in meditation. That phase of experimentation has done its work: We can be assured that wherever consciousness wants to go, the human brain will follow. Our neurons are capable of registering the highest spiritual experiences. In some ways, however, you and I know less about the mystery of life than our ancestors.

We live in the Age of the Higher Brain, the cerebral cortex that has grown enormously over the last few millennia, overshadowing the ancient, instinctive lower brain. The cortex is often called the new brain, yet the old brain held sway in humans for millions of years, as it does today in most living things. The old brain can’t conjure up ideas or read. But it does possess the power to feel and, above all, to be. It was the old brain that caused our forebears to sense the closeness of a mysterious presence everywhere in Nature.

That presence, which is found in every particle of creation, suffuses your life, too. You are a book of secrets waiting to be opened, although you probably see yourself in totally different terms. On a given day, you are a worker, a father or mother, husband or wife, a consumer combing the mall stores for something new, an audience member waiting impatiently for the next entertainment.

When you are living the truth of one reality, every secret reveals itself without effort or struggle.

It comes down to the age-old choice of separation or unity. Do you want to be fragmented, conflicted, torn between the eternal forces of darkness and light? Or do you want to step out of separation into wholeness? You are a creature who acts, thinks, and feels. Spirituality fuses these three into a single reality. Thinking doesn’t lord it over feeling; feeling doesn’t stubbornly resist the higher brain; doing occurs when both thought and feeling say, “This is right.” The one reality can be recognized because once you are there, you experience the flow of life without obstacles or resistance. In this flow, you encounter inspiration, love, truth, beauty, and wisdom as natural aspects of existence. The one reality is spirit, and the surface of life is only a disguise with a thousand masks that keeps us from discovering what is real. A thousand years ago, such a statement would have met with no argument. Spirit was accepted everywhere as the true source of life. Today, we have to look with new eyes at the mystery of existence, for as proud children of science and reason, we have made ourselves the orphans of wisdom.

Therefore, this book must work on two fronts. First, it must persuade you that there really is a mystery lying in the hidden dimensions of life. Second, it must inspire you to feel the passion and dedication required to get there. This isn’t a project to postpone until you are ready. You have been ready since the day you forgot to keep asking who you are and why you are here. Sadly, most of us keep shutting out thousands of experiences that could make transformation a reality. If it weren’t for the enormous effort we put into denial, repression, and doubt, each life would be a constant revelation.

Ultimately you have to believe that your life is worth investigating with total passion and commitment. It took thousands of tiny decisions to keep the book of secrets closed, but it takes only a single moment to open it again.

I take it literally when the New Testament says, “Ask and you will receive, knock and the door will be opened.” It’s that simple. You will know every secret about life when you can truly say I must know. I can’t wait a moment longer. Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree and Jesus wrestling with demons in the desert are symbolic of the same drama of the soul that you were born to repeat. Never doubt this: You are the most significant being in the world, because at the level of the soul you are the world. You don’t have to earn the right to know. Your very next thought, feeling, or action can begin to uncover the deepest spiritual wisdom, which flows as pure and free as mountain waters in spring. It isn’t possible for the self to keep secrets from itself forever, no matter how thoroughly we’ve been trained to believe otherwise.

Secret #1: The Mystery of Life Is Real

The life you know is a thin layer of events covering a deeper reality. In the deeper reality, you are part of every event that is happening now, has ever happened, or ever will happen. In the deeper reality, you know absolutely who you are and what your purpose is. There is no confusion or conflict with any other person on earth. Your purpose in life is to help creation to expand and grow. When you look at yourself, you see only love.

The mystery of life isn’t any of these things, however. It’s how to bring them to the surface. If someone asked me how to prove that there really is a mystery of life, the simplest proof would be just this enormous separation between deep reality and everyday existence. Ever since you and I were born, we’ve had a constant stream of clues hinting at another world inside ourselves. Haven’t you ever fallen into a moment of wonder? Such moments may come in the presence of beautiful music, or in the sight of natural beauty that sends a shiver up your spine. Or you may have looked out of the corner of your eye at something familiar—morning sunlight, a tree swaying in the wind, the face of someone you love as he or she sleeps—knowing in that moment that life was more than it appears to be.

Countless clues have come your way, only to be overlooked because they didn’t form a clear message. I have met an astonishing number of people whose spiritual beginnings were nothing short of amazing: As children, they may have seen a grandmother’s soul leave at the moment of her death, witnessed beings of light surrounding on a birthday, traveled beyond their physical bodies, or come home from school to see a beloved family member standing in the hallway, even though the person had just died in a terrible auto accident. (One man told me he was a “bubble boy” for the first ten years of his life, journeying in his bubble high over the city and away to unknown lands.) Millions of people—this is no exaggeration but testimony from public polls—have seen themselves bathed in a pearlescent white light at times. Or they heard a voice they knew came from God. Or they had invisible guardians in childhood, secret friends who protected them while they slept.

Eventually, it became clear to me that more people have had such experiences—truly secret voyages into a reality separated from this one by a flimsy veil of disbelief—than not. Parting the veil means changing your own perception. This is a personal, totally subjective, yet very real shift.

Where would you begin to solve a mystery that is everywhere, yet somehow never forms a whole message? A great sleuth like Sherlock Holmes would start his search from one elementary deduction: Something unknown wants to be known. A mystery that doesn’t want to be known will just keep retreating the closer you come to it. The mystery of life doesn’t behave that way: Its secrets are revealed immediately if you know where to look. But where is that?

The body’s wisdom is a good entry point into the hidden dimensions of life, because although completely invisible, the body’s wisdom is undeniably real—a fact that medical researchers began to accept in the mid-1980s. The former view was that the brain’s capacity for intelligence was unique. But then signs of intelligence began to be discovered in the immune system, and then in the digestive system. In both these systems, special messenger molecules could be observed circulating through every organ, bringing information to and from the brain, but also functioning on their own. A white cell that can distinguish between invading enemy bacteria and harmless pollen is making an intelligent decision, even though it floats in the bloodstream apart from the brain.

Ten years ago, it would have seemed absurd to speak of intestines being intelligent. The lining of the digestive tract was known to possess thousands of nerve endings, but these were just remote outposts of the nervous system—a way for it to keep in touch with the lowly business of extracting nutrition from food. Now it turns out that the intestines are not so lowly after all. Their scattered nerve cells form a finely tuned system for reacting to outside events—an upsetting remark at work, the threat of danger, a death in the family. The stomach’s reactions are just as reliable as the brain’s thoughts, and just as intricate. Your colon, your liver, and your stomach cells also think, only not in the brain’s verbal language. What people had been calling a “gut reaction” turned out to be a mere hint of the complex intelligence at work in a hundred thousand billion cells.

In a sweeping medical revolution, scientists have stepped into a hidden dimension that no one had ever suspected. Cells have been outthinking us for millions of years. In fact, their wisdom, more ancient than cortical wisdom, could be the best model for the only thing more ancient than they, which is the cosmos. Perhaps the universe has been outthinking us, too. No matter where I look, I sense what cosmic wisdom is trying to accomplish. It is much the same as what I myself want to accomplish—to grow, expand, and create—the main difference being that my body is cooperating with the universe better than I manage to.

Cells have no problem fully participating in the mystery of life. Theirs is a wisdom of total passion and commitment. So let’s see if we can link the qualities of bodily wisdom with the hidden dimensions we want to uncover: the wisdom you are already living.

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