The Central Ganglion

Economic Inequality.

2011-08-19T07:20:00.000-07:00

Excellent clip on economic inequality in the United States from PBS worth 11 minute look.

Do It For The Chickens

2011-08-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

Louise just found this website. It's an appeal from the WSPA, the World Society for the Protection of Animals, to the McDonald's restaurant chain, to stop using eggs from hens raised in cages, and use only the eggs from free-run hens.
Since McDonald's uses only free-run eggs in Europe and the UK, there's no excuse for their Canadian restaurants still using eggs from caged hens. Their USA restaurants have already pledged to phase in free-run eggs this year.
Check out the letter-writing campaign sponsored by WSPA. Send McDonald's a note. Odds are, even if you never eat at McDonald's there's one in your area anyway, so write to them as a neighbour and part of the food community.

Avoiding GMO Foods

2011-06-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

Louise found a useful article in Chatelaine magazine, about how to avoid eating foods containing genetically-modified food organism products. Ya know that the times, they are a-changin' when even a fashion magazine (but one that earnestly tries every year or so to re-write itself as a relevant magazine for women) speaks up on the GMO issue!
At any rate, check out Louise's post on our blog Q-zine about food. One of the links mentioned in the Chatelaine article is for this new project to certify foodstuffs that do not contain GMO products -- the Non-GMO project. Nice to think that there'll be yet another seal of approval to help me make product choices. Usually my choice is "don't buy stuff" but gee, there are days I want a chocolate bar or potato chips.
Luckily, on the potato chip front, the Canadian company Old Dutch Foods Ltd. has two new products out: lightly-salted regular chips, and lightly-salted Rip-l chips. The rippled ones in particular taste & crunch real good, and I'm planning to bring them and the regulars to a family barbecue this summer. Any time I get chips with an ingredients list three items long (potatoes, canola oil, salt) I'm thrilled to avoid MSG and preservatives and so on. Chips made in Calgary from Canadian potatoes -- that's regional to western Canada if not local. Now to lean on the company to fry 'em in canola oil that's not made from Round-up Ready canola!

Mason Bees

2011-02-15T10:19:00.000-08:00

*ftweet!*
All right, so we've all heard about the problems with honeybee hives over the last year or two. (If you haven't, well, open a search engine and read a little of the kerfuffle.) There are some personal improvements people can do to make up for the effects that our urban living has on pollinators. Honeybees are only the most well-known of these insects that make it possible to propagate most of our food plants. Another kind of pollinator is the mason bee.
These are good-tempered bees that don't live in big hives. They live in little homes they make out of nooks and crannies in trees and odd places, some of which can be in suburban yards. Mason bees are better neighbours than wasps or ordinary bees. A lot of people are learning about mason bees and installing little houses for them.
If you're interested in learning more, there's a mason bee course starting up at Swan Lake Nature Centre. For people who live outside the Victoria area, check at your local recreation centres, nature centres, and libraries for local programs on mason bees. If there isn't one set up, get cracking! Program planners need local people to ask for activities like this and facilitate them!

SWAN LAKE NATURE SANCTUARY
presents
Build a Mason bee Condo
Invite an amazing pollinator into your garden - BUILD them a CONDO!
Local expert, Gord Hutchings, will familiarize you with the life-cycle and habits of the Orchard Mason Bee. Then you’ll make your own observation Mason bee condo so you can observe the adult bees building the brood chamber, depositing the pollen store, laying eggs, and watch the developing larva and pupa. All materials are supplied.
Sunday, March 13th 9 - 11:30 am
$55 members $70 non-members
call to register
3873 Swan Lake Road, Victoria, BC, 250.479.0211 www.swanlake.bc.ca
www.facebook.com/SwanLakeChristmasHillNatureSanctuary

An Optimistic Book for a Happy New Year

2011-01-01T12:13:00.000-08:00

So this year, my resolution is to express a practical optimism. Not just a wishful thinking, positive attitude kind of thing, but an authentic optimism that is actually well-founded in recent experience, with reasonable expectations for the near future.
With that in mind, I've been reading a book that Bernie took out from the public library. Note that public libraries are a very effective expression of practical optimism! Also note that our local public library, the Greater Victoria Public Library, (yes, only in Victoria is it necessary to look up the public library in the phone book under not L or P nor even V, but G) is doing a crackerjack good job, and will even be keeping all branches open on Sundays from 1:00 to 5:00 pm from January 2 to April 17. Check out the article written by Tom Hawthorn for the Globe and Mail on December 10 -- an article that praises this library in particular.
As for the book I've been reading, it's Raj Patel's book The Value of Nothing. The subtitle goes on to add: Why everything costs so much more than we think. You can read about it at Patel's website, or do a search on his name and the title to find some videos and reviews.
The Value of Nothing is a great book to read, and then give a copy to any snotty person you know who keeps annoying you with opinions about economic policies and the free market system. It doesn't really matter what that snotty person's annoying opinions are. My own opinion about the free market system is that it isn't an organized system, it's not free by any of several definitions discussed by Patel, and it bears little resemblance to the markets where I sold produce, wool, and books for over fifteen years. Yet I am now hoping to go forth and be less snotty myself when others wish to share their opinions about economics in informal discussions. And I owe that spirit of good-mannered cooperation to Raj Patel's book.
Patel has done his homework here, and has referenced several historical and contemporary economists. Reading this book makes me feel smarter, not dumber. There are just enough footnotes to explain some details without whipsawing the reader back and forth in bewilderment.
It's no surprise that Patel can tie the price of a cup of coffee and a Big Mac to global climate change and democracy. And that's without any cheap slogans or party rhetoric. Read it -- or his bestseller Stuffed and Starved -- and form your own opinions.

David Harvey explains economic crisis

2010-10-22T11:01:00.000-07:00

Bruce Curtis (Carlton University) turned me onto this fantastic little video:
"David Harvey - The Animated Crisis of Capitalism"

Or view the unanimated lecture

or at YouTube: David Harvey

Canada's Stonehenge

2010-08-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd mention here the name of a book I've just read by a Canadian scholar, Gordon Freeman. He is a retired professor from the University of Alberta. His book is called Canada's Stonehenge: Astounding Archaeological Discoveries in Canada, England, and Wales. You can read about it at canadastonehenge.com
The Canadian Stonehenge he describes is a cairn of rocks in southern Alberta. It's larger than the many small circles of stones in many places on the Prairies, circles that are commonly called "medicine wheels." By making many visits to this cairn in all seasons of the year over decades, Freeman has confirmed that it is not merely a mound of rocks surrounded by stones left randomly by the melting glacier, as archaeologists have assumed. The site is an astronomical observatory at least 5,000 years old with sightlines for summer and winter solstice sunrises and sunsets, and many other sightlines.
Freeman has repeatedly asked the provincial government of Alberta to protect the site from digging for oil well development. His requests have been partially successful, protecting the cairn itself but only some of the surrounding area.
I think his book will be of great interest to many people. Freeman also discusses his observations at Stonehenge in England, and the Welsh source of some of the stones installed at Stonehenge. The author is sympathetic to the cultures who built these great stone features. He has made a particular effort to learn about calendars in their various forms. In his text he doesn't shy away from commenting on political decision-making, particularly as it influenced the Gregorian reforms to the modern calendar.
Check out his website, and get your local public library to order a copy of the book. This book is the opposite of the ravings of a wing-nut: it's the sober description of years of quiet observation in the field, and the studies of a scholar who for decades has interacted peaceably with farmers and small-town people as well as government officials and academics. I find it a very Canadian book, and a good one for describing what it's like to be a scholar of books and of the natural world while living in Alberta.

Okay, So He Really Was Crazy

2010-05-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

Or, like so many before him, driven mad by prophecy. The Guardian is reporting that when GW Bush was trying to sell the invasion of Iraq to the French, the Shrub was doing it by using screwy biblical prophecy: Gog and Magog. To quote Andrew Brown:
In the winter of 2003, when George Bush and Tony Blair were frantically gathering support for their planned invasion, Professor Thomas Römer, an Old Testament expert at the university of Lausanne, was rung up by the Protestant Federation of France. They asked him to supply them with a summary of the legends surrounding Gog and Magog and as the conversation progressed, he realised that this had originally come, from the highest reaches of the French government.
President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. Bush had then said that when he looked at the Middle East, he saw "Gog and Magog at work" and the biblical prophecies unfolding. But who the hell were Gog and Magog? Neither Chirac nor his office had any idea. But they knew Bush was an evangelical Christian, so they asked the French Federation of Protestants, who in turn asked Professor Römer.
He explained that Gog and Magog were, to use theological jargon, crazy talk. They appear twice in the Old Testament, once as a name, and once in a truly strange prophecy in the book of Ezekiel[.]

And, of course, the story just gets stranger--as is typical when talking about the Bush II Whitehouse.

Dam That's Big!

2010-05-27T14:58:00.000-07:00

Wood Buffalo National Park of Canada is the largest park in Canada's system of National Parks and the 2nd largest protected area in the world, at 44, 807 square kilometres. It is also home to the world's largest.....beaver dam. Seriously.

The dam is, apparently, about one and a half CN Towers in length, ~850 metres or 2,800 feet long. The product of several generations of beavers, the dam blows past the old record of a dam 652 metres long in Three Forks, Montana.
Beaver dams are unusual in that they can be seen from space--like the Great Wall or the Pyramids at Giza. Canadian ecologist Jean Thie said Wednesday he used satellite imagery and Google Earth software to locate the dam, which is about 850 meters (2,800 feet) long on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park.

Beaver can cut down as many as 200 trees a year, and generally build dams between 10 and 100 metres long. When such dams are near human development, the dams are usually destroyed and the beavers caught and transported to ~~little beaver penal colonies~~ new areas away from humans. These beaver, well away from people, have been free to reshape the environment as they see fit.
The dam wasn't begun until after 1975, it was determined after comparisons between aerial photographs. But they've been *ahem* beavering away on the dam for decades. Currently, there are two new dams going up that look like they will eventually be connected to this dam, making a dam almost a full kilometre long.
Here's a Parks Canada video of the dam from the air:

There's a number of links, so I'll just include a link cluster here.
Parks Canada
Discovery News
EcoInformatics

Ever wonder...

2010-04-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

...what our governments get up to? I do. And Google has decided to post just how many requests and of what kind governments are making of them. I applaud the transparency, even as I remain suspicious of Google's motives.

A screengrab from Firefox, cropped with GImP

The Acceptable Version

2010-03-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

Good ad. Read the story in The Guardian Online.

The Thermohaline and the Bay of Bengal Island

2010-03-29T10:02:00.000-07:00

The BBC reports (here and here) that research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters has found no apparent long term slowing of the Gulf Stream. This may be one major dodged bullet; the Gulf Stream is essential to bringing heat north from the tropics and keeping Europe 4 - 6ᵒC warmer than it would otherwise be. The Gulf Stream is part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation which itself is part of the global thermohaline system of currents.

On the other hand, and across Africa, the island known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis has now become nothing more than a hazard to navigation. The island itself has slipped beneath the waves of a rising ocean. The School of Oceanographic Studies (Calcutta) says that satellite imagery shows that the entire island is under water. So on the plus side of the global climate chaos ledger, rising sea levels have removed one source of international friction.

Tiger and the decline of Canadian Journalism

2010-03-18T16:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, someone explain this one to me.

I turn on the CTV nightly news and the lead story is Tiger Woods has decided to play golf. Not that he had won anything yet, you understand, but simply that he had shown up in public. I might even get this being an item on the sports news, but the nightly news news? Why is this news? Why is this an item that every Canadian urgently needs to know?

Then we are presented with a parade of experts (mostly other news media staffers -- remember when news reporters used to interview people other than themselves?) who pronounced that American had seen fit to forgive Tiger for his past indiscretions -- which then had to be detailed in case anyone in the country hadn't already heard them ad nausem, which is obviously redundant given that Canadians have to all know this story or why would any of us supposedly be interested enough in it for it to be the lead story? But having established once again that Tiger has been a bad boy, we get to hear that American has forgiven him.

Two things wrong here. First, since when is it up to America to forgive Tiger? Isn't that like his wife's prerogative? Come to that, what does any of his private life have to do with anyone? If it wasn't affecting his golf game, why should any of us -- even actual golf fans -- poke their noses into his family business?

Second and more sociologically significant, who says America has forgiven him? Was there a poll? Because a poll was not referenced here. Just a bunch of sound bites from Tiger's publicists. And it is this very news cast saying how America has forgiven him that gets the word out that it is time to forgive him.

I personally do not feel a couple of months qualifies as the statute of limitations on being an ass, but then I never thought this was my business in the first place. But it is fascinating to see the power of some publicist somewhere to get this wealthy ass a clean slate after only a couple of other months. Clearly the interests of the corporations who had invested in Tiger advertising, and Tiger's own financial interests, out weigh the interests of well, actual natural news reporting.

That this item made the news, let alone positioning as the lead story, seriously undermines the credibility of our national news outlets. This is a more important story than, say, the economic implications of the Canadian dollar reaching par with the American dollar? Clearly this is yet another example of appealing to lowest celebrity scandal-sheet style reporting to raise ratings rather than responsible reporting. That the non-story of this non-event -- a more blatant PR managed newsfeed I cannot imagine -- appeared on our news at all reveals a complete abdication of journalistic responsibilities. Bloggers give more objective reporting and take PR handouts less blatantly than this. I am embarrassed for the stat of Canadian journalism.

The best we can hope for is that someone at CTV took a massive bribe, or thought to curry favor with the corporations that employ Tiger to advertise their products in hopes that some of those advertising dollars would come their way -- because if they were too stupid to figure out they were part of a managed PR exercise, then we are truly on our own....

quote of the week

2010-03-14T21:03:00.000-07:00

"Word has become this gargantuan labyrinth inhabited by a lot of
bewildered people who were hoping for one night in a cheap motel."

Donna McMahon, in reply to a lengthy online discussion on the difficulties of trying to figure out the intricacies of Word processing program:

Quote of the Week

2010-02-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

"Not to mention that in two years the BC gov't cut the arts funding budget from
$47 million to $3 million but was bragging on the radio today about the $450
million put into the Olympic sports. We'll be able to play ball but no one
will be left to write about it."

Anderson Colleen

Now For Sale 2nd Hand

2010-01-07T08:22:00.001-08:00

This Canon 5.2 metre lens was up for sale on ebay before Solstice. Canon says of the lens:
This is the only ultra-telephoto lens in the world capable of taking photographs of objects 18 to 32 miles away (30km to 52kms away). Having a focal length of 5200mm, Canon Mirror Lens 5200mm can obtain one hundred times as large an object image as that of a 50mm lens.
The asking price on ebay was apparently $45K. Funny, but it didn't sell. The video below gives you an idea of what this lens is capable of.

And John apparently has dibs on it for a birthday present.

Behind the Scenes: Avatar

2010-01-02T19:36:00.001-08:00

Behind the scenes of Avatar: The Bootleg

Avatar & Natural News

2009-12-28T15:41:00.000-08:00

Here's someone who really liked Avatar. This is a review by Mike Adams from Natural News.

James Cameron's Avatar delivers a powerful message of connectedness with Mother Nature

$10 Billion?

2009-12-26T08:26:00.001-08:00

Over at Alt Film Guide, there's an interesting look at what this year's $10 billion box office really means. Is it a record year for film views, or is it a figure that simply hides the decline of the film industry as a cultural force?
While Hollywood.com notes that there was a rise in ticket sales this year over last--a five percent actual rise--but that there was also a rise in ticket prices that helps mask any fall-off in sales. Box Office Mojo breaks it down into numbers of tickets sold; 1,403 billion tickets in 2009. But, to keep that in perspective, 2002 saw sales of 1,575 billion tickets. But (and this is a big but) back in 1947 when the population of the US was only 144 million, an estimated 90 million people went to the movies every week. That would translate into ticket sales of 4,680 billion, or three times the ticket sales of 2009. And that in a world without blockbuster or tentpole movies costing close to a half-billion to make (Variety reported that Avatar cost ~460 billion).

From Boxofficereport.com, the top 10 films of 1947:

I'm actually surprised at how few of these films I've seen.

What They Won't Tell You

2009-12-23T09:14:00.001-08:00

It won't matter. Nothing I say will make the slightest bit of difference--but, hell, that's never stopped me before. Avatar is not a good movie. It's a crap re-make of a second-rate Dances With Wolves. It didn't matter that Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was a bloated, incoherent, ego-driven piece-of-crap film, and it won't matter with Avatar either. Millions of us will still spend our money on it. Hell, it might even make a buck or two, even with its absurd price tag (something around a quarter billion dollars!). A lot will be written about how good a movie it is, about how it "invents a new kind of film-making," but it will all be crap. Contrary to the hype, Cameron is not an innovative film-maker. He is a film-maker with a real talent for action sequences, and we'd all probably be better off if Hollywood took on the Hong Kong idea of letting one director make the film, with a second director given the action sequences. That way Cameron could play to his strengths, and the rest of us could watch decent films with wow passages. But instead we are suffering under the auteur theory of film-making, and we are often the poorer for it.
Cameron has a talent (or maybe only a knack) for taking existing film-making techniques and pushing it to its limit, while marrying it to a decent story with some kick-ass action sequences. Take a look at his (actually small and limited) canon of film. Terminator, where he takes blue-screen and stop motion and pushes it, smartly using the stop motion to animate a robot, so that any flaws in the technique will be hidden in the character. In Terminator 2: Judgement Day, he takes a new piece of software and uses it as a visual metaphor for the mutability of evil (as opposed to the mechanical implacability nature of it in the first film). But in all his earlier work (Titanic excepted), he is kept in check by producers, money, and limitations of the medium.
Almost none of this applies to Avatar. This is Cameron's return to feature films after the blockbuster success (even in the world of event films) of Titanic. But unlike Titanic, ninety minutes into Avatar, I was offering to leave. Don't get me wrong, the action sequences left me twitching like a brook trout on a fly, and that's what the action sequences were supposed to do. But in terms of story and character, I was bored. Seriously bored. And an hour later I was praying for a planet-killing strike from space that would take out both sides of this over-wrought and pointless tale. "Kill them all and release me from this hell," I whispered, but it was not to be.
3-D has been around since forever, and like having seen Ray Harryhausen's work before seeing Terminator, I've seen a fair bit of it. Up, last summer, was a lovely little film. And the classic Creature From the Black Lagoon is still, I think, a superlative film.

The Creature--still rockin' the house since 1954

Cameron, as is usual, ramps it up, pushing the new 3-D as far as its been pushed in modern film. But that doesn't, in and of itself, make the film any better. In fact, I found that the 3-D actually interfered with my ability to watch the film some of the time, getting in the way of what story there was. The CGI? Well, its the logical next step, the next phase as long as you have the $$$$$$$ to do it. Impressive, but doesn't replace the need for characterization. Or story. Or coherence or complexity. And while the luminous nature of the world on Pandora (the planet Avatar takes place upon) is interesting, it too becomes a distraction. And yes, I got the double meaning of Avatar; both the representation of a person in a virtual world and the embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life. Or even the incarnation of a deity (after all, the central character was blessed by the tree/deity of the Pandorans not once, but a couple of times). Doesn't make the film the least bit better, though.
So go--you know you're going to--and spend your money and you can even talk about how good it was afterwards (but really, isn't it more like The Dark Crystal? High concept, beautifully realized world, but the script really sucked?). But seriously, you'd be better off with the old cellophane and cardboard glasses and a copy of Creature. 'Cause there's a lot more going on there than in Avatar.

Telus sacks system access fee

2009-12-16T20:27:00.000-08:00

CBC News - Technology & Science - Telus sacks system access fee

CBC got it wrong. I have received my new Telus 2 year contract invoice and I'm being charged access fees.

I had a 3 year contract which expired, and Telus tried to tell me by texting me and charging me for the text. They reversed the charge. They didn't bother to tell me when I phoned about the charge that my contract was up. When I did find out and said my partner used Fido for a much better rate, Telus began phoning me. Phoning me at work and at home and inbetween to get my business. At the beginning of December 2009 I dropped into Tom Harris Cellular in Tillicum Mall to renew the contract or discuss options as Telus had offered me a $15.00 monthly rate.

I paid Tom Harris Cellular $39.20 for Service and Support and got a new phone.

My invoice from Telus arrived today and is $52.85. I used to pay $31.30 per month.

My invoice breakdown:

Super Talk 15 (Dec 10 to Jan 09) $15.00
Super Talk 15 (Dec 7 to Dec 09) $1.50
Talk $20 my old plan gives me a $2.00 credit

Equipment Exchange $25.00 (I'll get back to this charge)
Rate Plan Change $10.00
Rate Plan Change credit $10.00

Enhanced 911 Access Charge $0.05
Enhanced 911 Access Charge $0.50
Enchanced 911 Access Charge credit $0.05
System Access Fee $0.70
System Access Fee $6.95
Systems Access Fee credit $0.46
Total $7.69

I'm being charged an access fee that the CBC reported in October 2009 Telus was no longer charging. But wait.....they are charging it. Technically if I was month to month and now have a NEW contract should I be paying access charges??? Very confusing.

I phoned Telus Customer Service and got a $25.00 credit on my bill. I was then told my monthly bill next month would be $30.00. My old bill was $31.30

Wow Telus has saved me a whopping $1.30 per month. I've signed a 2 year contract which will cost me $400 to cancel.

I feel Telus reps who phoned me and made me an offer of a $15.00 plan to reduce my monthly bill were not upfront about all the extra charges. They made it sound as if they were offering me the plan my partner has with Fido, where he pays about $15.00 a month for his cell phone service, no access fee.

When my 2 year contract is up I will never ever use Telus again. Unfortunately our land phone and internet is with them. Maybe we should be changing those to Shaw.

Now, For Something a Little Different

2009-12-11T10:18:00.001-08:00

So, Tiger Woods has "tarnished his brand," committed "transgressions," crashed his car, and has apparently been sleeping with some cocktail waitress and (it seems) a host of other women. There are questions about whether his sponsors will pull their money, whether he'll "be able to recover" from the scandal, and if he'll be okay once he gets back on the golf course. And, of course, the endless self-reflecting chattering-class noise over whether his privacy has been violated, or whether or not he gave up the right to privacy when he began dropping a ball into a cup with mechanical regularity.
Honestly, I don't care. About any of it, really. The man is a golf machine, and as meaningless as I find golf, I admire his skill in playing the game. But I would like to offer an alternative take on his alleged indiscretions; good!
Seriously, take a look at the guy. He's handsome, focused, and intensely athletic. I hope he sleeps with lots of women, and I hope that he knocks more than a few of them up. I sincerely hope that he leaves a bunch of babies behind (although I hope he acknowledges them and supports them both financially and otherwise). My fondest dream is that he have an affair with the Williams sisters and leaves both of them with a couple of kids each. It wouldn't be bad if he did the same with Nicole Kidman and Meg Ryan.
These are people of extraordinary beauty and no little bit of talent. They are, love them or hate them, at the top of our current food chain. They are, in social evolutionary terms, the fittest, and I really think that ensuring their genes are spread as widely as possible through the genetic pool is a good thing.
And this is not just my belief that more people having more and better sex is of benefit to society. It's that "The Marching Morons" isn't the only way this works; it can be the marching intelligentsia as well. There is a drive to spread one's genes, just as there's a drive to nurture and nest. And neither is better or worse, more or less "moral." Both drives are necessary to the continuation of the species. It's only when society gets in the way (as in Islamist countries, or Christian fundamentalist Amerika) that hysteria develops; its because genes don't give a damn about society or culture or morality. They only care about perpetuation (and even that is anthropomorphizing). The genetic stew of humanity occasionally throws up extraordinary combinations, and its only to our benefit when they are spread widely.

The International Editorial

2009-12-07T08:19:00.000-08:00

Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change is published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages
Copenhagen climate change summit - opening day liveblog

Editorial
The Guardian, Monday 7 December 2009
Article history

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

This editorial is free to reproduce under Creative Commons

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation' by The Guardian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at guardian.co.uk.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/02/guardian-environment-team
(please note this Creative Commons license is valid until 18 December 2009)

The Biggest Threat to the World: Canada

2009-12-01T08:15:00.000-08:00

George Monbiot's latest column from the Guardian, which focuses on Canada and the tar sands, deserves to be reprinted in full. We must do better than this, and that starts with politicians with vision and purpose, unlike what we have now on either side of The House.

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country's government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I've broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.

It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada's obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.

In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the wellbeing of the world.

Why? There's a simple answer: Canada is developing the world's second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It's actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, comprising pristine forests and marshes, will be be dug up – unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.

To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta's tar sands operation is the world's biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.

Canada hasn't acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government's share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten £8bn for mining the tar sands.

The purpose of Canada's assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada's politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.

Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of Neanderthals to trample over it. Timber firms were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government's scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.

I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

War Crimes

2009-11-23T09:30:00.001-08:00

It seems almost minor compared to the news on global warming and climate change, but The Guardian reports:

Military commanders are expected to tell the inquiry into the Iraq war, which opens on Tuesday, that the invasion was ill-conceived and that preparations were sabotaged by Tony Blair's government's attempts to mislead the public.

They were so shocked by the lack of preparation for the aftermath of the invasion that they believe members of the British and US governments at the time could be prosecuted for war crimes by breaching the duty outlined in the Geneva convention to safeguard civilians in a conflict, the Guardian has been told.

The article is worth reading. I'd support prosecution, but hey, that's me.

Moms Against Climate Change | Take Action | takeactiononclimatechange.com

2009-11-18T19:45:00.000-08:00

Moms Against Climate Change Take Action takeactiononclimatechange.com

Peak Oil

2009-11-11T21:40:00.001-08:00

According to The Guardian:

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

Listen to an audio clip with Terry Macalister here.

A report by the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC) said worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could "peak" and go into terminal decline before 2020.

The world has used less than half of the planet's conventionally extracted oil, but the remaining resources will be more difficult and expensive to get out of the ground, slowing production and increasing prices of crude.

With exploitation of the world's reserves running at more than 80m barrels a day, even major new discoveries such as the oil fields recently found in the Gulf of Mexico by BP would only delay a peak by a few days or weeks, the report said as reported by The Guardian.

The risk to the UK from falling oil production in coming years is greater than the threat posed by terrorism, according to an industry taskforce report published today.

The report, from the Peak Oil group, warns that the problem of declining availability of oil will hit the UK earlier than generally expected - possibly within the next five years and as early as 2011. [Also reported in The Guardian]

We don't have any plans in place to deal with peak oil: in Canada, we import the oil we use, and export the oil we produce (leaving most of us feeling WTF?). We peak out, everything falls apart. Our government is in denial, our corporate heads seem to be suffering a complete meltdown,and the general public just doesn't want to know. Any wonder why I'm a bit despairing of our future?

Canada and the World

2009-10-29T19:37:00.001-07:00

Even 20 months ago, no one knew what 350 meant, nor why it mattered. That's less than 2 years back. Then 10,000 year old ice sheets disappeared in the Arctic, Stephen Harper got a north of 60 hard-on, the IPCC released a report based on data that was already out of date (some of it a decade out of date), and a book detailing how James Hansen's work was censored came out. We shook our collective head, and some of us began to realize that we had entered what James Kunstler has called The Long Emergency.
It didn't take long to realize that 350 was the upper limit of atmospheric CO2 that could be considered "safe" (meaning that we might be able to keep global warming to 2°C and we might be able to live with the consequences of that rise), and here we are today looking at 390 ppm of carbon dioxide, no significant efforts being made to reduce carbon emissions, and a future that's looking at a minimum of 4°C warming and 6 metres of sea level rise--meanwhile emissions continue to increase and atmospheric CO2 rises at about 2ppm/year.
Here in Canada, we've got a Conservative government that is lead by a Prime Minister who still yet to convince anyone that he actually believes global warming may be a problem. Stephen "American Corporate Lackey" Harper is busy fiddling while the globe--including the nation of which he is nominally a member--burns. All our divorced-from-reality leader can see is the NorthWest Passage opening up and all that lovely ocean open to commercial exploitation.
Last week, the British Meteorological Office released a map of what we can expect to happen when we hit 4°C. The equatorial countries will get hotter, true, but the further you get from the equator, the more extreme the changes. But even now, Environment Minister Jim Prentice wants special treatment for Canada, allowing us--well, really just Alberta and the oil sands--to continue increasing our GHG emissions, while insisting that developing nations like China and India agree to hard caps that we ourselves will not accept. And the Canadian Government still refuses to release specifics of its plan to reduce our GHG emissions by 20% from our 2006 levels--which is light-years from our commitment under Kyoto.
Today comes the release of a new report. Quite unlike anything released in Canada before, it was financed by the Toronto Dominion Bank, produced by the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation, with economic modeling by the well-respected economic consultants, M.K. Jaccard and Associates Inc. As John Ibbitson writes in the Globe and Mail; "A major bank has paid two environmental organizations to produce a groundbreaking report that, for the first time, calculates the costs of both the Harper government's modest plans to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and the much more ambitious targets set by the environmental community, nationally and regionally."
The report offers a regional breakdown of economic impacts based on both the Harper government's vague commitment to 20% by 2020 (from 2006 levels) and the impact from the deeper and harder cuts that environmentalists are calling for and that would put Canada in line with our international obligations. And guess what? Neither scenario would kill us!
According to the report,"The Conservative government's goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 can be achieved, but only by limiting growth in Alberta and Saskatchewan." Alberta's growth would be 8.5% less in 2020 than it would be under a BAU (Business As Usual) approach, the report concludes. Under the same scenario, Saskatchewan would lose 2.8% of its projected growth. Central Canada, on the other hand, might well see some additional growth added to its projection. To quote Shawn McCarthy's article in the G&M; "Despite the steep costs involved in meeting targets, the analysis concludes the Canadian economy would continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace, and that investment in renewable energy and efficiency measures would result in an overall increase in employment compared to a “business-as-usual” scenario.
And even with the significant reduction in Alberta's potential growth and employment prospects, the province would still lead the country economically over the next 10 years."
So our economy would continue to grow AND there would probably be an increase in employment as well. And the cost? A reduction in projected growth an Alberta and Saskatchewan, and a significant out-migration from both provinces back to central Canada.
To further quote Shawn McCarthy's article: "TD's chief economist, Don Drummond, said the bank has not endorsed any targets, though it has supported a policy of a national emissions cap. He said the bank's interest was to shed light on an area where there has been little informed debate: the likely cost of imposing regulations."
I'm actually not seeing any real downside here. The Globe and Mail editorial board does though. In today's editorial, we read: "[T]he study acknowledges that what is proposed is no less than an economic upheaval: “There is a migration of capital and labour out of carbon and trade exposed sectors (e.g., fossil fuels) to sectors that are less carbon and trade exposed (e.g., manufacturing, services and renewable electricity).”
Canada cannot take its national unity for granted and must not, in the service of international obligations, allow itself to be immolated by a government policy of such wrenching dislocation." And the editorial concludes: "[T]he target [of carbon dioxide emission reduction] may be unreachable without unacceptable damage to Canada's economy and national unity. In which case, it is time for new targets, and new policies."
I can't help but think that no-one raised much of a stink about the "wrenching dislocation" caused by the development of the oil sands on the communities of Atlantic Canada. And even Jeffrey Simpson concludes that the Harper government's targets are just so much smoke being blown up our collective asses.
And so we have serious economic modelling of the potential and problems with trying to meet our international obligations regarding global warming and CO2 emissions. And we can now point to the report and say, "Tough, yes. But it won't kill us, and will probably make us stronger." And what of the complaints sure to come from the political and ruling classes of Alberta and Saskatchewan? Well, both provinces have had a great decade, with both provinces posting significant surpluses in their budgets, and neither has done a damn thing to prepare for the inevitable crash (particularly Alberta under Ralph Klein). For Alberta, that's two oil-based booms they've pissed away under Conservative governments. So honestly, I have no great sympathy for the Alberta government. And regardless of any future whining, we can look at the economic model contained in the M.K. Jaccard and Associates Inc. report, and read again the conclusion that "even with the significant reduction in Alberta's potential growth and employment prospects, the province would still lead the country economically over the next 10 years." And the planet (well, the human part of it) would thank us for facing up to our responsibilities.

Copenhagen, Canada, and the End of the World

2009-10-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

The Globe and Mail is reporting on an interview with Environment Minister Jim Prentice, saying that the chance of an agreement on climate change in Copenhagen is pretty much non-existent.
The world wants a climate change agreement in Copenhagen. The US is even onside, with President Obama actually understanding both the science and political realities of global warming. The EU wants an agreement, with Germany busy poaching Canadian alternative energy companies and the Brits launching the 10-10 campaign. China is even pursuing lower carbon emissions. So what's the problem?
The problem is the Canadian government. Canada has become the biggest roadblock to an international agreement to lower carbon emissions. According the the G&M article (23 October 2009, p A1 Ottawa dashes hope for treaty in Copenhagen) Canada is continuing to "insist that it should have a less aggressive target for emission reductions[...] because of its faster-growing population and energy-intensive industrial structure". The Harper government is also going to insist that any cap on industrial emissions will not be applied uniformly across the country, but will allow the Alberta oil sands to continue expanding. To quote the Environment Minister; "The Canadian approach has to reflect the diversity of the country and the sheer size of the country, and the very different economic characteristics and industrial structure across the country." The Harper government has also demanded that emerging economies (like China and India) agree to binding caps on carbon emissions, and has refused to release its own plan for carbon reduction until there is clarity on what the Americans are planning to do.
The New Democratic Party has a bill currently in committee that would commit Canada to an emission reduction of 25% from 1990 levels by 2020--a target that would meet our commitment under Kyoto and would be consistent with the EU's approach in the next round of negotiations. Ottawa has proposed a reduction of 20% from 2006 levels of emissions by 2020--our obligation under Kyoto was a cut of 6% from 1990 levels by 2012. The plan proposed by the Harper government would result in a 3% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020. Chief climate negotiator Michael Martin said to the committee considering the NDP bill that the Harper government's targets are "comparable" because they will be just as costly to achieve as the more aggressive NDP targets.
What becomes clear, as we follow the progress towards significant carbon emission reductions, is that the Harper government has no intention of ever reducing carbon emissions. Harper simply does not consider carbon emissions to be a problem (how can I say that? By simply looking at his record).
And our Prime Minister is dragging a lot of sceptics along with him. World-wide, temperatures maxed out in 1998, leading deniers to claim that temperatures have levelled off or are even declining. But new research to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The research, "is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO₂ and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO₂ and other greenhouse gases.

As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind's research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.

The study comes within days of announcements from climatologists that the world is entering a new El Niño warm spell. This suggests that temperature rises in the next year could be even more marked than Lean and Rind's paper suggests." (The Guardian Online).

The British Meteorological Office released a new map of the world (below) showing the current thinking on what the world will look like with a 4°C rise in the average global temperature. The 4°C rise mostly happens at the equator--the further you move away from the equator, the greater the changes. Here on Vancouver Island, we may only see an average 5°C rise, but up in Hudson's Bay, its looking more like 16°C. What this doesn't indicate is just how this will affect global weather patterns. If it was just going to get warmer, that wouldn't be the end of the world.But all that extra energy is going to change things in ways we can't imagine yet, much less model.

The Met Office says that climate researchers have discovered that:

levels of CO2 have risen 40% since the Industrial Revolution
Global sea levels have risen 10cm in the last 50 years [and that's a hell of a lot of water]
temperatures in the Arctic have risen at twice the global average [which suits our Prime Minister just fine]
snow cover in the northern hemisphere has dropped 5% in the last 2 decades

And researchers figure that extreme temperatures will affect eastern North America, with Toronto and Ottawa seeing the temperatures of their hottest days jumping by up to 10°C to 12°C. Anyone having suffered through a GTA summer will be white with fear about now....

The Third World -- and why we shouldn't say it.

2009-10-26T18:11:00.000-07:00

Interesting post here on why "third world" is a politically loaded term. I mostly agree with the author, but dislike the suggested alternative "developing world"; which harbors connotations of an inherent backwardness of other cultures and the assumption that over time they will become little clones of Western cultures, which is in my view similarly reprehensible usage. A commentator on the post suggests the phrase "majority world" to describe nonWestern cultures, which both more accurate and more interesting....

Ah, I Can Feel It Working

2009-10-22T11:57:00.001-07:00

From over at IPS:
In recent weeks, Greenpeace has staged three daring protests inside tar sands mines, temporarily shutting down parts of the world's largest energy project. On Oct. 3 and 4, activists blocked construction of an upgrader needed to refine heavy tar sands oil, belonging to Shell in Ft. Saskatchewan, Alberta.
Civil disobedience from Greenpeace, leading to 37 arrests, has enraged Alberta's conservative government. "We're coddling people who are breaking the law," complained Premier Ed Stelmach during a media scrum in early October.
"Premier Stelmach's public suggestion that he will use the 'force of the law to deal with these people' confirms his lack of knowledge of the limits of his authority and the clear rule that our system of justice cannot be interfered with or manipulated for political reasons," responded Brian Beresh, the defence lawyer representing arrested activists, at a news conference in Edmonton.

This is one of the uses of civil disobedience--like one of the uses of terrorism--to provoke those in power into over-reacting and doing something stupid that makes the instigator's point for them. Like the US after 9-11 made Al Qaeda's point that they were an imperial power by invading Iraq, the Alberta government is going to make Greenpeace's point for them. They are actually threatening to use anti-terrorism legislation to shut down civil disobedience at the tar sands.
"Canada's tar sands will singlehandedly produce more greenhouse gas emissions than Denmark, Ireland, Austria or Portugal by 2020 if the development continues expanding at its current rate, according to a recent report written by award-winning business reporter Andrew Nikiforuk. The tar sands already spew more greenhouse gas emissions than Estonia or Lithuania", the article continues.
It's not like Greenpeace stands alone on this; the head of the IPCC has also said that the tar sands should be shut down.
Keep in mind that this Saturday--October 24th--is 350 day, the international day of climate action. The 350 refers to the accepted maximum concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere--the number we've blown past already. Last I checked, we were at 385. Write an MP, get out and be counted, ride a bike, whatever. Check the website for ideas. In Victoria, there will be a day of activities at Centennial Square on Saturday.

Yes Men

2009-10-20T09:38:00.001-07:00

It looked – at first – eerily like a routine news event. A man in a nondescript dark suit standing at a podium in one of the smaller meeting rooms on the 13th floor of the National Press Club. But then suddenly it wasn't.

"There is only one way to do business and that is to pass a climate bill quickly so this December President Obama can go to Copenhagen and negotiate with a strong position," said the speaker – who said he represented the US Chamber of Commerce.

The statement represented a complete repudiation of the Chamber's earlier opposition to climate change legislation. The hard line had triggered walk-outs from Apple and a handful of other high-profile companies in the past few weeks.

From the Guardian Newspaper, who are reporting that the news conference was later boken up by an actual member of the US Chamber of Commerce screaming that it was all a hoax. This is typical of the Yes Men, who famously held a news conference claiming to be Dow Chemical and taking full responsibility for the Bhopal disaster, and promising to care for anyone injured in the incident. Dow lost $2bn off its share price and was later forced to announce that it was doing nothing of the kind. And, as with the Dow story, the Guardian reports: "And while a number of reporters still pressed Wohlschlegel for signs of a shift in the Chamber's position, he soon set them straight. The Chamber was as opposed to climate change legislation as ever."

There's A Buzzing Sound In My Ears

2009-10-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year Dawa Steven Sherpa was resting at Everest base camp when he and his companions heard something buzzing. "What the heck is that?" asked the young Nepali climber. They searched and found a big black house fly, something unimaginable just a few years ago when no insect could have survived at 5,360 metres.

So begins this story in the Guardian. It's becoming depressingly familiar at this point; insects where they don't belong, glaciers retreating at an appalling pace, and (in this case) glofs, or glacial lake outburst floods.
So have a read, then pop over to the review of Superfreakonomics and have a read of this:

A large chunk of Superfreakonomics is given over to what Levitt and Dubner present as a simple, cheap alternative to all this depressing futility. They profile Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, whose company, Intellectual Ventures, is exploring the possibility of pumping large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the Earth's stratosphere through an 18-mile-long hose, held up by helium balloons, at an initial cost of around $20m. The chemical would reflect some of the sun's rays back into space, cooling the planet, exactly as happened following the massive 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines. The primary objection to this plan, as with other "geoengineering" schemes, is that there's no predicting the unknown negative effects of meddling in such a complex natural system. And it's strange, given how much is made in both Freakonomics books of the law of unintended consequences, that they don't mention this in the context of Myhrvold's plan.

This is where we wait and wait and wait and then begin grasping at straws and stupid ideas, looking for the quick fix. The problem is not sunlight falling on the Earth, its the CO2 in the atmosphere. The sulphur dioxide "fix" does nothing but to help buy a little time. The ocean is still gong acidic (as one example), crashing what few food stocks are left. That will not be slowed by altering the amount of sunlight getting through the atmosphere. (Freakonomics; a bunch of untested and unproven correlations and ideas masquerading as breakthrough carved-in-stone facts. Mediocre speculative mutton dressed up as scientific lamb).

Power Shift

2009-10-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

I cannot remember the last time I (or anyone I know) had this much fun at a climate change rally. (The video will start automatically). Without this sense of joy and energy, we're going to get nowhere, and that isn't something we can afford. Without those of us in middle age with our "respectability" and (more importantly) dollars and commitment, things will be difficult. But without this kind of joy and energy, things will be impossible.
Great social movements arise in a sense of fear and excitement; from the sense of taking control of power and realizing that it's in each of us. It's a scary and exciting place to be. There's a sense of comradeship, of shared joy, that suddenly we really are all in this together.And for some reason, grim death marches don't really attract the crowds, the popular support, that you'd expect.
We need more of this; more dancing, more laughing, more joy. Greenpeace continues to draw people because there's always the chance to get arrested--as the protesters in Fort McMurray showed in mid-September.

(image from the CBC website)

Protesters from Greenpeace occupied two dump
trucks and unfurled a banner on the ground at Shell's
Albian Sands oilsands site in northern Alberta Tuesday.
(Greenpeace)

Propaganda; Shouldn't It Really Be The Word Of God?

2009-10-09T10:36:00.001-07:00

Over at the Conservapedia, there's a proposal being floated to re-translate the Bible. The Conservative Bible Project suggest that:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning are, in increasing amount:

lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ
lack of precision in modern language
translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

The ~~nutbars~~ Conservatives over at Conservapedia are really worried about the liberal bias in the Bible.They state that:

I'm particularly fascinated by #6 & #7: "Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning" and "Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story." To state so baldly next to each other that you want to remove what you think is liberal cant and insert what can only be described as conservative cant, and that you don't see a problem with this, is, to me, mind-boggling. But apparently this is not so on the far right: the belief that others have done something--whether or not that belief is supported by evidence--is apparently justification for doing the exact same thing. Instantly any concept of "truth" disappears and is replaced by the concept of competing propagandas. Any appeal to evidence is immediately seen to be a call on biased propaganda. "Things fall" is liberal propaganda, and any appeal to the senses (look out the window! Gravity is in operation!) as dismissed as biased and propagandistic nonsense ("that's just what they want you to believe! Gravity doesn't even work on those who believe in it!). This kind of thinking is completely resistant to argument; it is thouroughly magical and any appeal to reason, evidence, or even sanity is, by definition, biased and propagandistic, and can be dismissed out of hand. Logic and reason have no place in a hermetically sealed belief system, and are seen as enemies of faith or belief.
This program, on the part of the Amerikan Right, to create a political community where spiritual, economic, and political concepts are adopted and are then unchangeable proceeds apace. Mutually antithetical concepts like "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" are normal inside this doublethink groupmind. Regretfully, this type of thinking and political community building has spread into Canada as well. Alberta and Saskatchewan are hotbeds of it.

V-Con (No, Really!)

2009-10-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's really very easy to do without a car. Friday morning found us up early and on the municipal bus out to the ferry.
20 Minutes to down-town and another 40 or so out to the ferry with a 5 minute transfer layover, that's not bad. Sure, we ended up at the ferry an hour earlier than we needed to, but that was my fault rather than a flaw in the transit system.
Traveling as a walk-on is really a good way to use the ferry; it's so much more relaxed than worrying if your car is going to start, and making sure to park close enough and all the rest of what we think of as normal at the terminal and on the ferry.

Notice that there's two layers of traffic loading. That's a lot of cars, and this isn't one of the new "Super-C's."

Passengers, on the other hand, have a much quieter boarding experience.

Although there are a lot more passengers than 20 years ago. Paula and I have boarded, gone up a deck, found kiosks to sit at (so that I could plug in the Aspire 1ne), and dropped our packs, and there are still walk-ons loading.

Once at the other end of the ferry route, we waited maybe 10 minutes to board a municipal bus. Okay, 5 bucks, but that got us right into down-town Vancouver.

This was one of the articulated buses we're familiar with from our days in Edmonton, but haven't ridden out here. Victoria went with the even cooler, retro-styled double deckers rather than the articulated buses. A good choice, I think.

The double-decker buses (you can see one at the front of the queue here) are air-conditioned and quite comfortable. Besides, riding up top offers a hell of a good view, even if the ride itself can be a bit rocky on occasion.

The Skytrain, on the other hand, especially the new Canada Line, is a terrific ride. And the new cars are a delight. Notice the vertical bar on the right, with the four loops sticking out of it--making a terrific number of handholds when the car is full.
Our trip in from the ferry took about an hour all told. We boarded the bus about 10:00 am and were checking in to the hotel just after 12:00.

It is strange to be at a V-Con again after so many years away. It didn't take long before I was having fanzines thrust into my hands; an old BCSFAzine, and a copy of Why You Got This Zine #5. It took me about ten minutes to realize that we'd published the original WYGTZ and we'd done it back in 1983 (all nicely credited in the extended colophon). Kathleen is now pubbing her ish, and doing a lovely job of it--making sure that its only available in print and not online, which is unusual and quite nice.

And after decades:

Garth! It was great to see Garth again and catch up on at least an overview of the last few years.
There were other people, of course. People I live near:

like Karl, busy minding the Neo-Opsis table.

And Stephanie, gettinga few minutes away from the table.
But there's also Donna and Clint

who seem to becoming regular features in this life. Which is interesting and unexpected.

Marlene happened to be in Van and so she showed up--and got the chance to play dress up in the dealer's room. The period / pirate clothing was a real treat; the women looked lovely and the men looked dashing, and I even gave it a go. Ah, to be independently wealthy, and have a place to wear pirate clothes...!

SF Canada threw a author party / book-launch Friday night

Which was neat and well-attended. The idea was to create various circles of chairs and then scatter author names about, so that people could either sit beside authors they knew, or figure out who it was they were sitting beside.

There was also a book table--these are, after all, authors.
The event was well attended. Just a few of the familiar faces:

Brian Hades

Barry Alder

Selu--whom we had met on the Skytrain, having completely missed her on the ferry and bus....

Paula, having a good time chatting.

And Fran. Overall, quite a different Friday for me.

Backlash

2009-10-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

Yup, we all need that good old CO2. What did we really expect? That Oil company execs would think that a threat to the planet might override a threat to their corporate profits? Not gonna happen. And it isn't surprising that this comes out of Amerika. After all, the Guardian reported on 28 September 2009 :

US ignorance about the risks and reality of global warming could sink hopes of a new global deal to control greenhouse gas emissions at December's climate talks in Copenhagen, an advisor to the German government has said.

Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said the US was "climate illiterate" and that the rest of the world may be forced to agree a new deal without it.

"Nobody should dream of the possibility that numbers and targets for countries will be sealed in Copenhagen," said Schellnhuber, one of the world's foremost climate scientists. "If the US doesn't move then nothing will happen."

He added: "The US in a sense is climate illiterate. It is a deeper problem in the US, if you look at global polls about what the public knows about climate change. Even in Brazil and China, you have more people who know the problem, who think that deep cuts in emissions are needed."

< 9 Minutes

2009-09-29T08:00:00.001-07:00

POV footage of triggering and being caught in an avalanche. In less than 9 minutes, this fellow sets up, starts his descent, is trapped in an avalanche, and is rescued by his friends. Wrenching, amazing footage.

Avalanche Skier POV Helmet Cam Burial & Rescue in Haines, Alaska from Chappy on Vimeo.

Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes

2009-09-28T05:41:00.001-07:00

From The Guardian:

Unchecked global warming could bring a severe temperature rise of 4C within many people's lifetimes, according to a new report for the British government that significantly raises the stakes over climate change.

The study, prepared for the Department of Energy and Climate Change by scientists at the Met Office, challenges the assumption that severe warming will be a threat only for future generations, and warns that a catastrophic 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060 without strong action on emissions.

Officials from 190 countries gather today in Bangkok to continue negotiations on a new deal to tackle global warming, which they aim to secure at United Nations talks in December in Copenhagen.

"We've always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4C rise," said Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, who will announce the findings today at a conference at Oxford University. "People will say it's an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario, but it's also a plausible scenario."

According to scientists, a 4C rise over pre-industrial levels could threaten the water supply of half the world's population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts.

A 4C average would mask more severe local impacts: the Arctic and western and southern Africa could experience warming up to 10C, the Met Office report warns.

The study updates the findings of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said the world would probably warm by 4C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. The IPCC also listed a more severe scenario, with emissions and temperatures rising further because of more intensive fossil fuel burning, but this was not considered realistic. "That scenario was downplayed because we were more conservative a few years ago. But the way we are going, the most severe scenario is looking more plausible," Betts said.

A report last week from the UN Environment Programme said emissions since 2000 have risen faster than even this IPCC worst-case scenario. "In the 1990s, these scenarios all assumed political will or other phenomena would have brought about the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by this point. In fact, CO₂ emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating."

Textbooks and Propaganda

2009-09-20T18:21:00.000-07:00

Good article on rewriting of American history in Texas at Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing. Amazing to hear people talk so blatantly about removing any critical thinking from texts and schooling.

The net effect of the motion, would be to remove any trace of activism from American history -- because, presumably, you don't want kids to think that they could lobby government for change.

2009-09-18T07:58:00.000-07:00

see more Political Pictures

Human Smoke

2009-09-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

Not the brilliant and horrifying book by Nicholson Baker, but the bodies stacked up in the streets of Iraq. According to a new study by ORB, a British research group, the violent death toll now stands at ~1.2 million dead. This is in line with the previous study by John Hopkins published in The Lancet. American soldiers are going through bullets so fast that the manufacturers can't keep up (seriously. you can check out the PDF report here).
The number of violently dead now puts Iraq in a class with Rwanda and is approaching the Cambodian killing fields.
But ask Americans how many dead there are and the numbers are so low as to defy belief. An AP poll showed the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890. The official number is ~54,000. Best epidemiological estimate is 1.2 million with ~56% of that due to American violence.

Why We're All Going To Die

2009-09-12T06:45:00.001-07:00

Thanx to Failblog.

Sinead's Hand

2009-09-07T11:59:00.001-07:00

Nothing really to add to this.

10% Part 2

2009-09-01T20:56:00.000-07:00

And while comptemplating the worrisome news in Bernie's article below, I found this story at The Adventure Corner by Olaf Malver reporting on his just completed kayaking trip to eastern Greenland. He describes passing 12 mile-long tabular icebergs the likes of which his 55 year-old Inuit guide has never seen before. These icebergs can only make their way south because so much of the Arctic Ocean has opened up during the summer. Olaf, who has camped along eastern Greenland for fifteen years, also noted that many of the fresh water pools at his favourite campsites have dried up, and he also comments on receding glaciers.
As the author of the Guardian article noted, "We all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate."

10%

2009-09-01T07:49:00.001-07:00

Apparently that's how much of the world's fresh water is tied up in the Greenland ice sheets. And current measurements are putting them in the ocean a lot faster than they used to be travelling. According to an article in the Guardian, "Helheim, an enormous tower of ice that calves into Sermilik Fjord, used to move at 7km (4.4 miles) a year. In 2005, in less than a year, it speeded up to nearly 12km a year." Kangerdlugssuaq, another glacier, is now moving at an inch (24 mm) every minute, making its motion visible to the naked eye.
The rate of calving off the Greenland glaciers has risen so dramatically that it seems that the calves are now big enough to generate seismic events transmitted through the earth, and these events actually help speed up the glaciers.
The world response to global warming has, so far, been (to quote the Guardian) "all mouth and no trousers." Which is why they've launched the 10:10 campaign--a campaign to have people pledge to reduce their carbon footprint by 10% in 2010.This would seem to be a no-brainer, as it is only a matter of picking the low hanging fruit in our lives. Some of us have already taken this step, and from here on out the choices become more difficult and require more governmental involvement, but still, we can and should be out in front of our elected officials on this one.
Not everyone is happy, of course. There is a certain amount of anger over the EU-mandated phase out of the incandescent light bulb. But most people are on-side, and really just need a gentle pointing in the right direction to get going. So lets get on board, even those of us well into the change. Let's drop our CO² emissions by another 10% in 2010.

Gay Scientists Isolate the Christian Gene

2009-08-19T20:19:00.001-07:00

Normally I wouldn't

2009-07-30T22:46:00.001-07:00

But I just found this funny. I got linked to this story from Emails From Crazy People, the latest addition to the lolcats/loldogs/failblog group. Gary has a Landlord of the Flies--a thoroughly crazy man that he rented a room from for a month. The story is fairly short--so far--and is really worth reading. Go. Have fun.

This Smells

2009-07-22T20:33:00.001-07:00

I'm glad to see that its recent near-demise has taught those oh-so wise powers-that-be at GM the error of their ways, that they must make products that people want, and that make sense in the new economic and environmental paradigm. Their first new offering since billions of taxpayers dollars bailed them out? The Cadillac men's fragrance line.
"Cadillac, the new fragrance for men is part of the recent Cadillac renaissance: Hot new products and redesigns that capture the mantra of life, liberty and the pursuit," said Alwyn Stephen, a director of Beauty Contact, the company that holds the fragrance licence. "Our fragrance is a relevant extension of the Cadillac lifestyle. The design pays tribute to the opulence and extravagance of past eras, as well as the luxury and ease of today."
According to the Toronto Star, the line includes a spray, aftershave lotion, deodorant stick, hair and body wash. Some products will come in translucent glass bottles with sleek metal caps. The retail price for a 100 millilitre bottle of the eau de toilette fragrance will be $73.
Ferrari tried this a few years ago -- they couldn't give their cologne away. Porsche and BMW tried and failed at this idea as well. No doubt the deodorant will be popular because this stinks. Did anyone run this by GM's new owners which are, um, me?

Hope in Strange Places

2009-07-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

I've been finding hope in strange places for a while now. This year my editor Kathy (praise her with great praise) assigned me four books to write for high school libraries. Thus began my "hippie books" as my daughter calls them, or my "green books" as I was inspired to call them when trying to pitch a new title to yet another press. (Word so far: nope. Back to the kayak and re-think that particular book proposal while commuting out to Flower Island and back."

Writing the hippie books, or the green books, meant reading a number of other books currently available in order to find quotes to include in the text. It's amazing the statements that will be accepted by my editor (praise her) when they're a quote from someone else. I can't tell oil company executives, "You should be ashamed." But I can sure quote someone else's book in which an expert does exactly that at a public hearing. And in the bibliography, I have to include books I used for reference and for quotes, even if the title is an inflammatory statement that I could never get into the text, as in Edwin Black's Internal Combustion: How Corporations And Governments Addicted The World To Oil And Derailed The Alternatives.

One of the books I read was a copy I picked up at Bolen Books. Hardcover. Don't boggle. Yes, I buy fewer than a dozen books a year, though I read between two and three hundred at the library. But after hearing podcasts of Gwynne Dyer talking on CBC Radio's program Ideas for three hours on his book Climate Wars, I had to have a print copy to flip through to get the exact quotes needed for my green book on Biofuels.

Now that I'm done with Climate Wars, I handed it on to my partner Bernie, who handed it on to John. And if you look on the Twitter for our shared blog kayakyak.blogspot.com you can see that now John believes we as a species are doomed. Doomed, I tells ya, he adds with a wry grin.

Is John falling into despair? Heaven forbid. This book gave me real hope. We'll have to get John the podcast of Ideas with the special guest James Lovelock. The line that opens that show is Lovelock saying, There's just no way that I can see more than twenty percent of us surviving at the end of the century.

That statement gave me even more hope.

To think that within ninety years, there may be as many as twenty percent surviving of the teeming billions of us now alive... wow. That's the best prognosis we've had in forty years. Anyone who doesn't think so just hasn't been paying attention. And with the news this month of the USA and Russia signing an agreement to reduce their nuclear arms stockpile by a third, well, I'm celebrating. There is real, honest hope to be had for the future. And my hope is restored by writing my green books, my small part in making accessible the knowledge needed for that future.

The Oldest Trick

2009-07-13T21:30:00.000-07:00

Days after announcing her intention to step down as the Governor of Alaska, two new ethics complaints were filed against Sarah Palin. She and her staff were quick to respond.
“Although the governor would not have thought it possible, the latest complaint rises to a new level of absurdity in alleging that she has been paid for interviews that she has given to the news media. It is amazing to me that anyone could think that, let alone put their name behind it and once again seek to distract state officials and needlessly increase their work load. The state is losing the value of some of its expenditures when public servants are pulled away from important assignments to deal with far-fetched and mean-spirited allegations,” Palin’s chief of staff Mike Nizich said in a release announcing the filing of the recent complaints.
Palin herself said this: “The only saving grace in this recent episode is that it proves beyond any doubt the significance of the problem Alaska faces in the ‘new normal’ of political discourse. I hope this will be a wake-up call – to legislators, to commentators and to citizens generally – that we need a much more civil and respectful dialogue that focuses on the best interests of the state, rather than the petty resentments of a few.”
Strangely enough, at no point did Palin or her chief of staff ever deny the charges.
Smoke, meet mirrors.

80% of What...?

2009-07-09T12:28:00.001-07:00

One fact is being left out of today's announcement that the G8 nations will lower their greenhouse gas emissons by 80% by the year 2050.
One thing, though: 80% of what? I can't find the baseline that they're using in any new report. Is it 80% of 2009 emissions? Or 2006 emissions as outlined in the Canadian government's 2007 legislation (whose mandatory emissions targets don't actually begin until 2012)? Or are they using 1990 emission levels as perscribed under the Kyoto Protocol? (Canada is obligated under Kyoto to cut it's emissions 6% from its 1990 levels; by 2006, our emissions had increased 21.7%.)
Saying its an 80% cut is meaningless without knowing where you starting from, but no media outlet has figured that out.
More egregious are the words of our so-called Environment Minister, according to the CBC (emphasis added):

Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice said achieving the lower emissions by 2050 is only an aspirational goal of the developed countries. But it meshes well with Canada's plan to reduce its emissions by up to 70 per cent by 2050, he said.
Canada will not need to change its policies to achieve that goal, he added.

Fire this man immediately. He clearly has no business being our environmental steward.

Is It Getting Warm In Here?

2009-07-08T20:59:00.000-07:00

According to this story by the CBC, Canada ranks dead last among the G8 nations in the WWF's annual Climate Change report. The article states:

"Nowhere else on Earth do fewer people steward more resources, yet Canada now stands dead last amongst the G8 nations in protecting our shared home from the threat of dangerous climate change," said Keith Steward, director of WWF-Canada's climate change campaign, in a statement Wednesday.
Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are steadily increasing, and its per capita emissions are already among the highest in the world, says the study, conducted by Ecofys, a renewable-energy consulting firm.
"A plan to curb emissions was developed last year but has not been implemented," the report says.

Germany, the UK and France top the list as they have already achieved their Kyoto targets, whereas our Prime Minister seems to think that they are unattainable.

2009 rankings in the G8 Climate Scorecard (WWF/Allianz)
1. Germany
2. UK
3. France
4. Italy
5. Japan
6. Russia
7. U.S.
8. Canada

"So that Alaska may progress, I will not seek re-election as governor."

2009-07-05T16:57:00.000-07:00

She really is out of her mind.

I'm A PC...and I'm The President

2009-06-22T07:42:00.001-07:00

Unprecendented

2009-06-21T19:50:00.000-07:00

Despite Fox’s whining about ABC’s upcoming special on health care reform which will include a town hall conducted in the White House, it turns out that when George W. Bush was President, Fox did exactly what they are accusing ABC of.

Out of Time, Out of Luck

2009-06-20T13:27:00.001-07:00

"We have run out of time," Ashok Khosla, president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world's largest environmental association, told IPS. "Climate change is happening at a swifter speed than we thought so far."

Khosla, an Indian national, holds degrees in physics and natural sciences, and has taught and worked on environmental and social economics since the 1970s. He leads several non-governmental organisations committed to human development.

Katherine Richardson, a leading marine biologist researching the effect of climate change effect on the oceans, told IPS, "Sea levels are rising 50 percent faster than expected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"If humankind does not stop climate change in the immediate future, at the observed present rate sea levels shall rise by at least one metre by the year 2010." This would aggravate the catastrophic consequences already forecast for human settlements along coasts, especially in the developing world, she said.

Faster, Further, Hotter. It's like a new Olympic motto, only this one's about civilized human life on Earth. The rest of the story is here.

The Big Thaw

2009-06-17T20:29:00.001-07:00

As American as Apple Pie

2009-06-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

Interesting post at Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing on the legend of Johnny Appleseed. Explains when and why apple pie came to be associated with wholesome American values. Because the true story of Johnny Appleseed is just the tinest bit different.... Fascinating example of how real history is sanitized over time.

(Sociological Images is a great blog by the way. I read it every day, and it hardly ever disappoints....

More Bailouts

2009-06-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

So, someone explain the Canadian GM bailout package to me. $10 billion dollars to 'save' a company building cars nobody wants to buy.

I thought the conservatives believed in capitalism? Isn't the whole point of capitalism and the free market that competition ensures quality and efficiency by weeding out inefficient producers of crap? Isn't the whole point of recessions to clear out the deadwood? What is the point of Adam Smith's invisible hand punishing GM if the government comes and props it up? They won't give welfare to the poor because that would be interfering in the market place, but 10 billion to GM is okay. What am I missing?

To prop up a manufacturing industry in a post-industrial age. Why are we investing 10 billion dollars in an outdated, polluting industry that we need to ban to save the planet from global warming? The fact that GM is failing is telling us that the industrial sector is done. That's not what the economy is about any more. We might as well be investing in buggy whip plants as gasoline engine cars. I could see 10 billion investment in nano tech because that might help keep Canada abreast of developments in nano tech; or genetics or synthetic biology or etc. But investing in an industry thats done?

Not that you can refer to it as 'investing', because Harper was uncharacteristically up front that tax payers will never see most of that money back. I had thought that it was about saving jobs, and I get that from time to time governments may need to step in to stimulate employment etc. But it looks like GM is getting to cut their workforce too.

10 billion dollars. Deficit spending, Borrowed money. We'll be paying not just the 10 billion but the interest on the 10 billion. And for what. To shore up a doomed industry.

What if that were invested in education? In post-secondary training in nano or genetics or any of the other emerging tech. Or research. Or the arts. $10 billion would feed an army of Canadian artists, film makers, writers. 10 billion works out to what, a living wage for about 250,000 writers/artists/etc. Can you imagine what a quarter million writers could accomplish? Even if only one in a thousand became an international best seller, that's still another 250 Canadian authors contributing to world culture, putting Canada no the map, and bringing in revenue and tax dollars. 250 new Margret Atwoods.

If that money was used to launch a quarter million writers, even if only half of them ever got published, and only a half of those ever wrote a second book, that still means 75,000 new writer. Selling books. Paying taxes, paying back, over the lifetime of their writing careers, the full amount of the initial investment, plus a significant return on investment. Non polluting, sustainable renewable resource development.

But no, we throw the money into a black hole where no return on investment is anticipated...

And on a related issue, here's that Canadian Guy talking about bank bailouts:

Flash Dance!

2009-06-05T20:54:00.001-07:00

Mad props to Lila for finding this! Flash mob + Hammer Time!

Someone's Paying Attention

2009-06-04T09:19:00.001-07:00

Just not in the way you might hope. When it comes to issues of food security, countries around the world are buying up huge tracts of farmland in the Third World in order to ensure their own food security. As global food production suffers, these investments in offshore land stand to become very profitable, and then essential. Just not to the country where the food is grown.
There's a new website dedicated to tracking this trend; http://farmlandgrab.org/

Reuters | Wednesday June 3 2009

By Bate Felix

BRUSSELS, June 3 (Reuters) - The European Union is concerned by the trend of foreign investors and countries acquiring large tracts of farmland in developing countries to guarantee their own food security, a senior EU official said on Wednesday.

[...]

“The poorest countries are selling commodities, they are exporting migrants and now they are selling their land from which they will not take any kind of benefit in terms of food or whatever,” Manservisi added.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, China and South Korea are looking to buy farmland beyond their borders after sharp food price hikes in 2008 highlighted a need for greater food security.

Gulf Daily News | Wednesday, June 03, 2009

...

After suffering losses on investments in firms such as Citigroup, Gulf sovereign wealth funds are pumping billions of dollars into local industries such as banks and governments are boosting spending to avert an economic slowdown.

Gulf countries, mainly reliant on food imports, have also increased efforts over the last year to buy land in developing nations from Pakistan to the Philippines and Ethiopia, to help cater for a growing population.

Addendum: Gwynne Dyer talks about the same issue here.

The Weirdness

2009-06-02T07:54:00.001-07:00

What do you think when you see a sign like this?

Especially when its in front of a Tennessee Burger King? Chris Davis, a staff writer for the Memphis Flyer, noticed these signs outside two local BKs and decided to look into the matter (I want to pat him on the head and say "Good reporter! That's what good reporters do!"), and made some phone calls. The upshot? Burger King's CEO gets it-- John Chidsey has been quoted as saying that climate change is "an overriding issue of importance for the global community, business community and people in general." But the head of Mirabile Investment Corporation apparently doesn't get it--and his company owns more than 40 Burger Kings across Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, as well as a handful of Popeyes and All In One franchises.And the signs have been showing up in front of his restaurants.
So Leo Hickman has picked this story up in The Guardian, and The Memphis Flyer has the follow up.

Are We Allowing a War Criminal into Canada Today?

2009-05-29T09:16:00.001-07:00

Julia Dales

2009-05-26T08:24:00.001-07:00

Yeaaaaah Booooy! Two casual minutes in the back seat of a car with a cellphone--taking a break from reading Death of a Salesman--Julia lays down some beats that are good enough to get her into a wildcard spot at the Beatbox Battle World Championship in Berlin this weekend. That's top 20 worldwide, y'all.

To quote Karl, "anything humans can do, they'll do competitively," and Julia just takes us all to school. Again, I am amazed at what humans are capable of, because not only is Ms. Dales in the beatbox battle, but she's holding a 95% average down, sings, writes music and plays guitar, and is in the process of choosing the university at which she will pursue studies in global development and political science.
Back in Grade 9, she knocked out her friends and schoolmates:

Humans have the most unexpected talents and they come out in the most unexpected times and places--often during wars, emergencies, or other times of great stress. It is up to us as a culture, as a society, to find ways that everyone's talents get a chance to develop--without the war, emergency, or great stress. Do I really have to tell you why?

Mulroney: He's Having Our Cake...and Eating It, Too

2009-05-25T08:58:00.001-07:00

There's one thing about this sordid Mulroney-Schreiber thing that I don't get.
Mulroney says that starting in 1993 he was paid $225,000 by Schreiber in three installments of $75,000 each. In cash. In brown envelopes. In hotal rooms.
Mulroney did not claim this money on his taxes for six years because, he claims, as the payment was a retainer, he didn't have to declare this income until his retainer ended. That sounds fishy to me, but I'm no tax lawyer, so let's take Mulroney at his word and assume that Mulroney was acting in good faith based in this belief.
Mulroney finally declared this income and paid taxes on it in 1999. As Schreiber's legal woes grew, Mulroney decided the retainer was concluded, declared the income, and paid taxes on it.
Er, but wait a minute. Mulroney declared this income under the Canada Revenue Agency's Voluntary Disclosure Program. According to their website, this program:

require that the disclosure be voluntary, complete, involve the application or potential application of a penalty, and generally include information that is more than one year overdue.

This CRA program allows people who have been overdue in reporting taxes to pay unreported back taxes, and at the time that Mulroney paid his taxes, at a discount of 50%.
But wait another minute. This procedure is only for "information that is more than one year overdue." According to Mulroney, this information wasn't overdue -- according to him, it wasn't payable until the year he claimed it: 1999.
So Mulroney either was years in arrears in reporting this income and reported it under the VDP, thus allowing for a 50% tax discount, or he reported it on time, but reported under a program it wasn't eligable for and scored a 50% tax discount.
Either way, he handled it inappropriately and ripped off hard-working Canadian taxpayers.
(And why did Mulroney leave this amount of cash in a safe for six years? Why not put it in a bank and get at least some interest on it? For someone who seems well-versed in how to use the tax system, this seems a very odd course of action. But I digress.)

Bush Eats Kitten!

2009-05-22T10:22:00.000-07:00

Happy Earth Day

2009-04-22T01:17:00.000-07:00

Building a Mystery....

2009-04-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

I've never been a fan of Micheal Jackson...sure Thriller was a top selling album, and although it was in my former household, it wasn't in my personal collection. Speaking of collections, Michael Jackson was to auction off items from Neverland, the auction was cancelled but not before Linda Coffey took a tour and posted it on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWSze2pZZas

Say Farewell

2009-04-19T17:49:00.000-07:00

To J.G. Ballard, dead Sunday morning at age 78 according to the BBC. Extraordinary writer, extraordinary life.
Some of his novels, off the top of my head:
Crash
The Crystal World
The Drowned World
The Atrocity Exhibition
Empire of the Sun

There's a website dedicated to him (with a massive amount of content), a website that seems dedicated to journaling his influence,and, of course, a Wikipedia page. Hell of a thing, that he's gone.

Columbine

2009-04-19T10:21:00.001-07:00

Exactly 10 years ago on Monday, the world woke up to learn that two more unhinged American teenage misfits had snapped after years of bullying at the hands of the "jocks", the sporting overlords of their universe, and gone on a murderous rampage with semi-automatic weapons through their suburban high school.

Or that's the version we were told, anyway.

The teenagers were called Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their school was Columbine High, an idyllic sounding place nestled between the Denver metropolitan area and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. What is indisputable is that Columbine quickly became a byword for the nightmarish phenomenon - now seemingly a worldwide contagion - of school shootings. It was the bloodiest, creepiest, most vivid school attack anyone at the time could remember and remains, to this day, the episode the American popular imagination just can't seem to shake.

Harris and Klebold did not just gun down their victims in cold blood. They laughed and hollered while they were doing it, as though they were having the time of their lives.

In contrast to previous American school shootings, which had unfolded in hard-to-reach locales such as West Paducah, Kentucky, or Jonesboro, Arkansas, this one happened half an hour's drive from a major media hub. Denver television crews got there while the horrors were unfolding, and the cameras did not stop rolling for a week.

So starts Andrew Gumbel's Guardian article The Truth About Columbine in the Friday paper. In the article he discusses the role of the media, the echo-chamber that established the mythology, and the more and less horrible truth about what actually happened that day 10 years ago.
The stand-off? Didn't happen. The shooting was the SWAT team moving through the building looking for Harris and Klebold--who were long-dead and lying in the cafeteria. Cassie Bernall, asked if she believed in God and was shot when she said "yes"? Just shot. Another girl, Valeen Schnurr, asked if she believed in God, said "yes" and was spared. And the boys as Marilyn Manson-worshipping losers? Not so. Reasonably popular, the boys didn't listen to Manson at all. Really, an article worth reading. And then think about media complicity,our complicity, in generating myths instead of dealing with what really happened.

Yes, Thank You. Now Where's Ours?

2009-04-17T11:23:00.001-07:00

President Barack Obama on Thursday outlined plans for a high-speed rail network he said would change the way Americans travel, drawing comparisons to the 1950s creation of the interstate highway system.

Obama was careful to point out that his plan was only a down payment on an ambitious plan that, if realized, could connect Chicago and St. Louis, Orlando and Miami, Portland and Seattle and dozens of other metropolitan areas around the country with high-speed trains.

From HuffPo

The question is, when is the Canadian government going to figure this out? 2070?
Bill Curry, writing in today's Globe and Mail (17 April 2009), points out how it is the fear of protectionism in the US that's driving Canada to begin the process of harmonizing our environmental regulations with those of the US. Not because human life on the planet is at risk. Not because it is the right thing to do. But because trade with the US is threatened. This is too little too fucking late. We really need to be getting out in front on global climate change--and if that means shutting down the tarsands, or going nuclear, or imposing a hard cap on carbon emissions, then that is what it means. Harper is so resistant to anything past 1950 that he actually makes me long for the days of Brian Mulroney. Yeah, that one. There was actual progress made on environmental issues under Brian, even while he pimped the country out. Harper is just so not the prime minister we need in these times. He's just intractable, incompetent, and just plain obnoxious. Revolution Now!

Steps Towards Getting It.

2009-04-16T13:08:00.001-07:00

In Britain, Labour has put forward a program to get people into electric cars; they're offering a £5000 rebate to purchasers.

Consumers are to be offered incentives of up to £5,000 to purchase an electric car under government plans to be unveiled today that will also see the creation of electric car cities across the UK and the launch of large-scale experiments with ultra-green vehicles.

The proposals are part of a £250m strategy, seen by the Guardian, spelling out a revolution in Britain's road transport network based on ultra-low carbon vehicles. It will be launched today by Geoff Hoon, the transport secretary, and Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, with the aim of kickstarting the market for cleaner road vehicles and slashing the UK's CO2 emissions.

The rest of the article is available on The Guardian's website.

And who guards us from the guardians?

2009-04-16T13:03:00.001-07:00

G20 protest videos: Growing catalogue of evidence against police. An article with accompanying video foot age from The Guardian.

What's Big and Bad and Greenhouse Gassy?

2009-04-16T12:58:00.001-07:00

Just a hint:

image from The Guardian

A recent study out of the Danish government's environmental agency adds to this picture. It suggests that shipping emissions cost the Danish health service almost £5bn a year, mainly treating cancers and heart problems. A previous study estimated that 1,000 Danish people die prematurely each year because of shipping pollution.
The Guardian report also suggest that shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4% of all climate change emissions.

Spring is here

2009-04-02T08:15:00.001-07:00

And after gardening, thoughts often turn to greenhousing. Everyone wants one, but not all of us can afford one. (Well, some of us have space issues as well, but there you go...). Well, as a lovely recycling alternative, Richard Bennett of Scottish sustainable development charity REAP, has designed and helps schools build these greenhouses.

They are constructed of dimensional lumber, garden stakes, and re-used plastic drinks bottles. For something so cheap and designed to be built by schoolchildren, they work surprisingly well. I suspect that they last better than plastic film as well, as drinks bottles are heavier and seem to be made of a UV-stabilized plastic. The REAP website has the PDF of how to build these sheds. Got a local middle school that needs a project?

Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess!

2009-03-19T10:57:00.001-07:00

Oh yeah. When ya think its all doom and gloom, you see something like this that excites you with all the creativity of which people are capable. Even if you've seen it, its worth another look.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Live From Ottawa....

2009-03-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama and some other guy....

Even Lex Luthor Needs a Bailout...

2009-03-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

"Lex Luthor Bailout" with Jon Hamm - watch more funny videos

Bailing out the Auto Sector

2009-03-12T19:55:00.001-07:00

There's a lot of grief about bailing out the Big Three automakers in North America. Some of it centres on the fact that they've been making vehicles no one wants anymore (think about the Hummer and the F-series (200 and up) trucks. But most of the rage is based on the deals that the UAW have extracted from the Big Three; vacation time, overtime, and base-rates all seem to be freaking people out.

The problem with this rage is that it's seriously misplaced. Yes, there is a cost associated with building automobiles, and the numbers I've seen range from $65-$80/hr. Now that's all the labour associated costs related to auto manufacturing, although the people doing the screaming seem to think that this is $/hr in the worker's own pockets. It's not. And while the hour costs of car assembly are high, they are not really that far out of line.
Margret Wente in her Globe and Mail column of 12 March 2009 (p. A15), actually acknowledges her bias against the autoworkers--as well as health workers and municipal workers with the GTA--its that they get more than she does, that their union has extracted significant gains for their workers and hers hasn't. This seems to be common to most of the people doing the yelling about what autoworkers get paid--"they're just assembly plant workers and they get paid way more than me, get better pensions than me, get more vacation time than me, and I deserve better than them!"
Maybe they do. But from the quality of their analysis, I doubt it.

We acknowledge that manufacturing has been the way out of the working class and into the lower middle class for millions of working people--we just hate to acknowledge that a great deal of that social mobility has been because of a strong union movement. One of the most significant engines of Canadian prosperity has been the gains made by the UAW--because they spill over into the rest of the workforce. The Postal workers did the same, as well as the rest of the union movement in North America. Envy of these gains, as in Margret Wente's column, is an ugly thing, but its still easier than actually doing something to improve your own lot--like organizing, taking the beatings and killings from the owner-hired Pinkertons, and fighting for tomorrow even more than fighting for yourself. That's what the union movement has done, and all workers are the beneficiaries of their work.

Are cars more expensive than they need to be? Yes. And are the Big Three in trouble? Yes. But is it the fault of the unions? Not really. Assembly line workers build cars, they don't get the chance to design them, decide on profit margins, or decide which models will go into production. And let's be frank, for every stupid thing the UAW has done, the Big Three have made a couple of hundred stupid decisions--usually driven by short-term ROI needs rather than long-term sense.

Because it hasn't been the Detroit automakers that have driven the general rising level of prosperity in North America, its been the guys and gals making the damn cars, earning a decent buck, that have gone on to spend those dollars on other things like houses, furniture, food, vacations, and the like, that have spread the money around. Decently paid workers can afford to pay other workers decently.

Many of the Big Three's problems stem from other sources. For example, Saturn showed that it was going to be nearly impossible to rebuild car manufacturing in North America under the current financial/trade/political regime. Setting up a new line was simply too expensive compared to what could be done in other parts of the world under an aggressive free trade structure. So the assembly lines have aged, become less efficient, and are too expensive to upgrade at his point. Big capital doesn't see the return on investment (ROI) necessary to fix the problem--particularly with a global free trade environment. This parallels the problems faced by the British Empire at the end of its globe-spanning life. The wealth-generating heart of the empire had aged and become less productive and with free trade, the investment paid better if made overseas rather than at home. So big money made the sensible decision and Britain watched its trade deficit increase yearly and the country collapsed on on itself, hollowed out and emptied of wealth. The logic was unassailable--and unavoidable.

Explain it to me....

2009-03-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated watching the massive bailouts to the auto industry etc. It just so damned wrong-headed. Forget the basic tenants of the free market which these same corporations preach whenever environmentalists or etc complain about their rapacious capitalism; forget about the fact that we're using tax payer money for private profit; forget that these welfare bums are demanding gobs of cash in return for nothing -- I'd be much more okay with handing over the cash to preserve a national presence in auto manufacturing IF in return the citizens get a couple of billion shares in the corporation (wasn't American built on the principle of 'no taxation without representation'?) -- forget all that. My problem is that we're propping up an industry whose time is over.

Why are we throwing gazillions into industry when we're a post-industrial society. John Bell explained this back in the 1970s, for heaven's sake. They're worried about saving jobs in a manufacturing industry, but the number of workers in the arts is significantly higher, and the jobs are more enjoyable, self-fulling, life-affirming, non-polluting, renewable resource -- why is no one trying to bail out the arts? Why do we think we need people to buy cars (polluting, global warming, road building tax drains that kill or maim thousands of drivers and pedestrians each month) but buying theater tickets or building art galleries is somehow wasteful. And talk about (as Harper did) art gallas -- but the car execs don't have galas, they have private jets; bankers have to have their salaries capped at $500,000 (not counting, if you read the fine print, stock options). We can't afford $10,000 grant to a Canadian magazine but we can give billions to auto manufacturing? To save a dying industry? The backwards looking boobies who have no vision and no leadership are trying to drive the ship of state in reverse. Let's go back to 1950, they seem to say, instead of figuring out how to aim for 2050. Might as well try to bail out blacksmiths and wheelwrights.

And wasn't the whole point of the exercise to save jobs? So how is it that these companies can lay off 35,000 workers at a go, AND still take the bailout money. If they aren't even going to preserve jobs (other than the execs who created the problems) what was the point of forking over the cash?

Let us instead look to Sweden. When GM went had in hand and demanded huge bailouts for Saab, the governments response was, why? If you're in trouble, it's because your cars suck. We can let you access some funds for R&D to design the transport of the future, but building more of the current model, not so much. Furthermore, what money we have is going into nursery schools, because that is our future competitive edge; and into elder care, because that is a massive growth industry, and because those citizens built what we have to day. In contrast to your executives, who screwed up a perfectly good car company when you bought it out. So get out.

The Sweds are putting their bailout money into the non-profit sector because it is the largest employer - many many times larger in Sweden and Canada than industry. And since most people in the non-profit sector work for a LOT less than autoworkers we can hire two or three nonprofit people for every autoworker laid off. And they are more interesting, rewarding, and socially necessary jobs. Hell, for the price of one executive, we could fund an entire town's worth of programs! The Sweds get this, and they are not going to have recession or unemployment to the same extent because there's tons of room to expand nonprofit -- no contracting market there.

Who do you think will be ahead economically in ten years? 50 years? Sweden or... will there even been a Canada in 50 years?

Hundreds Attend Global Warming Protest

2009-03-06T10:41:00.001-08:00

Clean Coal

2009-03-05T18:28:00.001-08:00

...by the Coen brothers. (Yes, those Coen brothers...)

And the News Just Keeps Getting Better....

2009-02-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

Sign of the Times....?

2009-02-12T20:23:00.001-08:00

I Don't Really Know If I Can Stand This

2009-02-08T22:34:00.000-08:00

Trekkada. On EBay. WTF?

Comes with fold-in cover

2009-02-08T22:25:00.000-08:00

Yeah, check this out--an Imagine con (Rubber Chick-con 1) program book is available from Russell Books here in Victoria. And check out the price--I think that's three times what it cost to get in back in the day.

Is nothing sacred?

2009-02-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

This is Not Logical

2009-01-29T20:24:00.001-08:00

From straight.com...

The Bush Dictatorship: 8 Years in 8 Minutes

2009-01-21T19:23:00.001-08:00

Keith Olbermann sums up eight years of George W. Bush in eight minutes.

(Thanks to Karl for passing this one on...)

The Wrong Man

2009-01-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

I remember being woken up by a frantic phone call.
Planes. New York. Buildings. War.
It didn't make a lot of sense, frankly. I had no frame of reference for what I was being told. I switched on my TV just in time to see the first tower fall.
Mouth agape, comprehension still elusive.
Eventually I arrived at work, and found co-workers huddled around computers streaming radio broadcasts.
"They have no idea what they just woke up," I said.
Turns out, none of us did.

The Presidency of George W. Bush is irrevocably tied to 9/11. At first he spoke with restraint and clarity in response to the attacks, but that only lasted about 24 hours. Then it became apparent that I what feared was actually being contemplated: Pax Americana -- American forces tearing a swath across the globe, making the world "safe."
The irony is that this is exactly the plan that Bush's neo-con advisers had wanted him to follow anyway, even without a 9/11-type tipping point, and this is exactly what bin Laden expected him to do.
Bush believed that he was a man destined to live out a defining moment of greatness, and he threw himself down this ruinous path chasing that moment.
But Bush was never great. Not at anything, except having a famous last name and falling in with people who were willing to exploit it. His moment of destiny was the moment that he became President, thus proving the old adage that anyone could become President, even a party-hopping ex-frat boy drug user who had failed at almost everything he tried.
The wrong place, the wrong time. The wrong man.

Pax Americana didn't succeed, mostly because the Neo-Cons, drunk on hubris and their own press clipping, believed they knew better than anyone else. I guess when your invasion of a foreign country is based on lies, soon you actually start believing them. They forgot that the mission was to get bin Laden.
In WW II, it took 2068 days for the Allies to get Hitler. Now after 2688 days, Bush is gone but bin Laden is still out there. A free man.

Those who like Bush perceive him as a strong leader. But he wasn't. He was so weak that he bought into every stupid and destructive idea his clique of Neanderthal advisers whispered into his empty head.
Perhaps his rigidity was mistaken for strength. But sticking to your plan no matter how far reality diverges from your hoped-for reality isn't strength, it's inflexibility. In Bush's case, it was a disastrous liability.
Bush didn't even come through for his constituent base, the people who actually like him and think he's done a good job. He failed the neo-cons, he failed the religious right. He failed everyone.

We all know that this is the century that the American Empire finally falters. Bush pushed that time frame up by at least a generation or two. He praised free market capitalism, but was forced to to use the tools of socialism to save the business elite. He denied there was a need for fuel conservation, and now there's no oil. He denied the need for financial regulation and now there's no economy. He denied that climate change existed, and now there's no time.

So, George, what are you going to do now? Start a new oil company and run that one into the ground too?
Or perhaps you'll be dealing with the creation of your "Presidential" Library. That should be an easy job -- you only read one book of any consequence while you were "President": My Pet Goat.
So long, Bush. And good fucking riddance, too.

Fool:
1: a person lacking in judgment or prudence
2 a: a retainer formerly kept in great households to provide casual entertainment and commonly dressed in motley with cap, bells, and bauble b: one who is victimized or made to appear foolish : dupe
3 a: a harmlessly deranged person or one lacking in common powers of understanding b: one with a marked propensity or fondness for something (a dancing fool) (a fool for candy)
4: a cold dessert of pureed fruit mixed with whipped cream or custard

Bush: By the Numbers

2009-01-17T14:19:00.001-08:00

Bernie linked to it over at his blog FOB, but in case you missed it, here's Harper's magazine index of Bush: By the Numbers. Bernie quoted a few choice numbers, and I've picked a few other ones. Read 'em all here.

Months before September 11, 2001, that Cheney’s Energy Task Force investigated Iraq’s oil resources: 6
Hours after the 9/11 attacks that an Alaska congressman speculated they may have been committed by “eco-terrorists”: 9
Number of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and North African men detained in the U.S. in the eight weeks after 9/11: 1,182
Number of them ever charged with a terrorism-related crime: 0
Days since the federal government first placed the nation under an “elevated terror alert” that the level has been relaxed: 0
Number of box cutters taken from U.S. airline passengers since January 2002: 105,075
Percentage of Americans in 2006 who believed that U.S. Muslims should have to carry special I.D.: 39
Chances an American in 2002 believed the government should regulate comedy routines that make light of terrorism: 2 in 5
Date on which Bush said of Osama bin Laden, “I truly am not that concerned about him”: 3/13/02
Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3
Date on which the White House announced it had stopped looking for WMDs in Iraq: 1/12/05
Years since his acquittal that O. J. Simpson has said he is still looking for his wife’s “real killers”: 13
Percentage change since 2000 in U.S. emigration to Canada: +79
Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4
Increase since 2000 in the number of Americans living at less than half the federal poverty level: 3,500,000
Percentage change since 2001 in the average amount U.S. workers spend on out-of-pocket medical expenses: +172
Percentage change since 2002 in the number of U.S. teens using illegal drugs: –9
Percentage change in the number of adults in their fifties doing so: +121
Change since 2001 in the percentage of Americans who believe humans are causing climate change: –4
Number of total additions made to the U.S. endangered-species list under Bush: 61
Average number made yearly under Clinton: 65
Days after Hurricane Katrina hit that Cheney’s office ordered an electric company to restore power to two oil pipelines: 1
Days after the hurricane that the White House authorized sending federal troops into New Orleans: 4
Number of press conferences at which Bush has referred to a question as a “trick”: 14
Number of times he has declared an event or outcome not to be “acceptable”: 149
Average percentage of Americans who approved of the job Bush was doing during his second term: 37
Percentage of Russians today who approve of the direction their country took under Stalin: 37

Throw Your Own Shoe at Bush!

2009-01-05T18:33:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology you can throw your own shoe at Bush.
Try one here and another here.

This is Why You Use Paper Ballots Instead of Voting Machines

2008-12-31T12:18:00.001-08:00

The Day After...

2008-12-26T17:42:00.000-08:00

I on a walk to Oak Bay Village sadly noted that Santa had taken a turn for the worst. Upon stumbling down the stairs of an Oak Bay home after drinking one too many glasses of rum infused egg nog and crashing into a festively lighted tree, he met his demise by being electrocuted.

Hopefully everyone received what they wanted before this fatality occured.

Merry Christmas from The Central Ganglion

2008-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

Very Sad News

2008-12-23T18:18:00.000-08:00

There will be no Nativity Scene in Ottawa!
The Supreme Court has ruled that there cannot be a Nativity Scene in Canada's capital this Christmas season. This isn't for any religious reason, they simply have not been able to find three wise men in the Nation's capitol.

P.S. There was no problem, however, finding enough asses to fill the stable.

The Day The Shoe Stood Still

2008-12-23T14:52:00.000-08:00

Some Inspiration

2008-12-16T21:20:00.001-08:00

40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes @ Yahoo! Video

Finally!

2008-12-14T13:49:00.001-08:00

Finally someone gave Bush the boot!