Bandersnatchi's Trope

How do you describe an Ironman to someone who doesn't know?

2011-10-08T07:56:00.000-07:00

"Describe an Ironman" could mean "a person who is an Ironman" as my learned colleagues above have done,
or,
it could mean "a test of endurance conducted from point A to point B covering 2.4miles of swimming followed by 112 miles of bicycling, followed immediately by 26.2 miles on foot, done in the fastest possible time usually involving at least 2,000 competitors."

That may sound dull but it is the most economical and accurate definition I can compose.

Libor calls it a "sufferfest."

Metaphorically it might be something like this:

Ironman is a test of courage stressing the body and emotions to their limits by combining swimming, biking and running performed at optimum speed against, and with, about 2,000 like-minded souls. It requires commitment and fortitude, manifests a primitive need to push yourself as close to exhaustion as you dare in an exploration of your own character. It expresses the human need to stand on the edge of the deep and peer into the abyss just far enough that you can then draw back and scream defiance in the face of death, then to return, trembling, to the quotidian with renewed vigour and the confidence that comes from knowing that you can not only survive, but that you can prevail.

Organic vs. Vegetarian? Where's the beef?

2011-09-02T09:15:00.001-07:00

At the bottom, we want tasty, satisfying meals. If that means a nice chunk of BBQed mastodon, so be it! The leaf eaters can ruminate in their lotus position until they've extracted all the nutrition from their roots & greens, the world changers are going to toss the bones to the dogs and race off to the next adventure!

The goal shouldn't be to max out the world population with everybody eating beans & rice. Let's raise the bar a little. Life is about change. You live, then you die, no matter what you do. Humans are inventive animals. They created wine, port, whisky, wrote 10,000 cookbooks and have tried every critter under the sun with gravy or soy sauce at one time or another. To paraphrase Socrates, the unexplored diet is not worth living!

Perhaps when all countries provide free birth control, support abortion on demand, educate all their children, not just the boys, provide clean water and basic medical and dental care to their people, then you can go after food producers. The problem is at basis too many people not what they choose to eat.

Should meat producers be banned to curb climate change?

2011-09-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

re: "
Why Don’t More People Make the Link Between Animal Agriculture and Climate Change?"

By Kamal Prasad and Marilyn Cornelius

The assumption underlying the article: "that if only we will all live a simpler, less technologically enhanced life, everybody can live happily on this planet" is patently false.

All people are in competition for resources. There are winners & losers. People die and that's a fact.

We make choices. Some choose to live in flood prone areas and will watch their house flood and be washed away next year, if not, the year after. I'm not talking about Bangladesh, I'm talking about the banks of the Mississippi.

We work hard to achieve a better lifestyle for our families. If that means emigrating to America, working six days a week at two jobs so your children can have an education, buy a house of their own (away from the Mississippi) one day in which to raise their family, have the independence of a car with a roof and a heater, and eat meat several times a week, then that's what we worked for, that's what we wanted and that's what we have earned. Life's a struggle. You make sacrifices, work hard, then, no matter what you do, you die.

Now, ask the father of an immigrant family who has sweated blood for forty years hanging steel, if he will take that steak out of his children's mouths, and scrap his car, so that some Bangladeshi can re-build his stick and corrugated steel roof shack on the flood-prone banks of the monsoon zone property that got washed away for the tenth time in the last century. Go ahead. Ask him.

Perhaps when all countries provide free birth control, support abortion on demand, educate all their children, not just the boys, provide clean water and basic medical and dental care to their people, then you can go after food producers. The problem is at basis too many people not what they choose to eat. The goal should be population management not to max out the population with everybody eating beans and rice. Let's raise the bar a little.

Climate Change: these things can be done!

2011-06-16T13:40:00.001-07:00

Climate Change surfaced in my consciousness once again this morning. Perhaps it's because the NBA and NHL playoffs are over and the Tour de France and Wimbledon have yet to begin. Heh.

I read an article by Professor Lovejoy of Geo. Mason U. in my e-mail. He suggests geo-engineering solutions in addition to emphasizing that we are approaching tipping-point deadlines.
He points out the danger of delay and that people, and therefore their governments, are not likely to act until calamity occurs and probably only when it happens to them. Island peoples in the Indian Ocean losing their homes to ocean levels rising is not likely to move residents of Winnipeg who have just dealt with their own seasonal flooding from the Red River. Coral reefs dying don't concern folks in Edmonton, and so on.

In an earlier blog, I have pointed out the potential loss of white sand beaches everywhere as a consequence of ignoring climate change because everybody has a dream of vacationing on a tropical beach someday. I hoped that they might act because it hurt them in their dreams, but not so far. Perhaps they are still in denial and listen to false opinions of climate change by naysayers.
But perhaps the apathy is because the threat seems in need of a solution to focus on? Here, Professor Lovejoy has something to offer. He points to such familiar solutions as massive reforestation projects, restoration of grasslands and practicing agriculture that restores carbon to the soil, and then he points to more esoteric methods,

"For example, Vinod Khosla¹s Calera experiment has demonstrated
how to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by mixing it with
seawater to produce cement."

___________

Obstacles to implementing these solutions include:

- Doubt in the minds of ordinary people put there by industry lobbyists attempting to prevent any remedies that would cut into their profits, as well as the costs ofimplementing change. This could be changed by education but governments are listening to industry not educators. Lobbyists have bigger budgets and educators are too dependent on government grants to risk speaking out vehemently.
- Urbanization: the shift of people from rural to city living, a movement that in the last hundred years has changed the per centage of labour working in agricukture from 97 per cent to 3 per cent, means thatAgri-business and therefore our food supply is highly dependent on fossil fuels for energy and fertilizer and isn't going to change back easily or quickly.
- Costs in the form of lost profits. In the case of oil sands, reducing, or closing development there would decimate Canadian economy and have intolerable fallout politically with our biggest customer, the USA. therefore the cessation of oilsands production won't occur.
The political consciousness of the Canadian adult is still focused on the needs of family, home, job and could be moved to action in the form of endorsing action, if that action made obvious sense, that is to say, without to much technical explanation. So what is needed is a selection of projects that are conceivable, believable and achievable.

I propose the following:

- end gas flaring in BC and around the world. As of 2008, enough natural gas is wastefully burned every year, at the wellhead to heat 300,000 homes. That's a BILLION cubic metres of gas annually, which puts 1.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

- end interference in a woman's choice to control her fertility by providing education about fertility, conception, access to medication, including abortion. Provide education to women everywhere, because it has been shown that educated women have fewer children. 7 billion people, no matter what they do, produce more greenhouse gases just by living than, say, 5 billion people do. Either we reduce our population intentionally or nature will do it for us by disasters - flood, famine, disease, starvation, violent weather events, etc.

- reduce dependence on, and desire for gas-powered transport by all means: end NASCAR, and motor racing of all kinds, includng F1, Indycar, monster trucks, motorcycles, skidoos, hydroplanes, ocean racing, aeroplane racing, car shows, and end tax breaks for anything related to automobiles that does not reduce greenhouse gases. In June 2007, the Canadian Federal Conservatives sponsored a CASCAR racecar, the #29 car in the Canadian Tire Racing series. Can any government be taken seriously on environmental policy while they sponsor a gas-powered racecar?

- co-ordinate trucking industry by developing a computer run clearing and dispatch system like taxis use. At the moment trucks run all over North America, back and forth hauling everything from logs to food, and the inefficiencies result in millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases being produced unnecessarily.

- reduce regulation that works to prevent people from eating locally produced food, including meat. fruit, vegetables, grains. For instance, recent regulation required locally grown meat to be trucked away for slaughter and packing, doubling the cost in greenhouse gases, instead of permitting local packing by producers. It was a solution lacking a problem, and which only served to eliminate local producers and put profit in the pockets of corporate meat packing interests. Healthy food, eg. fruit cannot be produced locally at a profit because of useless regulation.

Political values lie at the heart of these issues. The solutions require change but the cost of not changing is greater, economically, morally, and idealogically.
　

NaPoWriMo is over!

2011-05-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, new month, National Poetry Writing Month is over at www.everypoet.org/pffa

I wrote 30 poems in 30 days.
My thread can be read here:
Geffo's Venal Muse

I am satisfied about a number of them, even written under pressure. I will add them to my anthology: A Leaf, Dead and Lately Fallen.

Here's a sample:

26. a traversiamo

The tenor rises
from the restaurant on the street below
and the shadow of the wrought iron foot board
haunts my wall - a spider shadow cast by the streetlight;
the red infusion that drenches the canvas
is the hue of my Chianti broadcast
by the flickering candle behind it.

I am alone, but I am not lonely.
At lunch the coloratura was lovely,
more lovely than the spaghetti alla carbonara
which was superb. For now it is dolce far niente
Tomorrow will be Naples - and pizza!
Somewhere my memory of Sophia
lounges in black lace, curvy, warm, seductive
a vision redolent of all that is good about Italy.

-30-

Romeo Must Die!

2011-02-22T09:39:00.001-08:00

World Population
* 1 billion in 1804 * 2 billion in 1927 (123 years later) * 3 billion in 1960 (33 years later) * 4 billion in 1974 (14 years later) * 5 billion in 1987 (13 years later)

Climate change causes notwithstanding, the human impact on the animal kingdom is indisputable.
But know this, there is no going back.

Concerns for the environment are not (just) about how pretty it is to look at, at the bottom it is about liveability - for humans.
Sure we care about pristine mountain streams being good for fish to spawn in, but in reality the concern is that the fish will still be there for us to eat.

We are pushing 7 billion people now. The environment supported lots of critters a hundred years ago when there were fewer than 2 billion people, but now we have five billion more! That's five BILLION more mouths to feed, butts to poop, and to house, warm, and entertain.
The only way for us to return to a world of plenty is for 5 billion people to die.

That isn't going to happen voluntarily, but it will happen, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

NASCAR is the canary in the coal mine.

2011-02-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

"Two truths are told as prologues to the swelling acts to the Imperial theme:"

- There is no stopping climate change - so get away from the coasts, sell off your shore front cottage.
- Just because they speak English, there is no reason to think our politicians are any less corrupt than those of your average banana republic.

Polluted water, air & soil will have increasing adverse effects on people as time passes because there are no new lands to conquer where unconflicted life is possible.
It's going to be an increasingly more vigorous battle for life & liberty from now on. The salad days are over, mostly because the peoples that "we" European descendants enslaved, colonized and exploited, are now grown up and sitting at the table of the developed nations demanding a piece of the pie.
The G8 has become the G20 and others are clamoring to be let in.
I see world politics becoming more protectionist from now on, and energy-dense fossil fuels will be hoarded by the military to protect borders and resources.
Because the only solution to this competition is massive reduction of the population, there is no political solution, only military ones.

btw, I consider NASCAR to be a bellwether, a canary in the mine - as long as there is NASCAR, no government can be taken seriously about energy conservation and climate change.

Sorry, Bubba.

"Why [should] I yield to that suggestion
Against the use of nature
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock against my ribs?"

Winter Wonderland

2010-12-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

Can you say, White Christmas?

I was gonna get out the bike, but..

The Conspiracy of Ignorance

2010-12-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

To govern effectively the mass of people must be kept poor and ignorant - Bernard Mandeville, 1670-1733, paraphrased from The Worldly Philosophers, R. Heilbroner

The dumbing down of America is evidence of cynical men in power conspiring to keep Americans poor and ignorant. The men in Washington don't want educated, intelligent, informed voters. They are too hard to manipulate by fear & greed.
cf. Patriot Act - scare the voters into giving up rights & freedoms so we can make more money selling arms & supplies to the military.
How many Senators & Congressmen send their kids to public schools? Why would they, unless they were trying to fund them, to improve them, to produce educated, intelligent citizens? They are not, so they don't.
Simple really.
Why is military spending so far ahead of education spending in the US? Could it be that there is profit in guns, but none in producing an aware citizenry that can't be fooled so easily into electing self-serving egoists like W?

Every time a school board tries to deny access to ideas by banning ideas from the classroom and substituting propaganda - as when Texas replaced science with theology - we lose.

I should have provided the reference to the Texas School Board: here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

"AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. "

and,

"In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school."

It is done not by revolution, but by erosion. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

2010-12-03T09:56:00.000-08:00

Today's Care2 newsletter held a brief article by Deepak Chopra on the mind/body issue. My reaction is below. Here is his article:

Quote:
"

The mind has remained a metaphysical riddle for centuries because it inhabits the physical world like a ghost. But that’s a Western perspective based on our bias for solid, tangible things. We insist that the brain must be the source of mind because the brain is a visible object, which is like saying that a radio must be the source of music because it is a visible object from which music emerges.

The Vedic rishis adopted the opposite perspective, insisting that visible objects couldn’t be the source of mind since the physical plane is the least conscious of worlds.

Our Western prejudice against the invisible isn’t easy to overcome. Mind will only be proved to exist outside the brain if it leaves some kind of footprint, a visible sign that is as convincing as the MRIs that provide concrete evidence of neural activity.

Right now you are a bundle of information in mind and body. You have unique memories; your cells have undergone chemical changes shared by no one else in the world. When you die, none of this information will vanish, because it can’t. There is nowhere for plus and minus, positive and negative to go since the field contains nothing but information. Therefore their only alternative is to recombine.

There is growing evidence that in fact we do share the same mind field. The brain belongs to “me,” but if ideas belong to “us,” then we are participating together in a field, sometimes quite mysteriously.

Adapted from Life After Death: The Burden of Proof, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2006).

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/does-your-mind-control-your-brain.html#ixzz1P5PeAxdl"
End Quote.

Sloppy thinking, poor reasoning, unproved assumptions and ridiculous conclusions like these really get up my nose - especially when people get paid for it.

Some points:
"The mind .. because it inhabits physical world like a ghost" - This is called "begging the question" for it is the mind's existence that is at issue. Here Chopra casually assumes the thing which is to be proved.

Western prejudice against the invisible is not prejudice at all. It is healthy skepticism of things for which there is little or no evidence.

"When you die none of this information will vanish.."
Really? What happens to the words on the Scrabble board when the game is over and the tiles are tipped back into the bag?

"Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.."

"There is growing evidence.." - really? Citations please.

What is mysterious is how long charlatans have gotten away with garbage like this.

An Inconvenient Truth: FAIL

2010-12-01T11:27:00.000-08:00

Al Gore made a film, established himself as an environmental activist, but in the end it only entertained the liberal-minded, middle-class who already accepted the climate change model he espoused.
The movie was a decent first step but was ultimately useless because the only people who went to see it were already believers. It was preaching to the choir.

I venture to say that no one who had already made up their mind that
"climate is changing as a result of human activity" was bogus, was converted into accepting this as true.

The only thing that will reduce harmful climate change is having fewer people. I see no political will to reduce population voluntarily, thus I suspect that nature will take care of the human over-population problem and it won't be pretty.

Meanwhile, converting to electric cars, recycling plastic bags, etc. doesn't mean a thing while Nigeria and Siberia continue flare off enough useable natural gas to power New York.

At night Nigeria and Siberia are brighter than Paris, London, L.A. put together and there are no large cities in these places.

Look it up:
http://www.earthzine.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/lights_at_night-2.jpg

so, sadly, "every little bit" doesn't help because it lulls people into thinking it is all okay. It isn't

Apart from the gas flaring in these places, on another front, China is building 2 coal-fired electricity generating plants EVERY WEEK

(reference:#22) for the next several years. Don't bother with your personal re-cycling if you aren't going to change Washington's policies on trade with these nations, and know this, 25% of US oil will come from Nigeria by 2025.

These three factors alone outweigh anything individual citizens can do to change matters. This problem was created at a national level and will only be solved at a national level.

Is veganism better for the planet vis-a-vis climate change?

2010-11-24T13:51:00.000-08:00

If the argument is about which is better for your health vegan or omnivore, that's one thing, but this thread is about whether producing meat is good for the planet, climate-wise.

If food production produces 18% of the GG problem now - U.N.F.A.O., how much lower do you think it is possible to get it? It won't be zero.

But this is like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You have to solve the population problem first before you worry about how many cows there are. If the population gets to 9B by 2050 as the UN says it will, the question of meat vs. veggies will seem small potatoes, if you will pardon the pun.

As for right now, reducing the number of cattle, pigs, etc. is of small concern while Nigeria and Siberia are lit up brighter than Paris or New York by gas flares you can see from space.
They flare off more natural gas each year completely wasted, than most countries and many states consume.

The GG thus produced make the cows issue trivial.

Come on now, let's focus on the correct issues..

Koko Classic Triathlon

2010-11-22T23:21:00.000-08:00

Just watched 5-0, they faked a triathlon as a backdrop to the drama.
Bad Five-O! Dissing triathlon by stating that they were blood dopers!
Maybe some long distance triathletes have blood-doped but this fake Koko event was a sprint or Oly at most. There`s no benefit to doping for short distance events. The writers got it wrong. I suppose it was jus`t so they could `find` a fingerprint on the blood bag. AND they had the robbers posing as triathletes doing a hard workout the night before the race!
Idiots.
Anyway, a bunch of real triathletes got some on camera exposure as extras on a primetime show, and that has to be a good thing.

3 inches of snow and minus 10C right now. Sucks.

Ten Rules for Modern Life

2010-11-18T15:46:00.000-08:00

I received the following in an e-mail today and have seen it before attributed to someone else. Whoever wrote it has some wisdom.

"Love him or hate him , he sure hits the nail on the head with this!
Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did
not and will not learn in school..
He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a
generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them
up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world doesn't care about your
self-esteem.. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you
feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You
won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had
a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault , so don't whine about
your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are
now... They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and
listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you
save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try
delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life
HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll
give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't
bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and
very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on
your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to
leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.""

Sexual Stupidity & the Afghan War

2010-11-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

One would have to admit surprise, initially, when reading of the stupid errors of judgment made by obviously smart men, and women, but we'll get to them later, in matters concerning sex.

John Kerry, Elliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, John Profumo, Marv Albert and men who were perhaps less smart, Tiger Woods, Hugh Grant, Jimmy Swaggert, Edwin Mose, Charlie Sheen, Kobe Bryant, Mike Tyson, Steve Garvey, hundreds of priests and other non-famous men. What is it? Hubris?

Why would someone who has a great deal at stake, make such boneheaded errors in judgment? Maybe that should be boner-headed errors. Was it arrogance that made them think they could get away with it?

It may be simply that in matters concerning sex humans universally act irrationally. There is arguably a disconnect between natural sexual urges and the convoluted, sophisticated, social arrangements we make to corral and direct the sexual urges humans universally feel.

Consider a stark contrast, say, the gulf that exists between the adolescent male urge to mate with anything that will hold still long enough. Or the famously documented urges of Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Caligula, henry VIII, and so on. Given the power to obtain access to women, whether legally or illegally, powerful men will rack up as many partners as time permits.

Even when social agreements like marriage, or informal relationships like living together are made moderns will stray. Notwithstanding whatever thrill may come from getting away with it, men will often not think twice when sex is made freely available. So what is this phenomenon? Is it perverse or noramal?

Of course terms like normal and perverse are subjective. Yet, we act surprised when a prominent person is involved in a sex scandal. If we knew our history we ought not to be surprissed, we whould pay it no attention because we expected it. Yet we continue to promote lifetime commitments to fidelity and exclusiveness and enact punitive laws to enforce them. What's going on?

Is it hypocrisy to take marriage vows? Or is it simply futile? When a man stands up in church and vows fidelity in front of God and his congregation is he lying, being self-deluded, simply stupid? Is the woman so desperate, self-deluded, dishonest that she goes through with it?

In other cultures, say, Islam, where it is akin to taking a slave, marriage may be the only way a man can legally have a sex partner, the law exists to enforce the ritual and the institution.

From an evolutionary perspective, it is a good male strategy to have as many breeding partners as possible. Since partnerships are problematical, promiscuity is a sound program to persue. It is in conflict with a female evolutionary perspective that must be centered around child-rearing to ensure projecting her genes into the future. This results in complex social arrangements, including invasion, raping and pillaging, sharia, marriage rituals such as seen in many of the world's religion. It may even be that the whole point of a religion is to regulate and give order to the natural mating urges of men and women.

Organized religious authorities set themselves up in power by creating myths about sex, fertility, sin, and so on. If you want to wield power over the people you must control their natural urges. Create a concept of sin associated with sex, then show people how they can get to exercise their urges legally and without sin, and you have control over them is the strategy devised by the Catholic Church and is copied by others.

But the urge can be stimulated to ennervate the individual to act in contrary manner to rational thought. Many examples exist of men who were seduced by a beautiful woman. Prostitutes are committed to tempting men toi have sex with them. Their task is easy because nothing could be more natural than to have sex with a willing partner. In the balance is loss of various degrees of prestige, moral propriety, and material wealth.

We in the wealthy western world cannot imagine returning to a time when women do not have property rights and defence of law such that they cannot be taken sexually at the will of a more powerful man, as happened centuries ago and still happens in areas of the world where the law is absent such as the Congo where mass rape is common even today.

Take the view of the Taliban in Afghanistan where the US and Foreign troops are regarded as threatening sharia law and the Afghanis rights to control their women. These Afghanis will fight to the death to prevent this. It is as simple as that. Under sharia law a man gets a woman and the right to control her sexually.

"If you want to defend the rights of women in Afghanistan you have to defeat the Taliban, and you have to do it militarily." - Douglas Ross, Professor of Foreign Policy, Simon Fraser U.

Young men & women are most susceptible to acting irrationally, that is to say, based on instinct rather than on reason, because between puberty and say, 40 yrs old, sex hormones are most plentiful in the body.

Denying young men access to sex partners by ssimple admonition or proclamation is almost impossible and in western democracies has consequences of unwanted pregnancy or heartbreak, but in many areas of the world it results in men taking up arms and many deaths are the consequence.

Minister Rich Coleman, Drunk Driving & Cindy Berner

2010-11-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

cc: almanac@cbc.ca

Re: Drunk driving, Minister Coleman and Cindy Berner
- Alexa Middelaer, 4, was killed after she was hit by a car driven by Carol Berner.
- Minister Coleman considers telling RCMP to back off a bit in enforcing drunk driving laws
I view it as absurd that on the same news broadcast a woman is being sentenced for killing a 4-year-old girl while driving under the influence, and at the same time, the Minister is contemplating “educating” the public that it’s okay to have two glasses of wine with dinner. So go ahead, go out to dinner, drive to the restaurant, have a few glasses of wine and drive home.
Who is being smart here? The citizens who are staying home to have dinner and enjoy their wine without risking killing some 4 year old child, or, the Liberal Government’s Minister, who is so wishy-washy about enforcing his own laws, that a few restaurant owners whining in his ear can persuade him to back off & he is now prepared to put children at risk on the streets?
We didn’t back off about another drug that was killing people and costing the health system money. Cigarettes. So why back off now over the consumption of alcohol?
The reason for the law in the first place, in both cases: cigarettes and alcohol, is the same, and that is: people die, and those who don’t die, cost us money in terms of health care costs, property damage and thereby in insurance costs.
Do not listen to the lawyer who sounded off about the fewer number of criminal cases relating to drinking & driving. He is just trying to drum up business. We don’t need more people with criminal records. We do need fewer people drinking & driving. The RCMP seem to have got it right this time.

Who needs to be good at Math anyway?

2010-11-04T13:14:00.000-07:00

G.V. Ramanathan, wonders if the nation isn't all in a lather about nothing, a professor emeritus of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he suggests the average person doesn't need higher math.

Ann Bibby wrote on Care2 Causes today:
"In a recent article for The Washington Post, Ramanathan questions the frenzied call to arms of the education establishment to try and boast the almost zero interest most Americans have in math beyond the basics. He points out that since the first clarion of concern in 1983's A Nation At Risk a lot of money and time has been devoted to promoting math, but that standardized test scores of American teens have improved not one bit since the 1980's. And despite the angst and alarm this causes politicians and business interests, the fact is that most people aren't required to use advanced math in their daily lives, either at work or personally. Math is less relevant to daily life than literature, history, politics, music and communication skills."

My take:

Sure the average kid can get by without higher math. Is "average" all you want your kid to be?

Math is the gateway skill to the high tech jobs of the future.

The "average person" can be intimidated by just tossing out a few statistics. The competent ones are not afraid of challenging politicians who attempt to hoodwink us by citing dubious stats to get us to panic into supporting lame bailouts that they don't properly understand themselves. Do you imagine W understood the bailout? Unlikely.
His advisors may have, who were likely huge investors in Wallstreet, but they were interested only in their own agenda.
Anyway, hoi polloi let them get away with it and now we have a multi-trillion dollar debt.
If everyone viscerally understood debt and compound interest, we might have burned Keynes at the stake instead of sanctifying him.

Another take, the lottery is just a tax on people who suck at math.

No one is "bad at math" but teaching makes them appear so. Teaching it by a method which relies for its success on short term memory - our weakest mental faculty, instead of say, imagination - children's greatest strength, is barren of ideas and a betrayal of children's potential.

Consider this - traditional math teaching is nothing but the forced memorization of facts, rules, formulae and process.

Where's Understanding supposed to come from?

My point is, if kids aren't learning by the way we are teaching, it is time to teach them in the way they can learn.

"Teaching Math with Manipulatives" - Geoff White
www.geoffwhite.ws

Spelling / Grammar - worth the trouble?

2010-10-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

If you want to make a difference in the world, you have to understand the issues. That needs language - unambiguous, CORRECT language.

If you start accepting non-standard uses of language, if sloppy grammar and spelling goes unchallenged, the consequences are dire.

Labor contracts cannot be binding if the wording is ambiguous or wrong.
Worse, if you lack a proper understanding of grammar and accept incorrect substitutes such as "relative" for "relevant," "irregardless" for regardless, your thinking is handicapped and you will find it harder to succeed in this world, or even to survive.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/8-spelling-mistakes-even-smart-people-make.html#ixzz13htII2i2

Gleepix: Storm in a Teacup

2010-10-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Glee is not aimed at tweens as the CBC Radio guest, Prof. Sullivan, said.
It is a nostalgic look at our experiences in our senior year at high school.
Tweens are not buying the products advertised on Glee or in GQ for that matter.

The prudery expressed by Prof. Sullivan when she remarked on Lea Michele sucking on a lollipop shows that she doesn't get the joke. Lea Michele is the antithesis of Rachel Berry. She (Lea) is enormously attractive and would be hugely intimidating to any high school boy but all actors in the show pretend that she is some dowdily dressed, ugly Betty - to borrow a metaphor from another show that casts a beautiful actress as a frump. And yes, it is a legitimate source of humour as it reveals how little we understood ourselves in our teenage years.

Glee holds up a mirror for us, as we try to decide whom we best can identify with from among the stereotypes the cast represents. Reductio ad absurdam.

GQ is not a public magazine as Prof. Sullivan stated. It is a privately-owned business just like the Alberta Report. If you don't like it, don't buy it. But even the Alberta Report can still teach us something. GQ sells to its customers what they want to buy (as does AR) and they are all adults, notwithstanding the mother who claimed last week on CBC news that she was afraid lest GQ end up in the hands of her 8 year old son. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Real high school girls wear less on the beach. Better not let your kid go to the beach, mom.

Glee presents for our consumption, tongue-in-cheek references to truths from our youth that we can all relate to, such as when Puck tells us frankly, what he really wants from his life, unedited by taste or inhibition, when Britney & Santana misbehave like comic book caricatures of teenagers, or when Rachel speaks her mind, and reveals the crass insecurities we all experienced. The upside is we adults can discuss the matters raised because Glee broke the ice,

Thanks to you Glee, GQ and to Michele, Aragon & Monteith and to CBC Radio for giving us food for thought.

"Because I can" doesn't cut it.

2010-10-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

Ultimately, I hope we participate in sport for the joy of it. Bruce Kidd, Canadian Olympian said, "Sport is a pleasure of the flesh." It feels good to push our bodies, and competition enables us to push harder than we could on our own.

One of the values of sport is that it can teach us something about ourselves.

Thus, if we find that our competitiveness causes pain to others, it is my hope that we would desist.

By extension if we realized that what we were doing was unfair, unseemly, without grace, that we would stop doing it.

Take my Nina Kraft example, if I am beating Natascha and I know I am doing it because I cheated, I hope that I would feel bad enough about it to stop doing it. Natascha was given the title after Nina was disqualified but Natascha never got to enjoy the win by receiving her acclaim on Alii Drive. Nina knew she was dirty.
Similarly, Oscar Periero never got the acknowledgement on the podium on the Champs Elysees at the finish - Floyd Landis stole that from him, and Floyd knew he was dirty.

The win was meaningless for Nina and Floyd because they were disqualified, all they did was steal the rightful glory from the other kid. I hope for better from our sports heroes.

If you are struggling with this issue, and you should, good. We all should. Fairness is a fundamental concern in sport. Something I emphasized to the rugby and basketball teams I taught as a schoolteacher.

"Just because we can" is a phrase we hear all too often when clear thinking escapes us. Think, "why do you do this?" "Because I can." is a pathetic response. It reflects a lack of understanding about ourselves, and is especially common from pro athletes. Hardly surprising, few of them earned their graduations from high school or college honestly, like the rest of us had to.

"Because I can" has become a de facto excuse for getting away with stuff even though the person concerned knows it's unfair. So my response to your question above is that if "outside help" is understood as being unfair in a triathlon, then an honorable person knows whether "teaming up" is fair or not without being told. Even though it may be impossible to enforce.

A Philosophy of Teaching Mathematics

2010-10-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

Meaning

Where does the idea of a philosophy of mathematics come from?
Some of the first questions we ask are: What is there? What can I Know? and What ought I to do? Often philosophy is seen not as a discipline that gives answers, but one that merely hopes to ask better questions. I have a goal in mind, and that is, to do away with an establishment that seeks to bury math in symbolism, literally full of Greek symbols, such as pi and delta, unfamiliar to almost everybody, to demystify the activities that hide behind unexplained processes, such as calculus and algebra, even long division, which have plagued students for more than a century, since the inception of public schools. What I mean to do is to decode this mathematical language into a spatial reality.

After observing the world and the people and things in it we then want to talk about it. For this we employ language, and the first task is to name things: mother, father, pig, tree, antelope, and so on. Then we might want to say something about the scope of the world - how big things are, how far away things are, how many things there are. We employ metaphor: "The buffalo are as many as there are fish in the sea," or, as John Cabot told his King of the fish on the Grand Banks: "They are so plentiful, a man could walk on their backs from Greenland to Nova Scotia." Primitive man had only a few numbers: one, two, three and many. This sufficed for a primitive life. It had survival value up to a point. As long as there were enough buffalo to eat who cares how many there actually are? Need dictates.

When the metaphor breaks down we must resort to counting.

To describe the world, to say what there is, and how many there are, a few wavy hand gestures and holding up some fingers, works up to a point.
"Many buffalo, two days ride, that-a-way!" just about does it, until the population outnumbers the resources, then we need the accountants.

To master bigger numbers than we have fingers for, we employ symbols and right there we lose almost everybody. It is a common complaint to say, "I can't even balance my cheque book!"

What happened at that point was that, by employing symbols, mathematics was removed from the world of the concrete and into the abstract. This is not a necessary transformation. It has, however, been used to separate understanding from practice for most people and resulted in frustration, a sense of powerlessness and exploitation. How many big money earners have been defrauded by managers who knew more about manipulating numbers than their employers? If the math was concrete and available to everyone this wouldn't happen, at least, not so often. It may be that a fool and his money are still parted - eventually.

What I said I wanted to do is to decode the mathematical language into a concrete reality. You see - a key phrase - what has happened is that symbols are introduced into the learning process before the pre-pubertal mind can comprehend them, and therefore, rote and process learning have been substituted for understanding. Instead of understanding numbers, we merely train the processes of manipulating symbols according to rules and formula which must merely be remembered in lieu of understanding. Recitation has taken the place of comprehension.

This program has gone unchallenged for decades, for so long that most people think that there is no alternative, that children must be forced into the memorization of facts, rules, formulae and process, that that is all there is to math. Yet the alternative has been in front of us all along. To what am I referring? Why the very books we use to teach the subject. Open the schoolbooks. The storybooks, the atlases, the geography books about foreign lands and the people who live there, the history books about colonial North America, cook books for HomeEc, shop manuals for woodwork and car mechanics, science books about heat and light and sound. What do you see Pictures. You see a picture and a story below it, saying something about the picture. A picture is worth a thousand words. In the first storybooks we use to teach children there is only a picture of a thing, a boy, a dog, a ball, and the name printed underneath. this is the pattern. Open the math text, what do you see?

Where are the pictures?

What has happened as I said above is that we jumped straight to symbols, 6, +, -, x, etc. leaping from a vision of the world to abstract notation, bypassing the pictures altogether. This has made understanding impossible for almost all children. Piaget explained that the human goes through stages of development from sensori-motor to concrete operational to abstract which takes 10-14 years or more and no amount of coercion can change that. So in order to save children from counting on their fingers for ten years until their cognitive; development renders them capable of grasping abstract concepts, to give them something to do from grade one through grade ten we have resorted to drill and recitation, endless practice of meaningless skills so that when their intellect is ready for algebra, so the thinking goes, they can understand (suddenly) what we have been going on about for the first decade and a half of their lives. The cost in terms of their patience and cooperation has been enormous. Many children resent the boredom of mathematics the seemingly senseless waste of their time doing endless reams of sums for ten years that by the time they get to Grade 10, where there is often an option to drop math or at least to take some practical course like shop math or bookkeeping that may lead to employment is possible.

That in a nutshell is the problem To put it in the form of a question, what is the point of training efficiency and competence in arithmetic for the first ten years of a child's life if the cost is that it puts them off ever wanting to do math again? If they can be persuaded to study, to memorize the facts, rules, formulae and process necessary to achieve competence in math for ten or twelve years of schooling, but at the end they just hope they can remember it long enough to pass the exam and hope they never have to do it again, what really was the point of doing math in the first place?

The solution?

Change the method of presenting and doing math from grade one or two say, up to grade 8 or 9 or 10. Grandma and the pre-school teachers and the grade one teachers are doing just fine. All a child needs to start with they are already getting: the ability to count to nine and to build a rectangle. Although we have something to say about the counting.

If little Johnny can say, "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten." Can he count? No. Well, maybe. You see all he has demonstrated is that he has memorized the names of he numbers, as he has memorized his A,B,Cs. But there is more to counting than knowing the names of the symbols 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, and 10.

You have to know that 4 is larger than 3. If we assumed that the child would know that 4 was bigger than 3 because it came later in the sequence wouldn't he think that Z was 26 times bigger than A? All we know from the recitation is that he knows the names of the number symbols, just as he knows the names of the letter symbols.

We need to teach to concept of magnitude and nothing is simpler than to substitute a manipulative, a plastic block, say, for the symbols, initially.
Let us use a small cube, a little green block, attractive, non-threatening. Let us hold it up as the child holds his and say, "This is one."
Then let us hold up a small orange block - merely so that it is easily distinguishable from the one by looking, and say, "This is two." The two-block will be the same size as two green "ones" placed together.
Then let us hold up a pink block and say, "This is three." The pink block will be the same size as three ones placed together.
And so on.

We will lay them out on the table and say these are the numbers, one, two, three, etc. and we may write down the symbols below the blocks and say, "These are the names of the numbers."

The point here is to teach counting in concrete terms, rather than with symbols. Piaget has shown that it is pointless to employ abstract teaching concepts before the mind is ready but we can still teach the skills of mathematics. we can teach "kindergarten calculus."

All we do in math is count.

The Acquisition of Meaning

2010-10-15T00:45:00.001-07:00

How does a thing acquire meaning?

How does “y = Mx+C” acquire meaning?

How does “the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides” acquire meaning?

How does “6” become meaningful?

One of my lifelong philosophical investigations has been the acquisition of meaning. There is a TV show that ends its credits with a boy pointing at a tree on a hillside and asking, ”What does that mean?” Is that a sensible question? Consider if the tree has meaning, if the tree on a hillside has a meaning, if a tree on a hillside against a cloudless sky has meaning. I think what this line of questioning reveals is that we look for patterns of relationships to elicit meaning. Humans are essentially pattern recognizers. I wrote an undergraduate thesis entitled, Intelligence as the ability to recognize, extend and create patterns.” In it I wrote that a pattern is a relationship between at least two things. For there to be a pattern there must be at least two things. In the case of a dot on an infinite field there is no pattern. But a dot on a field with finite boundaries must have a relation to at least the boundary, or in the more pedestrian case, the dot has a relationship with the edge of the paper. By extrapolation, an isolated event, a “random” event is not a pattern. For an event to have a pattern there must at least exist a context for the event. If there are two such events, then of course, we have a pattern.

One way to investigate the acquisition of meaning is to consider learning a foreign language as an adult. I have taught ESL. One typically begins with some vocabulary, some examples of familiar objects: dog, cat, man, car. This is just re-naming. The meaning for the learner is still the original word/object relationship they discovered growing up. My understanding of cat is not enhanced by learning that, in French, it is called “chat.”

In some languages I am told, there are concepts that do not exist in other languages. If a student should acquire the new concept in the new (for her) language as an adult, then she would be able to tell us something about the acquisition of meaning. Without her we have to introspect a bit more. If I learn a new word in a foreign language, say, in a vocabulary list, such as perro, broma, barato, etc. I may memorize the list and pair them with the equivalent words in my first language but it is a chore and I need many reviews, even then I have to translate the word to English to assign meaning to the object to which the word refers. I think what is missing to give the new Spanish word meaning for me is having the relevant experiences with the object that a native speaker might have when acquiring the object in the quotidian way. This is to say that there are schemas (pre-concepts) and actual physical experiences (sensory experiences) that someone would have in association with learning a word. Take “perro” for example. When a Spanish child first meets a perro his parents might use the word as it licks his face and that experience is what the child recalls when he hears the word subsequently. Also, when he experiences the face-licking again he might utter the word “perro.” Importantly there will be feelings associated inextricably with the use of the word, and vice versa – the word can elicit the feelings.

This is an important feature of meaning acquisition. To put it bluntly, for there to be meaning, there must be feeling. Could there be a rote recall of an equivalent meaning as in vocabulary lists? Yes, of course, but for there to be a visceral understanding of a word or concept, there must be a feeling associated with it.

Therefore when teaching, we must seek to evoke feelings in association with a concept in order to ensure that students acquire meaning viscerally.

A corollary of this is, that if there are no feelings associated with an experience then it is meaningless. An example of this may be when a student witnesses an experiment in science, chemistry, say, perhaps litmus paper turning colour when in contact with an acid or akali, and having no accompanying feeling, she simply shrugs and says, “so what?” In this case I am prepared to admit that it is an appropriate response and we as educators ought to respond positively to it by changing our approach, rather than, say, reproaching the student for having a bad attitude.

Again, to acquire meaning requires that there be feelings present. What kind of feelings? There is an amazing range of possible feelings that could be associated with an experience. Consider dissecting a frog. You can easily imagine the range of feelings this could engender, ickiness, amazement, wonder, fear, disgust, and so on. No doubt all of us remember that experiment vividly. For this query, it is not the one, intended, scientific feeling that I am concerned with. I wish only to observe that with strong feelings comes strong learning. Focusing the learning experience is another project. Thus, in the case of learning math, where meaning is often lacking and the learning is sometimes considered tedious, it is obvious that we must strive to present the opportunity for the students to experience feelings when learning math. One feeling we all would like them to experience is the joy that comes with success.

How shall this be done?

One way is to employ the "explore and discover" principle. In practice this looks a lot like play, but it is directed play.

Exploring and discovering are activities naturally satisfying curiosity. And like attaining understanding, directed play, or exploring and discovering, produces good feelings.

Understanding a concept is usually accompanied by the production of dopamine and endorphins in the brain, in short, pleasure. When that little light goes on, and you finally "get it," it feels good!

Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have shown that understanding of concepts occurs naturally in children if the appropriate sensori-motor experiences can be had. That means the necessary opportunity for exploring and discovering concepts must be provided for the children to learn naturally; in other words, play.

But not just any play, if you want children to learn language you must provide a language-rich environment. If you want children to learn math concepts you must provide a math-rich environment. More on that later, let's get this straight: sensori-motor experiences of the right kind are necessary for the acquisition of schemas - groups of experiences, that can be assimilated and synthesized into concepts or accommodated by the child's mind. This sense of understanding is enjoyable and is all that is needed for successful learning.

It is our mission as teachers and parents to provide the appropriate materials and situations for this to happen, and sometimes just to get out of the way.

While that made me happy, by 1998 the demand on my schedule had become so heavy I knew had to find another way to reach more people. My solution was to record my workshop on video. I willingly sent the tapes to interested parties I couldn't teach in person. The problem with that scheduling solution was no one could ask questions. Extra explanations were missing because I wasn't there in person at the white board. That led me to the development of a handbook.

I'll tell you more about that in a minute. You probably want to know more about the Mortensen Math system first.

MORTENSON MORE THAN MATH employs manipulatives to enhance the child's ability to visualize math concepts, to decode the mathematical language into spatial reality.

The best way I know to explain the Mortensen Math system is to talk about memory first. How good is your short-term memory? More importantly, how good is your short-term memory with numbers? Suppose I gave you 12 numbers, each of them seven digits long. Do you think you could remember them for an hour? Five minutes? Do you think you could remember them long enough to write them down, even right after I told you?

Not likely. That's because you've been taught like everyone else to memorize the hard way. The hard way is how most students are taught math as well.

The truth is the entire math curriculum used in traditional teaching situations, employing textbooks, relies on memorizing nothing but FACTS, RULES, FORMULAE AND PROCESS!

Our job as educators is to decode this mathematical language of symbols into a concrete reality. This is what the method does.

Learn more at my webpages: Geoff White - Teaching Math with Manipulatives using the Mortensen Method

Transcendent Writing

2010-09-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

Mysticism Today

I am seeing many examples these days of an undue fascination with mysticism and wonder for its own sake.

It's one thing to have an open mind, to consider carefully, to explore unique ideas as they come to you, and quite another to seek out notions merely because they are unlike any other, to live on the fringe.

Being on the cutting edge of knowledge is not the same as hovering at the limit of sensibility.

While I have no quarrel with those who are deluded through genetic flaw, driven to it by social pressures or personal demons, to the point where they are unable to distinguish between fact and fancy, I take issue with those who deliberately look for the quirky and controversial with full knowledge that the material will amuse the gullible and the untrained.

An example or two might serve to clarify what is bothering me.

I was recently invited to attend a seminar on guided, or transcendent writing which is purported to be, or simply described as “words that flow from the heart and pierce the heart at the same time”
Sounds innocent doesn't it?

Fuji (planchette writing), guided writing or spirit writing, has a long history in Chinese folklore and appears in other cultures in various forms. It arises out of superstition and strong emotionality surrounding loss of loved ones, a belief in a life after this one, supporting a desire for communication with the dead, and is absolutely unsupported by any testable evidence. Likely it is fostered by the exploitation of of the superstitious for fame or profit.

Simple observation of the act is seldom possible because the writer will commonly testify that some negative spirit among the observers is blocking communication with the spirit realm as if skepticism is more powerful than the supposed spirits will to communicate, as if negative beliefs are inherently more powerful or the spirits have a lot of ego and refuse to show themselves except to true believers. Writing done in isolation of course is abundant from the self-declared practitioner and will be accompanied by wonderful tales of extreme emotion and experience.

I ask why, when I feel inspired and have a fruitful day of writing, it is not seen as guided by a beneficient spirit and is something other-worldly to behold, and not merely the product of industriousness?

So the claims made by these persons of having produced writing guided by some spurious connection with another ethereal realm amounts to nothing more than, "Hey, look what I did! Yeah, I know its weird, but that's spirits for ya."

"Transcendentalists were strong believers in the power of the individual and divine messages. Their beliefs are closely linked with those of the Romantics." - wikipedia
"Edgar Allan Poe had a deep dislike for transcendentalism, calling its followers "Frogpondians" after the pond on Boston Common.[6] He ridiculed their writings by calling them "metaphor-run," lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake."[7] One of his short stories, "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", is a clear attack on transcendentalism, which the narrator calls a "disease". The story specifically mentions the movement and its flagship journal The Dial, though Poe denied that he had any specific targets.[8]" - wikipedia.

"The term transcendentalism sometimes serves as shorthand for "transcendental idealism", which is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and later Kantian and German Idealist philosophers."
- ibid.

"Immanuel Kant had called "all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects." The transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with German philosophy in the original, and relied primarily on the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles: principles not based on, or falsifiable by, sensuous experience, but deriving from the inner, spiritual or mental essence of the human." - ibid.

"The practical aims of the transcendentalists were varied; some among the group linked it with utopian social change; Brownson connected it with early socialism, while others considered it an exclusively individualist and idealist project. Emerson believed the latter. In his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist", Emerson suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice:" - ibid.

While Emerson may have waxed lyrical about it (transcendentalism), procliming the wonderful experiences to be had while in conjugation with nature, let your spirits run free, etc.:

"So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit." - Emerson, quoted in wiki article.

he used a different tone when pressed as to its veracity:
"In his 1842 lecture "The Transcendentalist", Emerson suggested that the goal of a purely transcendental outlook on life was impossible to attain in practice:
You will see by this sketch that there is no such thing as a transcendental party; that there is no pure transcendentalist; that we know of no one but prophets and heralds of such a philosophy; that all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in doctrine, have stopped short of their goal. We have had many harbingers and forerunners; but of a purely spiritual life, history has afforded no example. I mean, we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels' food; who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. ... Shall we say, then, that transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish." - ibid.

The phrase above, "not falsifiable by sensuous experience" is telling. While the transcendentalists wanted to borrow the credibility of someone like Kant by describing their position as transcendentalist, they did not understand what that entailed. It just sounded good and was likely to baffle their 19thC peers who were just as ignorant, they wanted also to avoid "falsifiability by sensuous experience." To put it plainly they wanted to avoid having anyone observe them doing what they claimed to do which is have that connection with the non-material world, the spirit realm. Lockean empiricism insisted that knowledge could only come from the senses. If you couldn't tuch, see, smell, taste or hear it, it didn't exist, in the sense it was not real.

Kant tried to prove that you could have knowledge that was transcendent of experience, but he was talking about things like mathematical truths as exemplied by the Euclideam maxim, "the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees," and two parallel lines do not intersect. The problem with that "knowledge" was not truth, it was that while it was true (by definition) it was not knowledge of the world. In the real world two lines were never parallel, they didn't exist.

The falsifiable part meant that for a claim to be knowledge it ahd to be falsfifiable by Lockean standards. You had to be able to observe it, through the senses. Or else it wasn't knowledge. It might be true in a Platonic sense, but that was mere tautology: it was true by definition.

Descriptions of trancendent writing abound with fluffy ambiguities that forbid clear, concise definition, enabling all manner of misunderstandings which result in no one being able to say exactly what it is, or what counts as an example of it, thereby avoiding exactly the kind of falsifiability that was wished for by its original practitioners. Unfortunately for them this also means TW defies verifiability. If you can't examine it you cannot refute it but you cannot prove it either. For fluffy ambiguity see the following.

"Transcendent states are those which take the mind out of the envelope of personal or at times, even transpersonal awareness and into a pure field of infinite silence. Here, the subject/object process no longer resides. In this state, the reciprocity between what we know as the "I" in its singularity melts and the internal wisdom that is easily manifest can render a complete elucidation of knowing in its totality.
further: "The contemplative manifestation, which is characterized by one's ability to enter a state of clarity to the point of arising in consciousness, is capable of meeting the transcendent at its depth. Here, the ability to witness the > field of pure consciousness and the point of recognition of the underlying state out of which thought emerges becomes self-evident."
- Re:[FairfieldLife] Transcendent Writing, a yahoo group

The above is a description of the transcendent state, not an example of TW.
As such it fails to say, coherently, what it is.
What the rules of grammar, and accepted word useage give us, is intelligible meaning. The above breaks both rules in numerous ways. It is also redundant in many cases, the very definition of double-speak.

"infinite silence" - infinity refers to something without limits as in describing something capable of degrees. Silence on the other hand is not something capable of degrees, the slightest sound ends it. There cannot be a little bit of silence, or a lot of silence, or by extension, an inifinity of silence.

Similarly, transcendence is a bi-value state, either a thing transcends experience, or it does not. It cannot therefore have depth, which is a matter of degree.
Other examples of bafflegab - simple linguistic error, exist throughout. there is not a single clear, concise sentence in the two paragraphs. Therefore the above example lacks any meaning. It is unintelligible gibberish.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this example, one: nothing can be learned from the offered descriptions, and two: no argument with TW can be mounted. It is hard to refute ambiguous rubbish.

Fight Against Cancer: not a good idea?

2010-09-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

We have just seen a national event, "Stand Up For Cancer" ontv, seen Cops For Cancer begin a 1,000 kilometre bicycle ride in a group of 25 riders. On the eve of 9/11, when almost everyone's mind is on the events of 2001 on this date, I wonder what would be the result of winning the fight against Cancer.
To put it bluntly, what if we won the battle against cancer, what then? And let us here let cancer, stand for all disease. The major disease killers are heart disease, cancer and stroke. Apparently nobody dies of old age anymore. Do we even know what death by old age is now? So if we defeated these 3 major killers, what then?

There would still be death by accident and natural disaster. But these causes barely put a dent in population growth. If we ended death by the big 3 causes, would not our population skyrocket?

If it did there must surely come a time when massive death by famines would occur. No matter that technology proposes to supply food endlessly. For even if finite resources could be extended by technology with cloning meat substances in a vat, or farming algae in the seas, whatever, there is still the logistics of transport to overcome. We have seen many famines in the world in the last 50 years, too many to mention, yet, even knowing in advance where and when they would occur, and that they would occur, we have still failed to get the food there, and millions have died.

In addition to the, as yet unsolved, logistical problems of food distribution, we have the insuperable problems of overcoming the lack of political will to feed everybody. Recently, the tragedy of Darfur has showed us that there is no unanimous belief that all people should be saved from starvation. In Sudan, Chinese oil interests trumped the death of thousands by starvation as they used their Security Council veto to prevent the tragedy when tons of food & supplies stood ready to be delivered to the beleagured population, and they died before our eyes.

East Timor is another example of political disinterest allowing the death of thousands. It is foolish to think that we would save everybody, merely by providing food, even if we could overcome the logistical problems.

There are the further battles with birth control and eugenics issues, for how else could we stem the tide of humanity that threatens to overwhelm our ability to feed the masses. UN figures show that by 2050 world population will reach 9 billion people, fifty per cent more than lived at the turn of the millennium. Dare anyone say massive death by disease or malnutrition is not certain.

So, why try to stop heart disease, cancer or stroke.

Clearly, the personal motive is to spare us the loss of loved ones or even personal demise, no one wants their life ended prematurely by a named cause.
The public motive behind the battle against heart disease, cancer, stroke is profit.
Pharmaceutical companies seek treatments, not cures. Fund raisers, like the Cancer Society, the Heart & Stroke Foundation, are run by people who depend on their fund-raising for their livlihood.
Not that there is anything wrong with that per se. There is a market for the drugs and a need for money to pay for them, but neither group is looking long term. Big pharma does not want an end to the diseases and they would lament the discovery of a cure because it would put an end to that profit stream.
Of course, they would simply move on to some other ailment, there is no shortage, and they are very creative when it comes to finding new income streams, even inventing problems that seemingly did not exist before. Prozac comes to mind. But to stay on topic, even though big pharma does not want an end to the big killers, neither do we.

And, by extension, we do not want fund raisers to continue either.

In reality, death by disease, a sudden heart attack, or stroke, a short final struggle with inoperable cancer, ameliorated by powerful pain killers, seems preferable, to me at least, to a long, slow, pointless, painful, death by starvation, with awful wasting away of the flesh in desperate wishing for something to eat, watching family members growth weaker, scrawnier, day by day until they finally succumb to wasting away as skin covered skeletons.

A theory of culture

2010-07-02T15:49:00.000-07:00

I have formulated a theory of culture as an assemblage of values shared among a group of people.
These values are such that they each describe a good or its negative equivalent a bad.
An example may serve to illustrate. It is a good thing that mothers instinctively care for their children. It is a bad thing to cause harm to others without reason, such as self-defense. To love your neighbour as you love yourself is good.
The culture should be teachable for otherwise it would die out. It would be transmitted to the youngsters of the culture much as language is passed on from mother to child. Demonstrably, language is a huge part of a culture for many values can only be transmitted as part of language, such as good poetry or other aesthetically pleasing language forms: plays, speeches, essays and the like.
It is observable as this is actually done, that many values become condensed as aphorisms.
Use of language in particular ways can signal differences in culture that is differences in the shared values.
After Wittgenstein, "the meaning of a word is its use," or the way it is used in a particular language game.
Values thus must be meaningful or the culture is without point.
Language differences between people can signal a difference of culture.
People discourse to detect these differences.
Personal safety may be an issue, where variance in language use can signify a danger of association with the person.
This gives sense in having a discussion in order to get to know someone. In this case what is being sought is the presence of shared values, which may give credence to the possibility of a "meaningful relationship" being formed.
Thus it is that many sociologists regard culture as, " The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought."

For many to speak of culture is to speak only of the Arts: music, painting sculpture, crafts, etc. While it is useful for purposes of that discussion, it is nonetheless true that a person can be "of a culture" and that that culture may have identifiable artistic forms associated exclusively with that culture and indeed, that that culture may be identified by those arts, eg. Eskimo culture.
A culture must have a set of beliefs, for it makes no sense to speak of goods" if it is not also "believed" by a member of that culture that a thing is a good. Thus a culture necessarily has a belief structure, or equivalently a structure of non-beliefs.

UC Berkeley Classics Professor Tony Long says that "Epictetus scarcely needs updating as an analyst of the psyche's strengths or weaknesses, and as a spokesman for human dignity, autonomy, and integrity." The central Stoic thesis, says Long, is that our God-given reason and ability to self-reflect give us the power to shape our own lives. As Shakespeare put it: "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so."

Epictetus thinks of being human as a profession.

A profession?

We think of professionals as having technical skills, and Epictetus uses the word in exactly that kind of way. So what is the profession of being a human being? It's acknowledging your irreducible social identity--that you are positioned in the world with a certain set of relationships--family, work, community, all kinds of relationships. And therefore your profession, as a human being, is to fulfill those relationships in the best possible way. This seems to me an extraordinarily different way of thinking about our identity from our usual idea of the "real me."
On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five."
—H. L. Mencken

If you already have your mind made up, why do you need to read about it?

2010-06-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

On Writers and Company on CBC radio today there is an interview with an author, a philosopher by trade, who has a book out "26 Arguments for the Existence of God."

My first response is that it is a commercial work pandering to the doubts and anxieties of the great unwashed who may actually buy this book.

Of course, you can define "God" in many ways and therefore you can discuss the existence of such an entity or spirit or whatever in a number of ways. In the end though, nothing conclusive can be said, for there is no evidence whatsoever to support the contention. I can hear the protests already. What about this, or that, they will say? It must inevitably regress to a discussion about what shall count as "evidence."

Evidence

All such discussions require some discussion of this sort. How can you proceed, except with an agreement about what is going to count as evidence of something, anything?

The difference between something actually existing and, say, someone testifying that they have a "feeling" that something exists, or perhaps, reporting that they have had some experience that leads them to believe something exists, is precisely in the evidence that is on offer. If it involves feelings, or sensory experiences, supposedly had by someone, but which cannot be experienced by anyone else, or which cannot be observed independently, at any given time, say, is that, while that may be enough for the person who claims to have had the experience, it must leave others wondering at best, and at least, merely shrugging and moving on.

Bertrand Russell said, "We ought not to believe anything for which there is no evidence whatsoever."
If this seems materialistic, it is. The claim is about existence. A claim of existence requires material evidence, or what does existence possibly mean?

There need be no doubt if someone says, "I had a feeling." We need only reply, "That's nice" or "How sad," whatever is appropriate.
Their feelings don't alter the world of material things like medium-sized dry goods: people, cars, houses, rocks, etc On the other hand, evidence of "God," of a "God" in the ordinary sense of "God" - an all powerful being with will, personality, an agenda, etc., would alter the world as we know it and must therefore be taken notice of. So the discussion of evidence must be undertaken, lest the discussion dissolve into bickering and the disharmony of claims, counterclaims, skepticism and emotional outbursts.

Proof

That someone may make a statement of their beliefs is harmless, unless that requires something of others - that they refrain from doing something, say. If someone says, for example, pork should not be consumed, and as a result, pigs for food are made illegal then a response is necessary because a conflict has occurred. And what has been contentious in the past, has been when someone says, "I believe that it is contrary to God's law that x," and that claim has ramifications on others. That case seems to require some proof that there is a God. And that requires evidence of a material existence.

In addition, for reasonable people, some agreement about what constitutes "proof" is necessary also. Without that, disagreement can result in violent dispute, as has often occurred.

Now, any University course in Philosophy typically deals with concepts of proof and evidence and proper, valid arguments.

That some institutions, in an apparent attempt at undermining the process of reason, have arbitrarily made requirement of standards of evidence superfluous is a matter of history. Oral Roberts U, Brigham Young U., any Catholic university, or any religious sectarian university of any kind whatsoever, anywhere in the world, pre-empts unbiased skepticism by pre-supposing the texts of various works to be above examination, eg. the Qu'uran, the St. James Bible, the Talmud.

In practice the questioning of anything in these works is proscribed.
In practice, the discussion of the existence of God with any of the faithful is a complete waste of time, because the issue for them is already decided. No further discussion is possible,

Petroleum Gate: the real slick in the Gulf

2010-06-08T23:40:00.000-07:00

May 6th, 2010, I wrote the following passage in response to news of the oil rig blowout in the Gulf. I posted it at www.everyauthor.com Yesterday the BP CEO was reported to have made remarks confirming the suspicions I raised in the passage I wrote over a mont6h ago, to wit: we aren't responsible and here's $50M towards cleanup costs to show what good guys we are at BP. Keith Kohl of Energy & Capital has raised the possibility that BP won't survive this mishap.

Petroleum Gate

Peter Johns-Houghton toyed with his English Breakfast tea, then sipped it delicately. Then he spoke. His voice was even, but his expression was deadly serious.

"Our government is chagrined by BP's response. Their actions reflect on us of course. Many of the Board are close friends with Cabinet Ministers and we enjoy a good chunk of taxes from them as well as the employment of many of our voters, but, I fear this will end badly," he said.

"How so?" I asked innocently. I had my suspicions of where this was leading but I wanted to get him on record.

"The drilling company running the rig when it exploded is a sacrificial lamb, nothing more," he replied.

"But its market cap is a hundred million easily. Pounds," I observed.

"Yes, and BP will spend another 50 million washing seabirds and otters as a PR campaign. That’s petty cash. You have to understand that the oil corporations have the best lawyers money can buy, and their primary purpose is to protect the Corporation. These people are a great deal sharper than the lawyers the government can afford. The Deep Horizon rig was funded by BP, but it is owned by the drilling company. It was set up that way as a buffer to protect BP from greater liability. They own the oil of course, but their liability stops there."

"Then who..?" I blurted, shocked to hear this revelation from his lips, though I suspected as much. It had the ring of truth about it.

"The US taxpayer will pay, of course. Obama has already come out and said they will clean it up. Perhaps he, or his advisors, have already checked with Legal on it, but they know what BP knows - they aren't going down over a bunch of herring and some whooping cranes. Of course the shrimp industry is gone, but it was doomed the day they anchored the first offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It's amazing it has lasted this long really."

"But Obama has been, albeit reluctantly, telling us that he will support offshore drilling to sever US dependence on Middle East Oil!"

"Ironic isn't it." Peter beckoned the waiter and indicated he wanted more hot water. “The price dropped precipitously after last summer's peak at $147 per barrel. You'd think they would have moved to take advantage. Look I don't know if I want to tell you this.."

The waiter interrupted and Peter paused until he was out of earshot. I was dry mouthed in anticipation of what he might say next.

"I'm not really into conspiracy theories but what I'm going to tell you might seem like that. This must be off the record. If it got out that I told you this I may be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, but I'll have to take that risk. I’m getting out of politics anyway, should have retired five years ago. The stakes are too high. None of this is confirmed officially but it may come out anyway. Some things are too big to hide."

"What are you getting at?"

“The Deep Horizon explosion may have been an act of terrorism," he said. His tea steamed until it cooled as I digested the implications of his words.
The dominoes fell rapidly as I followed the sequence of his thinking as I imagined it.
If offshore drilling went ahead and US oil independence was assured, OPEC would still sell their oil in Europe and to China, so they had no interest in a Gulf Coast disaster, except for the Islamic Jihad, but no one had claimed responsibility.

"Who?"

"CIA?" whispered Peter, looking around nervously.

"Why?" I queried disingenuously.

"Remember Dole pineapple and the Dulles brothers?" he asked.

I took that as rhetorical. I leaned in to hear more.

"Who else knows you're meeting with me today?" he said quietly.

"My Editor. My secretary, maybe my wife, if she listens to me anymore." Things with Gloria had deteriorated since I began following the Peak Oil crisis last year."

Peter pointed at the TV over the bar. CNN was running a banner that the DOW was down 900 points initially this morning, but had recovered to only 400 points down in the last hour.

"There is a play going on. Two actually. Big money is playing the Euro. betting the Greek-Portugal-Spain situation is going to explode. And Oil speculators are trying to push oil over a hundred again. Too much money was tied up in new operations last year when it went to $147, and they need it to get there again or they will lose big. Plus, Interests in the Canadian fields in Saskatchewan and Alberta want oil over a $100 again too."

I could fill in the blank.

"And stopping offshore oil exploration is a good way to push it over the threshold." I said.

"Exactly," said Peter.

My guts had turned to water as we watched the stock market ticker in silence and I fought back nausea. I knew I had a huge story here but it was classic conspiracy theory. No one would go on record and I had no proof that CIA had blown up a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, but damn, it made a cruel sort of sense. If they would let their own Trade Towers go down, would they balk at a few sea gulls and Louisiana shrimp? Then an inkling of an idea grew in the back of my mind.

The Sane Mind Cannot Contradict Itself

2010-05-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

The human mind cannot hold two mutually contradictory ideas simultaneously.

Today I heard on the radio of a group that were beginning a running program. Their goal is to run 5kms after about 8 weeks, They are all still smokers. Of those who succeed in running 5kms in two months only 30% will still be smokers, or so I'm told. I can understand that. August 28, 2003 I paid $550 to enter the Ironman Canada Triathlon. I was a smoker.

I quit smoking Christmas Eve 2002 and I haven't touched a cigarette since, nor have I missed it.

Eight months later to the day, August 24, 2003, I finished my first Ironman Canada.Triathlon.

I have done it six times since then. August 29th 2010 will see my seventh Ironman Canada finish.

The key for me was simply deciding that I was not a smoker. It was inconsistent: smoking and running marathons, so I said: "I am not a smoker any longer." Either you are or you aren't.

To those who think it is more complicated or too difficult, I say, "You just haven't decided yet whether you are a smoker or not. If you can't make up your mind, then you are still a smoker. If you say to yourself that I want to quit but it's too hard, then you are confused. You cannot say "I want to quit" and then light up a smoke. Lighting up, says "I want to smoke." It's that simple."

My first run was about two blocks, then it became four blocks, then a kilometre, then 2K, soon it was, "how long could I run measured in half hours."

I'm not saying it was easy, just that it was simple, and simple because it was clear:
"I am not a smoker, therefore I do not smoke." No ambiguity.

I continue to run, bike and swim because it is fun and I want to be healthy. My ability to run a 10k at the drop of a hat or ride for two hours then do a day's work and ride home again, or go down to the lake and swim to the other side any day I feel inclined is my measure of good health. Try it. Do it. Enjoy it.

btw, I am 58 years old.

Top 10 Countries Killing the Planet

2010-05-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

Top 10 Countries Killing the Planet

Care2.com recently, May 11th, ran an article by Melissa Breyer called Top ten countries ruining the planet, wherein she stated that a country's wealth is the key factor in determining their threat to the planet. Makes sense. To generate wealth a country must exploit its resources, at least that has proven to be the case historically. Maybe in the future it could change but based on what I understand of human nature, I don't see that happening. When we have wealth we seek a "better" way of life, in terms of our enjoyment. We want better shelter, better food, water, air and of course, more security.

Only poverty seems to force us to accept a poorer quality of existence. We may speak (if we do) of having a more eco-friendly way of life, saving the whales, preserving bio-diversity, but it's human nature to want more food, better food, more leisure, more enjoyable leisure, more toys, more exciting entertainment.

The faint hope is that technology will help us do it. But the economic reality is that that's not what we want to spend our wealth on. The market determines what we spend our money on and market forces determine what governments will do. Governments exist to serve the dominant class in society, which according to John Ralston Saul is the Corporate Class. But that is not the core of my essay today.

“The environmental crises currently gripping the planet are the corollary of excessive human consumption of natural resources. There is considerable and mounting evidence that elevated degradation and loss of habitats and species are compromising ecosystems that sustain the quality of life for billions of people worldwide,” says Corey Bradshaw, leader of a new study by the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute in Australia that has ranked most of the world’s countries for their environmental impact."

quotes Melissa Breyer in her article.

The top ten countries endangering the planet are doing it by clearing forests, mining whole mountains, polluting air and water and destroying bio-diversity by endangering animal species.

They do all of this, not as a national program, but by the collective hand of its business interests, and this is of course in the interest of making a profit. No profit, no environmental impact. The corollary is: no market, no profit.

At the basis of this environmental exploitation is the market. The market is at it's simplest: people. There are nearly 7 billion people on the planet. In the first two hundred years since the Industrial Revolution market growth was achieved by colonizing. There were new countries to mine, harvest and to sell to. In the 20th century there were still new markets to sell to as Coca-Cola found out as they expanded into other countries. then followed MacDonald's Restaurants and every other corporation. Now in the 21st century as every country in the world has the internet and tv and is reached by any corporate interest that perceives them as a potential customer, new customers are achieved by birth.

Perhaps that's why there is no (or very little) discussion of population control. It may sound like a good idea for parlor room discussions but when dinner is served it is forgotten, yet as Paul Ehrlich warned in 1968 with his book The Population Bomb, everything else mentioned above depends on growth in human population. Stop population growth and you begin to limit environmental damage, species endangerment and climate change, also you begin to limit profits. Allow those 7 billion to become 9 billion by 2050 as predicted by the UN and the damage goes unabated.

There may be interest in the discussion, but could it happen at governmental level? The Canadian government is reluctant to include funding for abortions in their foreign aid budget because they are afraid of the contentious subject derailing their term in office and threatening their continued reign in subsequent elections. The foreign aid initiative concerns the perinatal care of third world mothers many of whom die in child birth. It is clear that they cannot accept that medical care professionals in third world countries, where women are routinely raped and may want abortions to save their lives, not to mention being saved the hardship of trying to raise and feed an unwanted infant in a war torn country whose netire population has struggled to survive below the poverty line for generations, may decide to terminate a pregnancy with the foreign-aid dollars. And if the Canadian Government cannot even entertain this discussion then there is little hope that they could survive the discussion of reducing environmental exploitation, including mines, forests, fisheries, and watersheds (where fertilizer pollution threatens our fresh water and food sources,) in the face of resistance from corporations who like their profits, and citizens who like their lifestyles.

Petroleum Gate

2010-05-06T13:36:00.001-07:00

[i]This started as a Morning Electroshock piece but it rapidly got out of hand. heh.[/i]

******

[b]Petroleum Gate[/b]

Peter Johns-Houghton toyed with his English Breakfast tea, then sipped it delicately. Then he spoke. His voice was even, but his expression was deadly serious.

"Our government is chagrined by BP's response. Their actions reflect on us of course. Many of the Board are close friends with Cabinet Ministers and we enjoy a good chunk of taxes from them as well as the employment of many of our voters, but, I fear this will end badly," he said.

"How so?" I asked innocently. I had my suspicions of where this was leading but I wanted to get him on record.

"The drilling company running the rig when it exploded is a sacrificial lamb, nothing more," he replied.

"But its market cap is a hundred million easily. Pounds," I observed.

"Yes, and BP will spend another 50 million washing seabirds and otters as a PR campaign. That’s petty cash. You have to understand that the oil corporations have the best lawyers money can buy, and their primary purpose is to protect the Corporation. These people are a great deal sharper than the lawyers the government can afford. The Deep Horizon rig was funded by BP, but it is owned by the drilling company. It was set up that way as a buffer to protect BP from greater liability. They own the oil of course, but their liability stops there."

"Then who..?" I blurted, shocked to hear this revelation from his lips, though I suspected as much. It had the ring of truth about it.

"The US taxpayer will pay, of course. Obama has already come out and said they will clean it up. Perhaps he, or his advisors, have already checked with Legal on it, but they know what BP knows - they aren't going down over a bunch of herring and some whooping cranes. Of course the shrimp industry is gone, but it was doomed the day they anchored the first offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It's amazing it has lasted this long really."

"But Obama has been, albeit reluctantly, telling us that he will support offshore drilling to sever US dependence on Middle East Oil!"

"Ironic isn't it." Peter beckoned the waiter and indicated he wanted more hot water. “The price dropped precipitously after last summer's peak at $147 per barrel. You'd think they would have moved to take advantage. Look I don't know if I want to tell you this.."

The waiter interrupted and Peter paused until he was out of earshot. I was dry mouthed in anticipation of what he might say next.

"I'm not really into conspiracy theories but what I'm going to tell you might seem like that. This must be off the record. If it got out that I told you this I may be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, but I'll have to take that risk. I’m getting out of politics anyway, should have retired five years ago. The stakes are too high. None of this is confirmed officially but it may come out anyway. Some things are too big to hide."

"What are you getting at?"

“The Deep Horizon explosion may have been an act of terrorism," he said. His tea steamed until it cooled as I digested the implications of his words.
The dominoes fell rapidly as I followed the sequence of his thinking as I imagined it.
If offshore drilling went ahead and US oil independence was assured, OPEC would still sell their oil in Europe and to China, so they had no interest in a Gulf Coast disaster, except for the Islamic Jihad, but no one had claimed responsibility.

"Who?"

"CIA?" whispered Peter, looking around nervously.

"Why?" I queried disingenuously.

"Remember Dole pineapple and the Dulles brothers?" he asked.

I took that as rhetorical. I leaned in to hear more.

"Who else knows you're meeting with me today?" he said quietly.

"My Editor. My secretary, maybe my wife, if she listens to me anymore." Things with Gloria had deteriorated since I began following the Peak Oil crisis last year."

Peter pointed at the TV over the bar. CNN was running a banner that the DOW was down 900 points initially this morning, but had recovered to only 400 points down in the last hour.

"There is a play going on. Two actually. Big money is playing the Euro. betting the Greek-Portugal-Spain situation is going to explode. And Oil speculators are trying to push oil over a hundred again. Too much money was tied up in new operations last year when it went to $147, and they need it to get there again or they will lose big. Plus, Interests in the Canadian fields in Saskatchewan and Alberta want oil over a $100 again too."

I could fill in the blank.

"And stopping offshore oil exploration is a good way to push it over the threshold." I said.

"Exactly," said Peter.

My guts had turned to water as we watched the stock market ticker in silence and I fought back nausea. I knew I had a huge story here but it was classic conspiracy theory. No one would go on record and I had no proof that CIA had blown up a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, but damn, it made a cruel sort of sense. If they would let their own Trade Towers go down, would they balk at a few sea gulls and Louisiana shrimp? Then an inkling of an idea grew in the back of my mind.

***

Ann Coulter shies away from University audience.

2010-03-25T10:52:00.001-07:00

Ann Coulter, who deserves no further attention nor notoriety for her extreme right wing views, has backed out of a speaking engagement at the University of Ottawa. She had received a letter from the Vice-President of the University, apparently to advise her that we have stronger laws regarding the dissemination of hate messages, discriminatory speech against minorities, etc. and she puckered and ran away.

I think this was an error though. We ought not to doubt the ability of intellects of University students and their professors - the intended audience of her talk, to decide for themselves what ideas are valid.
Censorship in any form is abhorent. If bureaucrats are entitled to muzzle anyone, then they may well muzzle just anyone who doesn't meet their approval. That is one very slippery slope. And it doesn't always come in the form of a ban.

Undoubtedly, the university lecture hall is the one arena best equipped in this country to hear new ideas, new arguments. No harm will come to educated and enlightened people merely listening to radical ideas in that arena. Indeed it is the one arena where radical ideas are most welcome lest a society stagnate. Nothing is decided there, unlike say, parliament. Weak-minded folks, susceptible perhaps to unpleasant ideas, are unlikely to be in attendance.

Better to have an open airing of ideas where they may be scrutinized by the country's best minds, than to drive them underground where they may fester. Crazies, sociopaths and their ilk undoubtedly exist and will have their ideas, let's have them out in the open where they may be identified.

Then we can get help for them, or at least immunize ourselves against their poison.
Out in the open, in the sunshine of the enlightened minds we need not fear Ann Coulter, if indeed, she is even worthy of fear.

"Ann Coulter is to political thinking what Peanuts is to high literature."
- John Cruikshank, Publisher of the Toronto Star, March 25th, 2010.

vox populi

2010-03-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

If anything should have taught us that we need a more universal understanding of our financial world it is the recent crisis from which we are now supposedly recovering. I'm referring to that which was precipitated by the sub-prime loan scandal.

Whether the current financial catastrophe in Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain is a ripple effect of the same thing is hard to know. It is possible that GOldman-Sachs induced the problems in the Greek economy by selling credit default swaps, effectively hiding $400 Billion of Greek debt and enabling them to qualify for entry into the EU.

If the world economic crisis is an unforseen accident resulting from governments getting overextended by wars, speculation or mis-guided economic policies or a latent effect of some big players exploiting weaknesses in the system, it is clear that we need a better understanding of how it works.

Alternatively, if the global meltdown is a consequence of manipulation by some elite mega-concerns as in the type of conspiracy typified by cliques like the Bilderberg society, we need a better understanding of how it works.

And, broadly speaking, this is my theme today, we need a better understanding of how our world works financially. We may not all be involved in the mechanisms that make it function, or malfunction, but we are all affected by it.

Evidence of our inattention is abundant. It operates at a local level as well as internationally. For example, my vote in a federal election can determine who gets on a committee to enact legislation governing the tarsands which affects how energy needs are met and how the carbon cycle affects the climate, which affects where wars are fought and what parts of the world are habitable for any number of reasons.

The world is run more or less democratically, that is to say, that at any level some body of people are going to vote on an action that affects many people. Corporate boards vote on whether to develop the Niger delta for oil & gas. Nations vote on whether to allow human rights violations in North Korea, China, or Darfur. I am not looking at how effective they are in making their resolutions happen at this juncture.

Informed consent is the least we hope for in these cases, as opposed to coerced voting, or blindly hoping that we guessed right when we cast our ballot. But what is informed consent?

Informed consent of measures like the emergency funding of employment benefits for 30 days that Senator Jim Bunning held up in the Senate this week is not possible at the level of the general electorate of 250 million people. It is logistically impossible for one thing. In addition, many could not grasp the concepts involved. That is, in part, why we have representational forms of government. But it is possible for an electorate to be more capable than they are presently.

When you examine what capabilities the common citizen must have to be able to inform herself about an issue it starts with being literate. If newspapers are the chosen media for informing the voters what the government is doing then the voters must be able to read.

In Rome, as pre-technological society, the Senate's edicts were given to the people by a speaker in the town square, a town-crier, if you will. Then it was passed by word of mouth among the plebians and the elite alike. Until 1440 when the printing press was invented this was the method. Soon there were pamphlets and newspapers. Word of mouth was still relied upon until public education was widespread. Today newspapers are being supplanted by TV and the internet. Now we have soundbytes not the Gettysburg address.

Today, even as various newspapers and television networks are owned by individuals with special interests - newspapers are unduly influenced by the advertisers who make them rich or merely keep them afloat, there are magazines like The Economist and the Alberta Report which can serve as sources for the details of issues that affect us. Not all issues can be reduced to simple terms like whether we allow elective abortions or not. Some issues are complex or can be made complex by the lawmakers who seek to promote their own agendas as when they concede support for a bill saving hundreds of thousands from suffering and death by attaching an amendment giving them what they want. For example, a bill to relieve the Katrina victims might have an amendment about water use in Colorado as a condition of voting support by Senators with big business supporters out west.

For centuries, for millennia, governments have controlled not only the flow of information to the people but also the means by which the people could assimilate and understand that information.

In 529 AD the Emperor Justinian shut down the Academy of Plato and like-schools everywhere. He thus rid himself, and subsequent rulers, of people who could understand the workings of the world and the agendas of tyrants, by denying them access to training that would enable them to do so. He thus kept the intelligentia from discussing the issues, and by the trickle-down effect - word-of-mouth, he denied the masses too. It worked for a thousand years. It is being done today.

Today we need not only the literacy to understand and interpret the rhetoric that spews from the mouths of the politicians but also the numeracy to understand and criticize the economic policies as well. As Justinian thought, it is difficult to control the masses if they know as much or more than you do. So how do you control the knowledge and the mental abilities of the masses? How do you limit the voters literacy and their numeracy?

Since the BNA Act education has been controlled in Canada by the Provincial government (PG). It determines what schools will be chartered, how school boards are to be elected and funded, what curricula will be taught. Often this is seen as a positive thing. New curricula are initiated by the PG, and speeches are made about positive expected outcomes. Seldom do the results match expectations.

The ways in which the PG can influence the education system are sufficient to achieve trhe PG's aims. They ultimately control funding by the distribution of tax dollars. By taxing and regulation they control media. By dissemination of information they control the content of the news media. This is not only about content but about the order in which it is disseminated. Ordering events can influence the minds of the voters and the impressions they form about the PG and by extension the supporters of the PG. Arguably, corporate interests hold powerful sway over the PG.

Recently, the math curriculum has seen proposed changes. These changes will be enacted in a years time. Three paths to passing secondary mathematics are being offered to students. Each will result in them receiving a piece of paper. Theoretically it will be possible for everyone to get a piece of paper denoting some kind of math success when they end their Grade Twelve year. This will give everyone something to be happy about. The student will have something to show his parents and his prospective employer. The teachers will have something to point to as indication that they too have succeeded in educating the students. The school's administrators will be able to point to positive results - at least the kids got something out of their time here. And most importantly, the PG will be able to show the voters that they got something for their rax dollars. At least no one wil be able to discuss the one third of students who failed to graduate with mathematics of any kind at grade twelve that currently pass through the secondary schools with nothing to show for it. At least that embarrassment will go away.

But did anything really change? Will those students be better able to understand the math required by their prospective employers? Will they be better able to see how their employers and their PG manipulates their lives by influencing them into jobs that they really don't want, but which, by default, are the only ones they can get? Will they be able to understand enough economics to see what is wrong with a system that has changed since their grandfathers were able to support their families without grandma having to take a job? And will they be able to understand enough economics to avoid being preyed on by banks and corporations that exploit them daily by keeping them ignorant about the ravages of such simple concepts as compound interest?

Current and past events prove the postulate - to govern effectively, a passive, ignorant, electorate is required.

If the people are too well informed, too knowledgeable, they will not allow to government to pursue its corrupt corporate-influenced agenda.

To govern effectively the mass of people must be kept poor and ignorant.

In short..
If poor, the people will be more motivated to seek their next meal than to meddle with the agendas of their self-appointed superiors.

If ignorant, they will be easily influenced by smoke and mirrors, the tools of the well-oiled propaganda machine that is rolled out by corporate funded parties when elections are called.

Can Poetry survive Rap?

2010-01-13T17:46:00.000-08:00

Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker and current executive director of the Poetry Society of America, said this morning on a National Arts Program on CBC, "I think rap has helped poetry .. by presenting it to young people."

Is she misguided? Is poetry in such "dire straits" that it needs the publicity afforded by semi-educated, forced-rhymers, who rely on cliché and abstraction, as well as absurdly forced rhyme for their success, for its survival?

Or is poetry robust enough still, in the early 21st century, to resist and overcome the exigencies of the personal communication device and the erosion of language skills, cf. Twitter, textspeak, et al?

Can poetry survive the slings and errors of egregious media, or must it beg alms to persist against a sea of rubes on Facebook and Twitter?

Would Shakespeare last ten minutes on Lavalife?

Does anybody but me care?

Personally, I think rap-as-poetry is an abomination. I don't mind if it persists as a separate art form, as a form of protest, social change, entertainment, etc., but I'd rather not think of it as anything but flawed verse.

Xmas Light Displays

2009-12-23T13:08:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following letter and sent it to the national tv network. I doubt they will pay any attention but who knows?

Quote:

Dear Sir,

This morning you ran stories covering the Copenhagen Climate Change conference and almost every
day you feature some story about reducing greenhouse gases and/ or Copenhagen.

Then you have that loon of a weather man promoting a Christmas lights display contest.

Either your editorial staff lacks any comprehension of the connection between light
displays and energy usage, or you think it isn't important, or you simply think we, your
audience, are too stupid to notice, in any case you have lost all credibility regarding
the issue.

Today's winner of the "get your light display on national TV" contest was from Red Deer,
Alberta - a province that produces 90% of its electricity by BURNING COAL!

The house had 65,000 lights on it.

Give your heads a shake will you?

Geoff White, B.Ed.

Copenhagen aftermath

2009-12-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

Those who lambast PM Harper & Premier Campbell for "shaming Canada at Copenhagen" are as unaware of what discussions took place behind closed doors as I am, but I am prepared to give these experienced politicians the benefit of the doubt.

Why, you ask?

Because strategy revealed in public seldom works.
They may have strategies to deal with Canada's awkward position as an major fossil fuel exporter doing business as the largest trrading partner of the USA and also sending millions of tons of coal to China and Japan as well as building two huge liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals at Ridley island near Prince Rupert and Texada island near Powell River on the south coast. Billions are at stake and it is unwise to make your deals in public.

Among the two hundred nations of the world there is a range of concerns regarding climate change. Some island nations are threatened with complete loss of territory due to sea level rise. So they will become refugees and will find new homes before final submersion. Coastal nations like Bangladesh, will suffer huge losses and there will be refugees. This has happened before, after monsoons and typhoons, and will happen again, even if there was no climate change.

The well-being of some nations will be enhanced by climate change. Canada may be one of them. PM Harper & his advisers can see that but it is politically unwise to say so in public.

IN any case, the Maldives may be doomed already. Even if we stopped all fossil fuel use tomorrow, parked the cars, shut down coal-fired electricity generation and let millions in the American northeast freeze this winter, it probably won't stop climate change in time to save the Maldives. We didn't initiate climate change in 20 years, it isn't going to stop in 20 years. And ocean levels could rise enough to submerge a good many island states by 2030.

In the meantime, World demand for energy is rising as nations develop from third world status and join the developed nations. The G7 has already become the G20. China is surging, as is India. Together they represent a third of the world's population. The scale of production of renewable energy production needed to meet the needs of just those 2,500 million people cannot be achieved in 20 years.

Over the next 20 years the world will need all of Canada's fossil fuel energy production, just as it needs all of Canada's grain production. Many millions of people will die in the next 20 years from obesity and health conditions like diabetes related to overeating, but nobody would think of cutting back on food production to save them from themselves, nor in a democracy would they tolerate being told, "You're too fat, so we are reducing the amount of food on the grocery store shelves until you lose weight."

Sound ridiculous? Canada, USA, India and China are democracies. It seems unlikely to me that those citizens will stop heating their homes, or using fossil fuel powered vehicles for work and personal transportation voluntarily. Further, no government will long survive in a democracy today, if it tried to force that regime on it's voters.

Joe Clark tried merely to raise the cost of a litre of gasoline by as little as ten cents and his government fell as the citizens told him what he could do with his cost hike.

As if further prooof of this is needed, the elected leaders of the USA, Canada, Brazil, China, etc. agreed MOnday this week merely "to try to keep global warming to 2 degrees" but would not accept penalties for failing, because they knew they would be out of office before their planes touched down on home soil if they tried to sentence their voters to life without fossil fuels, or even a 20% reduction.

Always remember the first ten percent is the easiest, the next ten per cent is harder, and so on.

Copenhagen Two: Canada - Sweden Comparison

2009-12-11T12:32:00.000-08:00

I think making spurious comparisons between Canada and Sweden lacks integrity or worse, common sense, worse still, risks insulting the intelligence of our audience. We cannot expect people to be sophisticated enough to understand the climate change model and its factors and yet fall for the Canada - Sweden comparaison. (quoted below at the bottom)

1) Canada, en masse, as a cultural unit did not endorse tarsands development. A few corporations with enormous capital resources and unprecedented influence acquired by determination and hard work have developed tarsands. The millions of voters who did not endorse tarsands should not (forgive me) be tarred with the same brush.

The nature of Sweden's economy and industrial base is significantly different from Canada's resource based economy. A "9 % reduction" there is like saying "Heidi KLum lost 3 lbs over Christmas and looks fabulous, why can't you look like her?" A spurious comparison.

2) Sweden cut it's oil consumption by 50% in the last 30 years.
Relatively easy when 40% of your population lives in 5% of your country area (the Oresund region) and 85% live in urban areas overall. But the most dominant characteristic is the sheer size of Canada. Victoria to St Johns is 6,327 kms. Malmo to the border of Finland is only 800kms.

Significantly, when all our food is distributed by diesel truck and when Greyhound cut its diesel consumption hugely this year, but only by cutting service to distant communities, you realize that you can't do that with food distribution. But Sweden can achieve a 50% reduction merely by putting in a decent commuter bus/train system, which it did.

3) Sweden has a carbon tax and a vision for an oil free economy by 2020;
This is aspirational and therefore spurious. BC has a carbon tax too, and a vision, so what?

4) Canada has no plan for meeting its breathtakingly irrelevant targets.
Sweden's government is 400 years old. Canada's is 144 yrs old.

Sweden's government is such that plans can be implemented without much opposition. In concert with their physical geography, merely having a a plan is a lot easier than in Canada's case. The challenges faced by a young nation like Canada rich in resource wealth but sparsely populated is greater than an e-mail can cover.
Notwithstanding that, even publishing targets in a democratic nation like ours or the USA is political suicide. The media is owned by corporate interests with cronies ion the energy sector. The opposition, rightly champions the labour sector, making "relevant" targets unpopular.

This Climate Change challenge requires a huge leap forward in educational terms.
Sending out mis-information and ridiculious comparisons like the one below will only weaken our position with PM Harper et al.

The G20 can't go non-fossil overnight. Western Canada remains one of th eworld's largest repositories of energy resources: oil, gas, coal, hydro. That makes it an easy target, but Western Canada is not the problem. The 6.2 BILLION people in the world are the problem.

The Canada - Sweden Comparison e-mail:
Quote:
(1) It's true!
Sweden has managed to reduce it's emissions 9 percent below 1990 levels; Canada's emissions are approximately 25 percent above 1990 levels!
Sweden has cut it's use of oil by nearly 50 percent since the early 1980's; Canada has made promoting dirty oil from the tar sands its raison d'être.
Sweden has a carbon tax and a vision for an oil free economy by 2020; Canada has no plan for meeting its breathtakingly irrelevant targets.

Copenhagen One

2009-12-08T12:30:00.000-08:00

People are jumping on the bandwagon, gleefully attacking the Harper government, saying that Canada is not taking a leadership role in the climate change battle.
Sure, it sounds like a good thing to "take a leadership role" and to have an "action plan," but it is reasonable to look at what that means in detail.

At a summit like Copenhagen, taking a leadership role amounts to telling other nations what they should be doing, and perhaps doing some of that ourselves.

However, it is apparent that each nation has different capabilities. Not all nations can take identical actions. The Maldives cannot reduce their oil production because they don't have any. Neither does Bermuda, nor a hundred other countries.

Nations like NIgeria depend entirely on oil production for their economic survival (40% of GDP and 80% of government earnings come from oil: - wikipedia). But their government is so corrupted by oil wealth that perhaps they would be better off without it. Nonetheless, thousands more would starve if they turned off the pumps. And yet, it is only the corrupt, greedy politicians in Nigeria who want the right to exploit their oil resources. The people who now suffer slow death by the poisoning of their air from sour gas flaming would gladly return to a pre-oil age lifestyle.

Canada may have the most GG production per capita, but that is a meaningless figure when our population is only 33 millions.

If total GG output is the parameter to use then Canada may have produced as much as China since coal & oil became primary fuel sources, but that was accumulated over more than a century and China now outstrips our GG output by a long way.

Still, we have to look at the big picture. Canada did not consume that GG output. Canada has been a huge net exporter of coal, oil and gas. The coal, oil and gas was burned elsewhere.

The world has come begging for our carbon-based fuel resources, waving bankloads of cash at us. Had we not gone into the energy production business, had we taken a Swiss-like neutral position and remained farmers as we were 110 years ago when 97% of the labour force were engaged in agriculture, what would the world look like now?
Since then we have been taken over for the most part by American corporations. We sold out. We could not reasonably have expected to withhold our resources from the world and lived like the Amish. We would have been takjen over like any Banana Republic, perhaps by force. History has shown that. It is disingenuous for the world now to point the finger at Canada and say we are the culprits in causing the climate change problem.

The world's economy is now too integrated to lay the blame at Canada;'s feet. In fact it is pointless to lay blame at all. It is even harmful for critics to push Canada's technological expertise away from a table like Copenhagen's, because we have the experts on energy sources and distribution that the worlds needs to solve the CC problem. Yes, we are experts on developing energy resources: oil, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, tidal, wind to name a few. The world needs Canada and its expertise at that table.

Climate change is not going to be solved by abruptly turning off the oil tap, shutting down the natural gas grid, closing the coal mines. We could do that tomorrow and the momentum of change would continue for decades, but the cure is as bad as the disease.

Compare the consequences of climate change and the consequences of turning off the supply of GG producing energy resources. The things we fear from climate change are human loss of life, destruction of property, loss of food growing ability, reduction of wealth and degradation of lifestyle, and only then animal loss of life.
As a side note, we slaughter billions of animals every year for food, isn't it hypocritical to worry about a few thousand bears dying so we can live our lives as we wish?

Climate change threatens these consequences, but so does the immediate cessation of carbon based energy sources. Even a transition to carbon neutral, and carbon negative, industry involves GG production. We cannot move directly from the present industry model to a carbon-free industrial model. We need coal-generated electricity to manufacture the solar panels of the new green industry. China currently is the leader in solar panel production. China produces more coal-fired electricity than the rest of the world and is building 2 new coal-burning electricity generation plants per week for the next 7 to 10 years.

So it is with manufacturing wind turbines, and infrastructure components, we will need the fossil fuel energy for a while.

"From each according to their means to each according to their needs" may be a guiding motto. The battleground will resolve around population and lifestyle choices I fear. You could choose to live like yuppies (DINKs - dual income no kids) or choose to wear homespun and have nine kids. It will become an idealogical war.

No More White Sand Beaches

2009-12-03T13:14:00.000-08:00

re: Copenhagen next week,
I have just sent the following to the CBC Radio programs: Q, and All Points West.

[quote]
Dear Sir,

Current articles on Climate Change (CC) tend to focus on drought & floods and extinctions eg. polar bears, but these things are already with us and seem not to be moving people to action. Let's try a new focus.

What could we lose if CC is ignored?

The Maldives government has already pleaded its case to the United Nations, saying, "stop climate change or we will drown."

The Maldives are a swarm of small island atolls off the southern coast of India. Their average height above sea level is 6 feet. Every island is surrounded by beautiful white sand, just like the islands in the Caribbean and in the south Pacific. Focus on the fact that these are the places we all dream of being able to go on vacation. Miami Beach, Waikiki, Jamaica, Fiji, Seychelles, Tahiti.

It's a straight line from burning fossil fuels (which emit carbon gas wastes,) to global warming, to icecaps melting, to sea level rise, to the end of white sand beaches everywhere.

In short, if you want to keep your gas guzzler, the price is no more sandy beach vacations by the ocean.

sincerely,

Geoff White
3107a-31Ave.
Vernon, BC
V1T 2G9
[/quote]

Write your MP or Congressman now.

Comments?

Geoff

It's great to see all the discussion, and kudos to everybody who is taking action, even by recycling, reusing, reducing.

I saw Al Gore's movie and have been following the media reports for decades while I observe little happening. My "white sand beach pitch" is aimed at hitting different folks where they live. They may not care about Polar bears or penguins but if they suddenly couldn't have that dream vacation it might wake them up.
I am sufficiently self-inforned to know that Hummers, or "big cars" aren't the only problem. My pitch is to connect the dots for the half of the population who lack the vision & the facts to see the big picture. It took the Love Canal actually to burst into flames before their eyes before many people realized that industrial pollution was a threat to fresh water.
I add further points below for those interested. Those who aren't interested are by definition part of the problem.

I was skeptical about sea-level rise until I got the data on the thickness of the Greenland ice sheet [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet](easily available)[/url] which, if melted, alone would account for sufficient sea level rise to swamp every white sand beach worldwide.

Average world temp. increases of 1 degree moves the Spring melt line further north by many degrees latitude, which in turn, [url=http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1071976.html]increases tundra melt and further release of CO2, methane & other GGs.[/url]

[url=http://www.pewclimate.org/arctic_qa.cfm#9]The melting of Arctic ice decreases albedo (reflectivity of sunlight) [/url]contributing to absorption of solar energy (starving Polar bears, killing zooplankton ( Beluga food).
The whole process accelerates and the problem grows like a snowball rolling downhill.

Yes, the global system has checks and balances and the pendulum will swing the other way, but it will take decades to reverse and the cost to mankind in the meantime is mindboggling.

We have seen droughts in Sudan starve 2 million people to death in the last decade or so. Suppose we do nothing and

China continues to build two new coal-fired power plants PER WEEK for the next 325 weeks.

India's econmy and population continues to grow and Indians demand cars and better technology.

technology growth = increased energy use

By 2050 UN says 9 Billion people, [i]give or take half a Billion[/i]

The death toll will be 2B - a thousand times the Sudan number,
in other words, 2 thousand million.

Sure, humanity will survive the catastrophe, in much smaller numbers, but what else will fare so well? Mass extinctions of large mammals is inevitable, elephants, polar bears, tigers, rhinos, - gone. The ones at the top of the food chain are most vulnerable for a variety of reasons.

Believe what you will, there is no scenario under climate change that is [i]better[/i] than what we have now.

Write the letter.

PoC

Gore & Suzuki on Climate Change

2009-11-25T11:39:00.000-08:00

Articles on climate change (CC) tend to focus on drought & floods and extinctions eg. polar bears, but these things are already with us and seem not to be moving people to action. Let's try a new focus.

What could we lose if CC is ignored?

The Maldives government has already pleaded its case to the United Nations, saying, "stop climate change or we will drown."
The maldives are a swarm of small island atolls in 26 groups off the southern coast of India. Their average height above sea level is 6 feet. Every island is surrounded by beautiful white sand, just like the islands in the Caribbean, in the south Pacific. Just like low lying coastal areas everywhere. Focus on the fact that these are the places we all dream of being able to go on vacation. Miami Beach, Waikiki, Jamaica, Fiji, Seychelles, Tahiti.

1) It's a straight line from burning fossil fuels which emit carbon gas wastes, to climate change to global warming to icecaps melting to sea level rise to the end of white sand beaches everywhere.

In short, if you want to keep your gas guzzler the price is no more sandy beach vacations by the ocean.

re: PM Stephen Harper saying on entering office, "we will not meet Kyoto limits on GGs.
David Suzuki seeks to rebut Stephen Harper's claim that fighting climate change will kill Canada's economy by quoting Sweden's success in reducing greenhouse gases (GG) by 8% since 1990 while increasing their economy by 44% (Suzuki's figures) but Canada's economy is many times more resource based than Sweden's. Apples & oranges. Canada's energy corporations must be worried that just as they are becoming major players in the energy market, they are being asked to stop producing oil & gas & coal.

I wonder why is no one asking Al Gore how we are to stop population growth and to reduce world population? Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb in 1968. Malthus warned of population growth a hundred years before that!
Is no one with a high profile speaking of it because they have too much money at stake? Are they afraid that as PM Harper claqims, if we cut GGs and don't fix the population growth problem we have to give up the luxurious lifestyle we enjoy here in the first world?
If we reduced per capita production of GGs by 2050 but the population grows by 50% by 2050 we will not have gained an inch on climate change, we will have lost ground.

Re-phrase the problem, want to save the white sand beaches? Stop having babies.

How do we get people to want to stop having babies?
1) Educate women. Give it to them free of charge. As in South Korea, educate women so that they have an option in life to support themselves without having half a dozen ofspring at the behest of a man seeking an heir.
2) Change the inheritance laws so that men will not prefer male children over females.
3) Legislate equality between the sexes. Mandate that leaders must alternate gender, whatever, do something to change the crazy desire for male children only.
Remove the incentives to have children, eg, baby bonus cheques, tax deductions for dependents..
Provide free conraception everywhere.
Buy vasectomies from male citizens.
Find surgical reversal technology for tubal ligations and pay women to have them.
Think tank ways to disincentivize having babies.
Stopping the catastrophe of CC is more important than the problem of too few young people / workers down the road.

Change the economical philosophy that growth must predominate. That precept can only work if population growth remains unchecked and that is devastating.
Educate everyone by means of a mandatory school syllabus of climate change and the long term effect of business practices.
Extend this list.

Canadian Politics on the Wet Coast

2009-11-19T12:06:00.001-08:00

A snapshot:

We have a Federal minority government that depends for staying in office on playing the separatists, the liberals and the socialists against each other and are doing it very nicely indeed, except that all they have achieved by 5 o'clock when they all go home, is to have stayed on the high wire for another day.
Our PM is on a Trade Mission, read, staying out of trouble by staying out of country.

Provincially, we have an egomaniac with a huge majority who is content to ride the wave of popularity he attained by winning the right to impoverish the province by hosting the winter Olympics.

Can't get rid of the swine and everything is just going to cost more to pay for the parties he is enjoying until the games are over and the bills come in.

I've said for years, that we shouldn't think our politicians are less corrupt than those in the average banana republic, just because they speak English.

Arts Matters

2009-11-06T14:18:00.001-08:00

CBC broadcast on the Arts in Kelowna Nov 6th 2009

My comments:
The speaker is mistaken in interpreting the quantity of brain activity as demonstrated by an MRI while listening to singing vs the speaking voice as a superior outcome because the qualitative value of the experiment is not measured.

More stimulus is not necessarily better stimulus. Nature is not a loud, noisy place. Humans did not evolve to thrive in a noisy, highly stimulating environment, but we can beciome addicted to high levels of stimulus with poor outcomes.

Few would agree that a constantly stimulating environment that we cannot shut off but cannot do without is a better environment.

The 350 Pledge

2009-10-22T12:44:00.000-07:00

What is 350? 350 ppm (parts per million) is the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. We are already at close to 400 ppm so we need to reduce fast.

So I have signed a pledge to do my part to help get us down to 350 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. If you want to do so, go here:
http://www.sensociety.org/

I pledge to park my car 9 months of the year and commute the 25kms from Armstrong to my office in Vernon by bicycle, 50kms roundtrip, which I have been doing for 3 years now. Dec-Feb the roads get silly around here, but I carpool as much as possible.

Go Green!

What It Takes

2009-10-20T12:23:00.001-07:00

We dragged ourselves out of the water and lay on our backs in the sun. Donnie and I had just swum across the lake and back.
Never swim without a buddy.
My shoulders were burning and my lungs had been turned inside out. I was ready to heave and I felt great.

Donnie flopped over onto his stomach on the warm, rough boards of the pier.
"I wanna go sub ten hours next summer. Can you help me, Clyde?"

I raised my head with my hands, feeling my abs about to cramp, opened one eye, keeping the other closed against the bright sun and said:
"I don't know so much about going sub-10 from personal experience, oh, the information is out there. You can find it easily - training schedules, periodization, nutrition.. but I know this:
you gotta love it.

You have to love it so much it lives in your gut, you gotta want it, want it so bad that it gnaws at you, that the goal becomes a need, a need that you would give anything for. You have to be willing to go out in appalling weather, to bike for four hours before dawn, to run on blistered feet with an aching back and pain in your lungs, to forego the beer with your non-tri friends because you have to be in bed by 8pm.

Going sub-10 is beyond most mortals. It means being willing to sacrifice pride, to mess yourself in front of God and everybody, to sweat and bleed and puke if necessary to get to that line before it hits 6 digits, 10:00:00. It means putting it all out there, everything you've got, being honest, being human - with all the weaknesses and frailties. You gotta want to wallow in the mud and the blood and the tears, to take your body where your will wants it to go.

If you want it that much, maybe you can go sub-10.
Then you can tell the rest of us how you did it."

Then I lay back down on the pier and thought about the race next month.
We hadn't done this year's sufferfest yet, and Donnie was already thinking about next year!
Ah, the ambitions of youth.

Use it or Lose it

2009-08-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

The race to develop the resources of the Arctic region will devastate this pristine environment turning it into a

vast sterile, festering wasteland. Think Niger Delta with snow and ice.

Sovereignty claims in the arctic again begin to conflict with Canada's 142 year long ownership of Arctic territory.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently visited the high north, dined on local fare and proclaimed that merely having

the Inuit peoples living there isn't enough, we must "use it or lose it."
The Inuit were re-located to the high north in 1953, a land of a 3-month long totally dark Winter, and its

reciprocal 3-month long summer of 24hour daylight and have been largely neglected since then.
Nunavut was established as a separate federal territory in 1999, governed by the Inuit themselves but with funding

from Ottawa.
Recent explorations in the Arctic by Russia, Norway and the USA have stirred the Canadian federal government into

action, at least, into speaking up.
However, I believe that, lurking behind this rhetoric about sovereignty - a legitimate concern, since keeping

foreign interests out is likely to be easier than getting them out once they have established a foothold, is a

desire on the Federal Liberals to develop the Arctic's resources, to wit: Oil, gas, uranium, gold, diamonds,

minerals with graet cash value and a high return rate on investment.
ALL of the above mentioned resources are extracted from the environment at the expense of the environment. There is

no known method of sustainable, eco-friendly extraction of these resources. Therefore, in short, development of

Canada's north in order to establish "use" of the region is guaranteed to destroy the region for habitable purposes

and as a habitat for indigenous species, such as Caribou, bear, fox, birds, and every living creature. Even sealife

is endangered because the pristine Arctic waters will be polluted by runoff from mine tailings, oil production

residue and spills, radiation poisoning, increased cancer rates are already extant in the Inuit population.
The race to develop the Arctic is sure to turn this vast pure habitat into a wasteland devoid of healthy life.

Eve of my 57th birthday.

2009-01-16T15:12:00.000-08:00

During the last 24 hours sefton and I have written a really interesting (I think) story on the Morning Electroshock forum over at Everyauthor.com site.

We seem to have similar mentalities albeit different styles when it comes to writing and we have put some very exciting prose together online. Never met the guy face to face but we once spoke on the phone for 20 minutes.

My birthday tomorrow. I'm fine right now but tomorrow I'll be old! 57. What of that? Dunno. It's just a number, factors of 1, 3, 19, 57, not even prime. I'm planning to dine out at a restaurant that offers a free entrée for the B'day Boy and later go to Rosters where they donate chicken wings equal to the number of years you have managed to remain upright and breathing.

I'll try to remain sober as well.

2009 is a new year

2009-01-14T22:34:00.000-08:00

I have in the past made resolutions, goals really, things I want to do, not so much the, "I want to be a better person" sort of thing.

I have set myself a goal of finding an agent to present my books to publisher's for several years and haven't done a thing about it yet. I won't waste time with soul-searching, but, at risk of annoying friends who may roll their eyes at seeing tnis one again, I will once more set that goal.

1. Get a literary agent.
2. Finish up Smiling Buddha, the novel I began in 2002 after returning from Taiwan.
3. Develop an online source of income, whether it be eBay or and MLM or an affiliate.
4. Be gone from Canada for next winter. heh.
5. Have a personal best time at Ironman Canada again this August 30th.
6. Finish the 50 day CORE challenge on Feb 13th with 500 pts or more.

I may add to this but that is good for a start

Carbon Tax? Spend it where it will have some impact: China.

2008-12-11T21:18:00.000-08:00

If you really want a carbon tax - because it can do us some good,
if you really want that carbon tax to have some real benefits,
then think outside the box. The box being BC.

That’s right. Spend the money where it can really do us some good.
Spend it where the problem is. China.

In China they are building coal-fired electricity generation plants at the rate of two a week.
You heard me – TWO coal burning, sulfur dioxide, CO2 spewing plants each and every week!
And guess where they buy their coal?
BC. British Columbia.
We are selling them the coal to burn and the wind blows the pollution right back at us.
Studies in California show that 1/3 of the daily smog in LA is produced by China.
(We have done no such studies to date.)

So, what can we do about it?
Clearly cutting back on diesel burning transport trucks at the rate of 2% is a pathetic and useless response. And that is what the Campbell carbon tax has done. Cut 2% of trucker’s jobs. Compared to China’s daily greenhouse gas output that is the equivalent of blowing out one candle in every restaurant in BC and expecting the skies to clear.

Here’s my suggestion. Use the carbon tax collected from BC residents to buy a nuclear powered electricity generation plant – a Candu reactor, say, and give it to the Chinese.

Designed by Canadians, powered by uranium mined by Canadians – which China will buy from us (part of the deal, to offset loss of coal sales) and while we’re at it we insist that it is to be built by Canadians – paid from our tax dollars.

We say to China, “We want to give you a nuclear electricity generation plant. We’ll design it, build it and train your guys to run it. You buy our fuel rods and dispose of them properly when they’re done. That’s it.

The result will be a carbon credit the like of which we could never accumulate by cutting 10% here and 15% there and it helps our 2nd largest trading partner.

You can thank me later,

NaNoWriMo has begun

2008-11-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

I have begun writing a new novel. This morning I put down 2k or so and enjoyed the 3 hours I spent at the keyboard.

It is set primarily on an island in Mexico where I went on vacation last February for two weeks.

Everywhere I go I am studying the environs for a setting for a novel of some kind, maybe a suspense thriller, maybe a love story, maybe SF, I never know at the time, but it makes me pay attention to details like the boats, the people, the vegetation. The latter is a problem for me because the names of plants always escape me and it is hard to research them from a distance.

Bander

New Monority Government

2008-10-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

Okay, the conservatives got re-elected as another minority government and the world didn't end, not yet anyway.

The dollar is falling, the price of oil is falling as are other fuels, natural gas, gasoline, but diesel is in short supply in some locales in Canada and trucks are sitting idle. Our food chain is 3 days to a week in Canada. If the trucks don't roll the food doesn't arrive.

I remember reading Paul Ehrlich's book in 1978 or thereabouts: The End of Affluence. It rings eerily true still in light of some recent developments.

Ehrlich pointed to various problems, the one week food inventory and the vulnerability of the banking system to a credit crisis being just two of them.

I await further developments, while I think about gathering some nuts and berries for the larder.

Canadian Election Tomorrow

2008-10-13T13:11:00.000-07:00

Looks from the polls like another Conservative government for the next 4 or 5 years.
The Greens & NDP are squabbling over who cares the most about the environment. Voters seem to be leaning towards whichever party thay think will protect their money the best. The urge to self-preservation for the short term, the immediate future, is the strongest motivation.

It irritates me no end that they twitter about a carbon tax and a cap & trade program as if this is a realistic solution The irritation stems from their attitude that Canadian voters are too stupid to know the difference or that neither plan has a hope in Hell of succeeding. And that they are probably right about how ignorant your average joe is. The government ought to know since they were part of the conspiracy to keep the masses poor and ignorant in the first place.

Deplorable efforts at making the schools effective or maintaining conditions where teaching professionals could make them more efficient, miserably low expectations of performance and shocking rewards system for underachievement all resulting in masses that are too incompetent to compete on a world stage, & too stupid to realize that they have been duped by the elite & betrayed by their elected representatives at the expense of the well-to-do classes.

I probably won't bother watching the election results sham tomorrow, since Canadian TV is banned from reporting the results in the East before polls close in the west, but American stations will carry the news anyway, besides isn't there the internet? We will read election results in Newfoundland immediately the polls close on some Newfy's Blog 3.5 hours before polls close in Vancouver.

Geoff

Any carbon tax in Canada is a waste of time..

2008-06-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

as long as gas flaring continues in the oil producing industry.

"Gas flares emit about 390 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, and experts say eliminating global flaring alone would curb more CO2 emissions than all the projects currently registered under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism."

- from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12175714

Should I stop driving my 3-cyclinder Suzuki hatchback to work even on cold, rainy days, instead riding my bike 25kms one way to cut down the size of my carbon footprint, and pay a carbon tax of 2.5 cents a litre of gasoline to my provincial government while they do nothing about the gas flaring going on around the world "because there is no local demand for the natural gas to make it economical (read "profitable") to the oil companies?

"Oil is a mainstay of Nigeria's economy, and the government acknowledges that the oil industry still flares 24 billion cubic meters of gas a year, enough to power a good portion of Africa for a whole year."

(or enough to power all of British Columbia for 5 weeks!)

Gas flares burn in Nigeria adjacent to houses that have no electricity. Why? because the residents are too poor to be able to buy the electricity in the first place. Why? because the oil revenues from the industry that is killing them are not shared by the citizens of the country:

"In the areas close to the gas flares, medical staff report treating patients with all sorts of illnesses that they believe are related to the flames: bronchial, chest, rheumatic and eye problems, among others."

Instead, the ruling junta lines their own pockets corruptly with millions from the profits of allowing the Oil Corporations to drill there, flaring off gas in contempt of Government regs. banning the practice.

The oil is shipped to Europe and the US market to power SUVs, power plants and generally to support the developed lifestyle of the first world.

What do I say? It's a dog-eat-dog world and we are winning the fight?

I don't see the green revolution succeeding, at all, ever.

Bander

Built at Last!

2008-06-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

I rode my new steed 182kms to Oliver last Friday.
It lived up to expectations and performed flawlessly,
except for 3 flats in the city of Kelowna - none out on the highway.

Stiff and aerodynamic, she will undoubtedly be 10 to 15% more efficient, saving me time and energy come raceday.

bander

April was National Poetry Month in Canada

2008-05-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

and to celebrate it in an active fashion I wrote 30 poems as part of NaPoWriMo on www.pffa.org
This is the third time I have done this and I feel the results were worthy of the effort. I have many good drafts that can be worried into poem-like states. It was amusing and mind-expanding. I had a theme: poems on the variation of "She Stoops To Conquer."
It is a comedy wr9tten by Oliver Goldsmith. The idea came unbidden to me as I typed up my first poem April first and I wondered if I could sustain the theme and write meaningful poetry. The puns in the titles eroded considerably before long but placed in a list readers could at least see where the sometimes obscure titles came from, eg. She Swaps the Reefer - about a woman who wanted a mini-van like the other soccer moms but who was obliged to drive a refrigerated semi-tractor to pick up her kids, until one happy day..

Anyway, it provided some amusement for me and my fellows.
This summer I am training for my fifth Ironman Triathlon August 24th in Penticton. I have a new bike, stiff, fast, sexy - and currently in pieces on the ground. I have to build it. I have received contributions of parts: gears, aerobars, brakes, wheels from friends around the continent: CA, PA, WA, and hope to race it this w/e on a Century ride - a fund raiser for Cancer research I think.

The bike looks like this at the mo:

and should look like this:

Soon.

G.

Wanna cut the carbon? Cut the Crap!

2008-04-25T10:16:00.000-07:00

Environmentalists are blowing smoke up the wrong orifices.

One truth is that “incentive based program” will not reduce the distance between Calgary and Edmonton or between Saskatoon and Regina. We live in a big country.

Better they should put their efforts into finding means to reduce world population.
There are a number of ways of conceiving this:

For example, a ten per cent reduction on a large amount is more effective than achieving a 10% reduction of a small amount. Specifically, reduce the emissions of the petroleum industry by 10% and you save a million tonnes. Reduce one person’s emissions by 10% you achieve next to nothing by comparison.

Hardships

While not without benefits, personal carbon emissions reduction may induce hardships on individuals. Such reductions may increase costs without increasing income for individuals.
Whereas industry will actually benefit by becoming more efficient and even more profitable.

Secondly, a large polluter can more easily sustain a significant reduction than can a small polluter.
The petroleum industry can sustain the changes without blinking. An individual citizen would experience drastic, unpleasant changes in their lives by an equivalent reduction.
In human terms, the aggressive reduction of personal pollution may mean fewer family visits, living in colder houses, wearing old clothes rather than buying new ones, eating more expensive foods perhaps, generally having a poorer lifestyle.

Think Globally

Another truth is that there are only 33 million Canadians, while there are 2,500 million people in China and India, which are rapidly industrializing – something we cannot morally ask them to arrest.
Think globally not locally. Canadian emissions are trivial when compared to the total emissions of a country like China, despite the fact that Chinese citizens produce one fifth the emissions per capita.

The government has proposed reducing Canadian emissions by 50% by 2050.
One way would be to reduce the number of Canadians by 50% or 16 million people.
If each Canadian did nothing different, the result would be the same: 50% reduced emissions.

While fantastic, it reveals an interesting fact. Chinese per capita emissions are estimated to be one fifth that of Canadians. To match a population reduction of 16 million in Canada by 2050, China would only need to reduce its projected population in 2050 by 80 millions, a five to one ratio. As was demonstrated in Korea, the social experiment of giving young women a college education will, by itself, reduced the birth rate. If this were done in China (and India, and Africa for that matter) the reduction in population alone would achieve the intended goal.
Of course Canada is not able to reduce its 2050 population by 16 million people, but China can easily do it.

Which is more achievable: Canadians reducing their carbon emissions by 50% or the education of women throughout the world?

World Population is projected to increase from 6.5B in 2007 to 9.4Billion in 2050.

Reducing our emissions today by 50% per capita will only sustain current emissions output by 2050!!!

All talk of carbon emissions reduction is crap without discussion of population control.

Some references:
Carbon Emissions per capita
Population Projections for 2050

Delta Blues

2008-03-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

The world has run down like an old alarm clock and time rattles on towards dawn. Can't sleep no more. Three hours to go now. The wax drips from the lip of the saucer and pools on the table, twin beads polishing shins lying akimbo on the old school desk, adding a lachrymose finish to wood less than antique. I’ve mellowed like the wood in the time since that desk was in my old schoolhouse across the creek and down the road.

I remember hot dry afternoons when I found a cool deep pool under the willow on the way home from school. Hours passed slowly as I watched the flies on the surface of the pedestrian stream, hoping for that mystical moment to be watching just the right fly when a big-mouthed bass would surface and gobble it down, disappearing into the depths like some monster from the Pleistocene, lurking, idly threatening, choosing his moment to rise again.

Dust motes floated on sunbeams penetrating the thick canopy of boughs, and settled among the dead flies and twigs passing on the glassy highway meandering through the county to join the Mississippi and ultimately to flow out into the Gulf by New Orleans, a place I’d heard about in songs that issued from the roadhouse by the crossroads, a place where darkies went to dance, where legends came to play for food and beer and enough money to buy gas to get to the next township, the next roadhouse. all the way from Natches to Mobile, legends like Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy, Son House and Willie Brown, out-of-work black men who packed up their guitars and played wherever they could for any payment whatsoever, forced by the Great Depression to take to the road.

Some of us kids would sit in the shadows of the roadhouse in the dark of a summer’s evening, listening to the magic as it flowed through the high open windows, listening to the stomping of the dancers feet on the floorboards from beneath the building where in the daytime the dogs would crawl to sleep away from the heat of the day. We’d sit there slappin’ our thighs in time with the boogie-woogie back beat and trying to emulate the walking bass line of the musicians inside, while the sky filled with gimlet-sharp stars and clouds of fireflies.

Round the hardware store I heard the old men talk about how David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Johnny Shines used to come to the roadhouse to play and how the party would go on for days and nights, people falling over at work because they had stayed up all night dancing.

It’s been a long time since Charlie Patton, Sunny House and Willie Brown tore up the Delta night around Clarkesville when we were children in our early teens, but the rhythms never leave the blood and the heart is always hearkening home, to where the blues wasn’t just the rhythm of an impoverished populace but more the spiritual sustenance of a way of life, replete with its hardships, its sorrows and its joys, no less than the Gospel music we absorbed on Sundays, yet grittier and more meaningful for its visceral appeal and prurience. We didn’t intellectualize about it, we didn’t worry it this way and that trying to understand it, but we couldn’t let it go. We worried at it, like the tongue worries at popcorn kernels stuck between tooth and gum, irritated but wanting more. To quote Robert Johnson,

I mistreated my baby
and I can’t see no reason why
I mistreated my baby
and I can’t see no reason why
Everytime I think about it,
I just wring my hands and cry.

- 30 -

Robert Johnson, May 8, 1911 - August 16, 1938
Father of the Delta Blues

Arthur C. Clarke: Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting

2008-03-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke,
born 16 December 1917, Died Today at 90, March 18, 2008

[img]http://www.nndb.com/people/725/000023656/clarke-sm.jpg[/img]

Novels

* Prelude to Space (1951)
* The Sands of Mars (1951)
* Islands in the Sky (1952)
* Against the Fall of Night (1953)
* Childhood's End (1953)
* Earthlight (1955)
* The City and the Stars (1956)
* The Deep Range (1957)
* A Fall of Moondust (1961)
* Dolphin Island (1963)
* Glide Path (1963)[b]
* 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)[/b]
* Rendezvous with Rama (1972)
* Imperial Earth (1975)
* The Fountains of Paradise (1979)
* 2010: Odyssey Two (1982)
* The Songs of Distant Earth (1986)
* 2061: Odyssey Three (1988)
* A Meeting with Medusa (1988)
* Cradle (1988) (with Gentry Lee)
* Rama II (1989) (with Gentry Lee)
* Beyond the Fall of Night (1990) (with Gregory Benford)
* The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990)
* The Garden of Rama (1991) (with Gentry Lee)
* Rama Revealed (1993) (with Gentry Lee)
* The Hammer of God (1993)
* Richter 10 (1996) (with Mike McQuay)
* 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)
* The Trigger (1999) (with Michael P. Kube-McDowell)
* The Light of Other Days (2000) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Time's Eye (2003) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Sunstorm (2005) (with Stephen Baxter)
* Firstborn (2007) (with Stephen Baxter)

along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Clarke is considered one of the Big Three of SF.

and one of my childhood, and indeed lifetime, favourites.

Bander

Tar Sands - a Black Hole of greenhouse gases,

2008-01-28T12:13:00.000-08:00

not in the sense of "nothing escapes it" but in the sense of colour and pollution.
In size and scope nothing on earth matches the Alberta Tarsands for greenhouse gas potential. IT covers a vast area of countryside and with global warming alone would begin to emit more methane, swamp gas. Warm the tundra and it leaks gas.

But we are Hell bent on extracting bitumen and refining it into gasoline. The threat to Middle East supplies has caused oil prices to top $100 a barrel this month for the first time in history. That value now makes extraction of expensive deposits like tar sands and oil shales, as are found in Colorado, viable investments. The US is looking to Canada to replace its dependency on certain OPEC sources to ensure that Americans can still drive their SUVs to the shopping mall, but more importantly that they will still have jet fuel to maintain their world air supremacy - which single force enables the US to be the world's greatest power.

Whatever the motivation, the oilsands will be developed and the gas emissions during extraction, and in burning the subsequent refined product will absolutely dwarf any and all actions of Canadian citizens aimed at reducing our carbon emissions.

We are going to become one of the world's greatest polluters by virtue of being one of the world's largest energy producers - and our neighbour to the south isn't about to let us turn off the tap.

New Year Insights

2008-01-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

Things that will affect us in 2008, too many to list but too important to ignore. The negatives are imposing but the positives are more pleasant. The US election is full of anomalies and a lot of heavy politicking. I will try to make sense of some of that later. Right now there is what's actually happening on the ground. Things like:

* Washington State Gov. Christine Gregoire's plan to reduce her state's emissions 50% below 1990 levels by 2050, and the 200% increase in green jobs it will bring to the state.
* The doubling of geothermal energy capacity once projects currently developing come online.
* Clean energy investment rising 33% in 2007 to $117 billion.
* The more than $20 billion in new construction planned for the North American liquid natural gas (LNG) sector.
* Goldman Sachs "strongly recommending" fund managers to overweight energy in the face of a looming recession.

Canada sells a lot of natural gas (NG) to the US from our Alberta and BC NG fields. Our NG utility in BC called Terasen was formerly BC Gas but was privatized and sold to Kinder-MOrgan who then sold it to the Carlyle Group (15% OWNED BY BUSH) and is now owned by Fortis. Most important is the major gas pipeline from Northern BC to Sumas on the border. It is owned by the American company and is held separately from the utility who services and installs local pipelines to consumers. There is also a similar pipeline from NE Alberta to Chicago which was built under NAFTA to give the US access to Canadian NG.

This could be trouble if they decide to impose tariffs on the flow, or to restrict Canadian consumers access by allocating flow to US cities first. If Canadians tried to fight this, there would be legal battles under NAFTA and the WTO would adjudicate. Canada would lose.

Worst case is the White HOuse would send in troops to "safeguard American interests."
Canada would lose. We would be like Afghanistan and Iraq -occupied countries fighting a resistance war against American troops placed there by a White HOuse trying to secure energy reserves for the American people. At the same time they would be safeguarding the assets of their Multi-Nationals and the Bush family's own fortunes, and those of their friends.

Which brings me to the most important point. I've been saying for months now that the US cannot afford to leave Iraq - Afghanistan - and thereby allow the Chinese and Russians to move in on the oil fields.
President Bush recently toured the middle-east and mooted plans for permanent military bases there. The Harper government has just tabled legislation to establish Canadian troops in the middle-east on a permanent mission, saying, "we cannot abandon the Afghani peoples"
Meanwhile security in Kandahar has not improved, the drug lords continue to run the place, poppies continue to be grown. The drug sales fund the Taliban / Al Quaeda in their resistance. The arms manufacturers get richer.

One effect of continued fighting in the middle-east is to push oil and other energy prices higher. $100 a barrel for oil two weeks ago - first time in history is a windfall for Big OIl, who are now buying back their shares with all the free cash thye have because they will own outright all the reserves in the ground on the leases
they control by 2023/4 Imagine, if oil is worth $300 barrel by 2024 and you own all of it, you don't need to drill for and find new reserves. If you own only a share of it, then you must find new reserves to increase profits, but if there aren't any new reserves? So Chevron , BP, Shell, Royal Dutch Oil and others, are buying back their shares spending Billions of dollars - instead of spending it on exploration. Why look for something you already know isn't there?

The era of cheap energy is over.

TRaining for IM in 2008

2007-12-24T13:34:00.000-08:00

I'm already a paid-up entrant in IMCanada Aug, 24th 2008 but the GF wants to go to Thailand in February for her holidays. I said I'll get the money together for that if we can fit in a triathlon in Langkawi.
Now I have to get myself fit enough to run the race on Feb 24th in 62 days!
Am I crazy or what?
I've been commuting by bike 2.5 hours a day until two weeks ago when the snow made the roads ridiculous for bike travel, but if it drops below zero again and dries up a bit I could ride throughout January - on the MTB of course.

Running is more of a challenge, because it is slippery out there on runners. Again if it dries up enough that I can see the sidewalk I'll do it. If not it's the treadmill for six weeks.

all for a silly t-shirt.

Bander, a.k.a.,
PrinceofClydes
@ trifuel.com

AIDS crisis in Africa - drugs the wrong approach

2007-12-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

Of course, sick & dying people should receive medical aid from those rich nations who can give it.

However no cure as yet exists.

Those people in Africa who are now suffering from AIDS (30 million) are goners.

More than 50% of the 900 million population are under 25 years old, i.e. in their prime child-bearing years. To think that they will not have sex is ridiculous. They are mostly poor and cannot afford - contraception and their poverty means that they have STDs and no medical treatment available to remedy it. Therefore they will have more babies, more disease and because STDs make even consensual vaginal intercourse a high-risk sexual activity (which for healthy couples is not high risk) - they will have increasing HIV infection. - 3 problems at once.

- Merely shipping vast quantities of birth control pills would reduce the birth rate, but not reduce HIV-infection.

- Treating AIDs sufferers won't solve these problems at all.
- Treating STDs alone won't solve the population explosion.

What the West should be doing is shipping billions of condoms to every nation in Africa.

But the logistics of such a program is overwhelming.
If every act was to be condom-protected, and we assume that even half the current population has sex daily that would require nearly half a billion condoms DAILY.

Production of such a volume is probably impossible, the cost would be unsustainable for any Western nation, shipping and distribution seems like a task beyond even Hercules, but more significantly I cannot imagine the governments of African nations being politically willing to accept such aid - surely they would regard it as racist, paternalistic, insulting (when Western nations aren't doing it themselves) and given the corruption surrounding food aid, and medical aid in the past, it has no chance of succeeding.

In summary. I think the 30M now suffering from AIDs will soon die, that even more millions will contract HIV and die in coming decades.

However, the lesson of evolution has taught us that there will emerge in Africa huge numbers of people who are resistant to HIV. The weak shall die off and those remaining alive will be resistant and they will pass on that resistance genetically to their descendants while we in the developed nations will not have this resistance.

I can only imagine the consequences.

What goes around comes around.

Right now, former colonies who have become independent nations, are voicing demands that the developed nations - whose industrialization has caused the climate change - compensate them for this disaster, to the tune of 50 billion dollars a year! "You in the First World have created this mess," they are saying, "now you must compensate us for the damage you have done to our environment."

What goes around comes around, and so it will be with AIDs.

A Sustainable World Civilization?

2007-11-22T11:34:00.000-08:00

Is the human mind capable of grasping the complexity and the scale of the system we are trying to control?

The social organizations and coping habits we used 50k years ago are still in place today. Can we raise our consciousness enough to survive, as a species?

Ashby’s law of sufficient diversity. Ability to manage must expand geometrically with each linear expansion of the system that sustains us.

Asks, Prof. William Reece, UBC ecological economics

Humankind is little more than a vast collection of tribes and other self-interested groups who will fight tooth and nail, kill their neighbours without regret, and breed themselves out of existence rather than impoverish themselves to save some unrelated strangers ten thousand kilometers away.
World Society is a myth perpetrated by money-hungry corporations to sell widgets.

The few ridiculously rich people who adopt starving Ethiopean children or who kid themselves that recycling cardboard cereal boxes will make the slightest difference to the climate, aren’t enough of an ameliorating influence on the violent mobs that predominate the world population.

When the house gets cold, and food gets short, altruism goes out the window. It is a luxury of the rich and those who delude themselves that they are well off. Neighbours will come to blows over garden watering violations. It is foolish to think that food or fuel shortages, will somehow bring a population together to live in harmony more than a few weeks, as in say, a natural disaster. The latter only stimulates charitable behaviour when it is temporary and singular. When disaster is widespread and long term, altruism goes out the window.

The UN estimated 9.2 Billion population by 2050, should be a headline on every newspaper, every day, if we were serious about sustaining our current level of sophisticated world society. It isn’t.

Evolutionary forces operate on a time scale beyond the scope of most people to grasp.
The smartest people alive today are not more intelligent than people who lived before the earliest recorded civilizations. We have risen from the nomadic tribes of 10,000 years ago to the space age technological world society we have today. However the competition between groups, whether tribal, ethnic, cultural, gender, age, cult, gang, secret society, has not diminished.
Survival of a world society, however it is conceived by big thinkers, is a short-lived concept.
The industrial age, information age, as dependent as it is on cheap energy, is short-lived. It arose in less than two hundred years and can become medieval in nature and structure again in a few centuries.

In other words, human nature hasn’t changed enough for this complex, energy dependent, unsustainable society of 6-9 billion people to survive. How it will collapse will be a matter of dramatic and tragic events cascading one upon another until a dynamic stability is achieved.

Another way of looking at the question, “Is our world society sustainable? Can it be?” is to realize that the perception that we have a world society is not a universal one. The third world population, Africa, India, Asia, South America comprises 80% of the world’s population. They are poor. They do not perceive that there is a sophisticated wealthy, world society. Rather they think that there are a few rich people who have exploited them unfairly. They are right. 20 people living well, does not typify or identify the nature of a society when the other 80% are starving in sub-standard shelters with inadequate supplies of fresh water.

The chattering of hosts and guests on TV shows about this or that fashion, musical event or new widget (I-phone, say) is just a few rich people yakking with each other about how great their lives are while the vast majority of people – 5 billion or more worldwide – worry about where their next meal will come from.

There is no sense of reality in the world, just mass-deception and denial.

Amazon's Kindle Book Reader

2007-11-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

Amazon unveils Kindle an electronic device that can store up to 200 books and downloads titles sold by Amazon - 80,000 titles already.

It’s not the first portable reading device, Bill Gates unveiled a book reader by Microsoft on a TV interview New year’s Day 2000 – for the new Millennium.

Sefton’s worried about the experience” of reading being degraded,, but being able to size the print for your eyes eliminates the need for Large Print editions as well as “normal” print sized books – surely a boon to an increasingly aging demographic. Flipping back and forth, etc. are all features that they will develop as soon as the readers give feedback. The Kindle 2.0 and 3.0 and 4.0 cannot be far behind. We are no longer using Windows 3.1, anybody miss it?

Scavella says books are biodegradable – Kindle cuts no trees in the first place
If cameras can be waterproof so can Kindle book readers, plus, nobody has yet died from a 9-volt battery discharge.

Rik wants finger touch screens, he’ll have them before Xmas 2008 – and more.
And, yes, Howard, top-to-bottom for Chinese characters as well. I bet they are already available in Taiwan but they never bothered to tell us waiguoren (foreigners).

Rachel – never mind page refresh and bleeding eyes – before you know it there will be an audio available with headphones for blind people. Character recognition from digital sources (ascii text) is easy – right now it sounds like Stephen Hawking but that will change. There will be a new industry for people with nice voices who can sight-read out loud. Screens have been improving amazingly in recent MONTHS!

Having your 200 volume library take up no more space than a pohone book does now is a huge boon for storage space, allergy sufferers who put up with book dust.

Costs come down so publishers will more willingly take on new writers or better yet, new writers can self publish as did James Redfield without huge risks in investment.

Writers may finally get paid what they are worth – it just may not be as much as they think it should be. This may herald the end of the wealthy author of a single best-selling book. There now can be thousands of new authors published each year instead of say, 10 per big publishing house, only a few hundred. (per language, per country)

Harry – the first transistor radio from Sony – in circa 1949 was ugly too, now we have Macs with ergonomic curves Gaudi would drool over (So you hate Gaudi, how about Frank Lloyd Wright?) We’ve got designer cell –phones already to match your clothes even.

Melanie, we can program sound effects like page-turning if you but want it – and birds chirping and groaning for the sex scenes too. Reading can be a multi-media experience like we’ve never had before.

We’ve never had it so good.

Water, water everywhere..

2007-11-06T12:22:00.000-08:00

70% of the world's surface is covered with water, yet..

Southeastern US towns are now officially out of water - Orne, TN, for example.
The US SW especially Phoenix, is sucking eons old aquifers dry and when that deep, deep hole gurgles its last, people will be leaving Phoenix in droves. No water, no city.

They will truck it in, they will sell or distribute bottled water, which has to be trucked in, and that costs money. There is no big pipe they can use to transport water from say, Lake Mead to Phoenix. It doesn't exist. And this is in the world's richest country!

Southern Saharan states like Sudan - of which Darfur is a part - have been in a drought for decades, yet the overall population of Africa continues to rise. 900 million I heard today from the lips of Paul Martin the former PM of Canada.

Wars over water, oil, land, food - all over the world have their roots in poverty. When the poor get hungry or thirsty they get desperate and will become refugees or stand and fight. Fight or flight, it's what all animals do. Some governments prefer to sell them arms to fight their wars rather than sell them the technology to solve the problems. If the money spent of guns in north Africa from Somalia to Dakar had been spent on desalination plants say, nobody would be going thirsty. There would be irrigation. There would be food.

If Georgia and Tennessee had spent the money on water supplies they had spent on NASCAR and buying bigger trucks there would be no water shortage.

Still, water shortages and poverty are ultimately about population. Too many people fighting over finite resources. The problems will not stop until people stop making babies - and we all know how well that program is going to work, but if people don't stop reproducing at the rate that has produced 5 Billion people in 150 years, nature will do it for them.

Forget Kyoto #4

2007-10-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

At last, someone has said it in public and on the air - live - intentionally.

The US / Iraq /Afghanistan war is all about, and only about oil.

This morning, Alan Greenspan, beeing interviewed by Anna-maria Tremonte about his book, said that Hussein, had he achieved control of the Straits of Hormuz, through which 18 of the world's 85 million barrels of oil used each day passes, he could have brought the world's economy to a halt. By reducing shipments of mere 5-8 million barrels of oil per day the world's economy comes to a halt - that's quite a declaration from the former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank and former Chair of the World Economic Advisory Board.

I have been saying that the US will never be able to leave the Middle East militarily while it is dependent on Middle East oil supplies. Therefore US activity in obtaining oil must increase in countries outside OPEC to ensure multiple streams of supply.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, although the White House hasn't declared this to be the case - they continue to spin this as an idealogical struggle to set Iraquis free of an oppressive dictator and to enable them to set up a democratic government - we can see how important oil is and how scarce it is becoming. I am referring to the peak oil scenario which says that, since world oil production has peaked, every barrel that comes out of the ground henceforth will cost more and be more difficult to obtain than the previous one, - a scenario that says oil prices must climb at an ever increasing rate and will soon be no longer viable as a fuel source for personal transportation.

Home heating must move away from oil fired furnaces sooner or later but probably within our lifetimes.
This puts upward pressure on natural gas prices.
There will be a greater political move towards damming river valleys to create hydro-electric power. Hydrogen fuel needs electricity to produce it
Wind generation, tidal power, thermal generation - all will be viable as energy costs soar.
Terrifyingly, nuclear power becomes the vehicle of choice, on the coattails of new coal burning plants.

However you get it the world economy currently requires the energy of 85 million barrels of oil per day to function, plus the current hydro, coal and nuclear power it already consumes. As oil supplies dwindle alternative sources must be brought on line. Number one is coal, as I have already written previously. It is plentiful, relatively easy to obtain and therefore cheap. The world wants cheap power. It will burn coal. Forget Kyoto. It won't happen.

Guy on CBC says, just turning off a light..

2007-10-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

will make help solve global warming. What is he smoking?

Let’s review the Kyoto proposition.

Some simple arithmetic can illuminate the scale of the Kyoto problem.

Roughly speaking, the Kyoto accord goal is to reduce our greenhouse emissions (GGEs) by 50% by 2050.

Let’s restate that in terms of people. Reducing each person’s output by 50% is one way of achieving this, this is the equivalent of reducing the population polluting at current levels by 50% or 16 million people.

According to IIASA – an NGO, http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/ChinaFood/argu/trends/trend_10.htm
the Chinese population will increase by 260 million people in the next 30 years i.e. by 2037. Thus even if Canada achieves its Kyoto goal by 2050 it won’t mean a thing because, in terms of equivalent numbers of people, we will have reduced our population by 16 million people and they will have increased their population by 260 million, or 16 times our population.

Chinese are lesser polluters per capita you say? If the Chinese currently produce only a third of Canadian’s output, Canadian output from 16 million equals Chinese output from 48 million people, but that’s at today’s rates of output. Chinese industry and its economy is growing at great rates – China is bringing on line a new coal-burning electricity generation plant - every week, right now. By 2050 they will be equal with any developed nation. The comparison is equally valid with the population of India, which grew at 21% between 1991 and 2001, and is now more than a thousand million people and adds the equivalent population of Australia every year. Between 1947 and 1991, India's population more than doubled. Almost 40% of Indians are younger than 15 years of age.

Canada has 33 million people. China & India together = 2500 million people. At 2% growth per year, that’s 50 million more people every year.

Reducing pollution is generally a good idea in any case, but it is completely false to think anything we do, such as replacing light bulbs, switching off a light or driving a car one day less a week is going to have an impact on global warming. Canada is simply too small a population to matter.

Technological changes such as changing gas engines to hybrids are slow, long-term remedies.
In the short run, we can expect greenhouse gas emissions to be roughly proportional to economic activity. Were we to reduce GGEs by 30% in the next 5 years would mean a reduction of income and employment on a scale commensurate with the Great Depression. No government would inflict such disruption, nor should it.

Forget About Greenhouse Gases Part 2.

2007-09-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

The nuclear energy industry will kill us all.

NRG Report:
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070924006333&newsLang=en
Report

"I’m excited to see an investor-owned company submit the first combined operating license application in nearly 30 years, and I hope it is the first of many to come,” said United States Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), who serves as ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee."

The trouble with nuclear power is not that the plants are going to blow up and coat us with radioactive dust as it circles the globe for two and a half years as the dust from Krakatoa did, or that the plants will inevitably melt down like the one in the movie, The China Syndrome, or like Chernobyl, no, we have learned things from those events and from 3-Mile Island, about how to engineer multiple fail-safes.

Rather the threat comes from three prongs of the devil's trident:
one, the used fuel rods must be disposed of. They are typically encased in concrete and "stored" (dumped) in a facility in Nevada, or formerly dumped into a deep hole in the ocean, where inevitably they corrode and the radioactive waste leaks into the environment.

two, the mining and processing of the raw uranium, pollutes the mine environment hugely. The tailings are piled in huge mountains of waste material which leeches into the groundwater by rain which necessarily falls on the mounds of tailings. Mineworkers in northern Canada have higher rates of cancer than other citizens and die younger, typically, of cancers.

three - One 2700 megawatt plant in Texas - thousands of miles from the nearest source of Uranium - won't threaten the world's safety, but the report linked above speaks of an endless chain of nuclear power plants to replace America's dependence on oil - which will result in trucks and trainloads of nuclear material - used fuel rods and new fuel rods - criss-crossing the country on their way to and from power plants from coast to coast. If you have seen a semi-trailer of hazardous material spill on a highway, say, caustic soda, or diesel fuel, you know what a mess it causes, but in a day or two at the most it is cleaned up and traffic resumes like it never happened. The threat is short-lived. However, nuclear fuel rods have a half-life* of 25,000 years. This may necessitate the digging up of entire roadways for hundreds of metres around a spill to remove the radioactivity - which creates a bigger waste problem as this material - contaminated asphalt - must be safely disposed of.

*Half-Life - radioactive material dissipates half its mass in a period of time known as a "half-life." In the case of Uranium 238 isotope used in fuel rods the half life is 10,000 years. One ton of fuel rods will dissipate naturally to a half ton of mass in 10,000 years, to a quarter ton in another 10,000 years and so on.

"A large nuclear reactor produces 3 cubic metres (25-30 tonnes) of spent fuel each year."

The US Energy Authority say the waste material site in Nevada is secure. This authority is less than fifty years old. The whole country is only 231 years old. How can they claim it will be secure for 100 centuries ???

"As of 2003, the United States had accumulated about 49,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors."

The country-side surrounding Chernobyl is deadly to all life for thousands of square kilometres. That's one.

Forget about greenhouse gases..

2007-09-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

if you don’t stop having babies, NOW!

I’ve shown that if ALL 33Million Canadians IMMEDIATELY cut their greenhouse gas output by 50% - the equivalent of killing off 16.5Million and letting the rest continue polluting as they have been. It wouldn’t matter a damn, because at a growth rate of only 1% China produces 14 million new people per year!

“The current annual population increase of about 80 million will remain constant until 2015.” - Source: "World Population Assessment and Projection, 1996.” the United Nations Population Division.

“Between now and 2050 world population growth will be generated exclusively in developing Countries.” - ibid.

“While such a steep decline, in fact, already happened in many European countries, it is rather unlikely that populous developing nations such as Pakistan, India, Indonesia or Nigeria - which greatly determine world population growth - would quickly follow this trend.” ibid.

Developing countries do not have the kind of regulatory agencies that the developed West - the G7 countries in particular, have. Their industries are notoriously dirty. Air pollution in Beijing has already made headlines - just because western athletes might be at a disadvantage there because they aren't used to breathing crap the way the Chinese athletes are. The facts are much, much worse.
China is planning hundreds of coal-burning power stations in order to compete in the marketplace, and to provide electricity for their increased urban populations as rural residents re-locate to the cities. China has over 200 cities with populations over 1 million people.

Published: Thursday, August 2, 2007 | 2:07 PM ET
Canadian Press
LITTLE ROCK (AP) - An Arkansas couple had a baby daughter today - their 17th child and seventh girl.

And the pair say they're still not ready to give it a rest.

Hope Springs Eternal

2007-09-14T12:19:00.001-07:00

Now they are doing “hope studies” and conducting surveys to “measure hope”
Some exponents were on the CBC radio this morning telling us that “hope is correlated with almost every positive human experience.” Wizards, I tell you, absolute wizards. Probably earned several social work degrees, maybe even a Psych degree thrown in, to learn that one!
Of course hope is associated with positive experiences, get to first base and you suddenly hope you can get to second. Have a good appetizer and you hope dinner will be good too. Have one good relationship and you hope all relationships will be good. Now there’s where hope triumphs over experience!
Human behaviour follows patterns. You don’t have to be a genius to extrapolate that one positive experience might suggest a second one. Logically after any identifiable experience, say, a first day at a new school, job, etc. things can get either better or worse. We hope for the best, because healthy people seek good outcomes, that’s why. Those who always seek worse outcomes are defined as pathological – when they go beyond being merely a “gloomy Gus” – and we institutionalize the worst cases. The rest get referred for analysis and therapy.
As I wrote in an earlier blog, you get to choose your attitude. Since people respond more receptively to positive people, it makes sense from a survival perspective to be hopeful, act hopeful. Plus it tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you have a hopeful attitude good things tend to happen more often. Make it a habit and you probably even turn bad things into a perception of good. When Fate gives you lemons, make lemonade.
I think these “Hope Merchants” are nothing more than the natural extension of the Oughties (’06, ’07, etc.) manifestation of self-help from the Eighties, the Personal Development of the 90s. Now we have Hope Studies. Self-help re-packaged. Nothing more than W. Clement Stone “Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.” The British often said, Keep a stiff upper lip!” By which they meant, no crying!
PMA - It works but it doesn’t need re-packaging. The expectation is that if you don’t give it a facelift now and again people will disregard it as being “old stuff” that can’t possibly apply to today’s generation. Always they want something “New and Improved.”
The fact is, there is nothing new in it at all. Plato, and the other Greek scholars, wrote all this stuff down more than two and a half millennia ago. Marcus Aurelius re-wrote it 500 years later and it was praised then.
What we need is not a copywriter’s update of the truths of our earlier scholars, just a better classical education in the first place.

09/11 - BC has a new Lt.-Governor

2007-09-11T10:35:00.000-07:00

For my non-Canadian friends, a Lt-Gov. is the representative of the Queen and among other things is a guardian of the constitution. After that it gets complicated but the L-G has no vote in parliament and is mostly ceremonial, but we do love our ceremonies!

This new L-G is, for the first time, a native aboriginal Canadian, Stephen Pointe, is a former Provincial court judge. This a.m. he was interviewed on CBC radio and among other things said, plagiarizing Norman Vincent Peale, "There is power in positive thinking."

Perhaps this epithet is now so apocryphal that NVP no longer deserves credit for the phrase, "The Power of Positive Thinking" which was the title of his 1952 book.

___________________

Also this morning CBC radio finally interviewed a lighting manager from the City of Calgary, Barry Poone, about their revolutionary street lighting which I wrote about (see my June 28th blog) several months ago! Alas, nobody listens to a lone voice in the wilderness. Now they all think they are the discoverer of this obvious improvement. I have been ranting about it for years. He spoke of the waste light refracted into space as seen in a satellite photo.

Fears of increased crime, devolution to previous eras in history such as a darkened wartime when blackouts prevailed. They studied crime rates in UK and Oz and concluded that lighting has no impact on crime but perception was changed. They felt afraid, but the people will get over it. I always maintained that what we were doing is lighting the streets at night just for the criminals! They are the only ones out there at 3am right? All good citizens should be at home in bed.

Invasive light coming in your windows and keeping you awake is also reduced.

Ah, but the savings! GIS studies revealed that 37,000 of 55,000 bulbs at half wattage saved $2 million per year! CO2 emissions are down hugely too, because Alberta produces 90% of its electricity by burning coal.

100 acres of prime food-growing farmland gone!

2007-09-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

A sports complex has been proposed for Vernon - Coldstream area, which will require excluding 100 acres of farmland in the Coldstream valley from the Agricultural Land Reserve, which is exactly what it sounds like. I have written the following letters to the Editor of the Morning Star newspaper here.

Dear Editor,

“Another 100 acres of prime food-growing farmland gone!” is what your headline should read.

A glance at the proposal for a sports complex on Hwy 6 clearly indicates that this project is designed to accommodate gas-guzzling vehicles, not hungry people. It is located on a main highway. It has huge parking areas – which should be growing locally consumable crops rather than being paved over to park pickup trucks. Talk about short-sightedness! Talk about terrible prioritizing!

Nearly every morsel of food eaten in Greater Vernon is trucked in from elsewhere, sometimes thousands of kilometres from where it is grown. It is counter-intuitive, read “stupid”, to pave over prime farmland in your backyard, and then to pay high costs to truck in the food you eat from California.

There are two world famous valleys in Canada – the Annapolis in Nova Scotia, the Okanagan in BC, and what they are known for is their fruit, their vines, their agriculture. It has been so since my great grandfather Victor Willett came here in the 1920s and grew an orchard on the west side and became the first postmaster at Ewans Landing. Pave over the farmland on Hwy 6 and soon enough there will be only one valley like it in Canada, and that will be the legacy of the Councillors who voted to approve it.

Hwy 6 project: “Field of Nightmares”

In my nightmares I see them coming, headlights along Hwy 6 gleaming through clouds of carbon monoxide, streaming towards the floodlit fields on the corner of Aberdeen Road that used to grow corn.

In Kevin Costner’s 1989 film, Field of Dreams, the premise was, “if you build it they will come.” That seems to be the dream of developers proposing the destruction of 100 acres of corn on Aberdeen Road to build softball diamonds. The nightmare is that they WILL come – hundreds of gas-guzzling, greenhouse gas-producing cars and trucks roaring in on oversized tires to leave oil and rubber residue on prime Coldstream farmland, farmland that could grow food to feed the people of Vernon.

Instead that food will have to be trucked in from hundreds, even thousands of kilometres away, at greater cost than if grown locally, covered in preservatives to keep it edible until it can get here. You KNOW this to be true. Consider this vision before you vote to approve plowing under, and paving over, some of the best remaining farmland in BC.

2007 Ironman Canada Triathlon in the books

2007-08-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

2007 results data

Time DIV DIV SwimDIV S.OVR TIME PACE T1
15:13:40 M55-59 68/109 73 1937 1:26:38 2:17 12:16

B. DIV BIKE TIME PACE T2 RUN OVR TIME Pace
53rd 1847th 7:02:57 15.9 11:48 76th 2264 6:20:04 14:31

My fourth ironman race is done and from the times above it looks like I haven’t learned a damn thing. Well, actually when you look deeper it shows that I am 4 years older and more cunning, because I am doing the same times 4 years on but on half the training. heh.

I swam just 7 times - the first one being July 6th. I rode the IMC course 11 times last year, only once this year and my bike split improved by 7 minutes!

My “walk-split” has been the same regardless. This year my long run was only 23kms which I did 10 times starting in May.

Seriously, my running has been neglected and there is no point in continuing to walk a 6 hour marathon once a year at $600 per!

Race day was almost perfect weather, cool, dry, - just some pesky headwinds starting at the 80k mark lasting the rest of the day but nothing a Clydesdale can’t handle. Lighter people were being blown around sometimes nearly being stopped in their tracks. I just plowed on through.

My swim plan worked out perfectly. I hugged the buoys and finished in 86 mins without mishap. I use a farmer john wetsuit and in the past it has billowed out in the chest increasing the drag. 2 weeks before the race I hit on the idea of wearing a cycling jersey overit to stop the billowing. It worked perfectly. I recommend it.

My old steel Bianchi flew down to Osoyoos in 1:52:00 - that’s 35.69kph - making up 250 places, 60 of which I lost going up the Richter. I climbed the Richter in 42 mins. In training it usually takes me 34 to 46mins, so that was okay. On the descent cars travelling alongside racers to cheer “Daddy” slowed me down. I descend into roller number one at 75-80kph and they were tracking Daddy at 55. I had to brake. Bummer.

I sailed along well enough to Beck’s road in Cawston but had some cramping in my left quad that forced me off the bike. I downed 3 packets of salt courtesy of KFC and soft pedaled to the Special Needs turn around. The cramps never came back. I did however dismount at the aid station further down the road to pee, massage my foot, and stretch out my back, cost me 5 minutes.

Britt caught me at the Yellow Lake aid station and we chatted for a few minutes.She hung back a little, hoping her hubby Antonio would catch up as he had flatted. I sped on into town easing up at the airport and cruised into T2 in 7:03:00 The first 90k was good for me but the last 90k needs some work. The bike shorts worked out - no pain there, but my lower back was very tired and sore.

T2 was slow, 11:48, no explanation for that.

I started out for OK Falls with a sore back and unable to jog. I knew that by the top of Main Street Hill I would be able to run some and it turned out that way. Britt and Toni passed me by Starbucks and I took their picture. Larry caught me by the Peach and we jogged down to the Sicamous when I had to let him go. He finished 30 mins ahead of me. My walk / jog routine got me in by 10:13pm and could be an hour faster if my feet didn’t get sore. I changed sox at mile 16 but it didn’t help much. If I can solve that one I will approach sub-14 I’m sure. Next year.

Libor and Andy were waiting at the finish line. I got a shout and a wave from Larry and felt good enough to drive the 2hours home to my own bed, skipping the prize dinner Monday night, but deciding between a plate of pasta, sleeping in the car for a third night and being at home on Monday didn’t seem like a tuffie.

More thoughts later.

The Dukie Ride

2007-08-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

Every August 12 since 1997 I do the Dukie Bike Ride in memory of my faithful mutt who died that day ten years ago.
At first, the ride was a way of coping with his loss, instead of just sitting around bawling my eyes out. Now it is a pleasurable remembrance of a creature I will miss for the rest of my days.

PoC
2 weeks to IMC

An Attitude is a tool not an ornament.

2007-08-03T11:37:00.000-07:00

Whether you think your are suffering or you don't, you're probably right.

It's an attitude, and you get to choose your attitudes.

Choosing the attitude that helps you achieve your goals is part of the mental game - a part of sports, business and life in general.

Choose, "I am strong, I am light, I run like the pond skater skipping across the lily-pads" (pick your own phrasing) and you are more likely to endure the discomfort associated with running 30,000 strides over 42kms than if you choose the attitude,
"My feet hurt, my back aches, I can't do this!"

It is common sense really. Norman Cousins famously spoke about the language we use when talking about suffering with terminally ill cancer patients. He noted how the phrasing affected the attitudes of the patients - either positively, or negatively. Of course we should choose the positive approach every time. The point here is that our "attitudes" must per force be couched in language, therefore choose positive language. We think in words. Words affect how we feel. Connect the dots.

Immigration or racism?

2007-07-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

If, as some CBC listeners have urged in their phone in responses, the Canadian government offered greater incentives to Canadian citizens to have larger families, rather than, say, increasing immigration quotas from an already huge 250,000 per year, would their actions be considered racist?

Wouldn't it be a statement to Canadians that although we need more people to sustain our economy and our tax base of working age citizens, we would rather have the population remain the same ethnic mix it is currently. In other words, let's have more Canadian kids rather than have to import foreigners.

It makes more sense to me to increase the numbers of qualified immigrants who would be ready to go to work right now and therefore to pay taxes right away, than to pay money to people to have babies which will have a higher cost to our taxpayers in terms of health care as they are birthed and negotiate childhood and incur education costs too.

There are qualified medical people: doctors, nurses, as well as teachers, who cannot get a job here and are wasting their skills in menial jobs, who would be able to make a greater contribution to Canada if they were allowed to practice the profession for which they were trained wherever they grew up before they emigrated.

The risk the government takes in accepting an immigrant under the current rules is that a qualified immigrant can sponsor an unqualified immigrant, usually an aging and ailing parent, who immediately seeks out a medical clinic and avails themselves of free (or at least, subsidized) health care. So why not let the qualified ones get a good-paying job in their chosen profession, earn a good salary and pay more taxes?

Tuesday July 17

2007-07-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

The Canadian census figures from 2006 have now been released and the radio talk shows, media etc. are now analyzing them.

They speak with a tone of surprise that Kelowna, in the Okanagan valley, is the oldest city on average in Canada.

Hardly surprising when it has been known for decades that the Okanagan with its terrific climate and great scenery is one of the best places in Canada to retire.
So folks from across Canada, now with the money to choose where to retire, have chosen to move to the Okanagan to live out the rest of their days. Of course they chose Kelowna of the three communities because of the superior medical facilities here.

Since they have driven up the property prices, young families can't afford property here, so the average age rises. Pretty obvious, huh?

And these guys on the radio are talking as if it's now a big surprise!
Governments! Idiots!

We've all seen it coming for generations.

My Great, Grandfather bought land here in the early years of the last century and his children grew orchards there.

Summer's Here in the Okanagan

2007-07-11T12:44:00.000-07:00

and I'm 48 days from Ironman Canada - my fourth ironman triathlon.
So I'm runnin', riding and swimmin' like a fiend. Nice work if you can get it.

My training log is here.

http://www.okbizpromotions.com/2007IMC.html

for anyone who wants to see the details of my training, how much this and that and where, etc.

I live in a lovely part of the world so it is a joy to train here and so hard to resist the urge to get out on the bike or hit the lake oin a sunny afternoon.

This is what I live for.

Supreme Court upholds ban on Tobacco Ads

2007-06-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

Because it has been shown that tobacco - smoking, chewing, 2nd hand smoke - is detrimental to public health and costs taxpayers through health problems treated under medicare.

Automobiles pollute the atmosphere - undisputed.
Autos produce greenhouse gases - undisputed.
People die in auto accidents - undisputed.
Autos consume valuable, irreplaceable oil stocks - undisputed.
People only buy huge pick-up trucks and muscle cars because of the image created in TV ads - probable, but companies buying strictly for business purposes aren't likely to be swayed by TV ads during the Super Bowl or Monday night Football broadcasts, are they?

Isn't it about time we banned automobile advertising because it is detrimental to the health of the planet and all who live on it?

Vancouver wants to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 1/3

2007-06-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

That's easy. All they have to do is turn down the lights - street lights that is.
Street lights are by far the greatest single electricity use in a city, more than any single industry.

Can city dwellers learn to live with a little less illumination?
It's that, or live with the consequences of global warming.
In addition, leaving the lights on just burns up existing fuel suppllies that much faster, hastening the end of the petrochemical age.

Calgary has in motion a plan to replace all their street lights, currently, those yellow sodium vapour beauties, with low wattage LED bulbs. They expect to recover the capital cost of the new bulbs with electricity savings as the program is completed in two or three years.

Ironically, Calgary buys electricty generated by burning coal while Vancouver uses Hydro-generated power.

A Letter to the Editor

2007-06-27T11:04:00.001-07:00

The Editor,
Glenn Mitchell,
The Morning Star,
4407 – 25th Ave.
Vernon, BC.

June, 25th, 2007

Dear Sir,

Re: June17, 2007 - Federal Tories sponsor car #29 at Mosport.

No Government can be taken seriously when speaking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, dealing with global warming or dealing with the depletion of oil stocks, when its members also endorse NASCAR racing.
At Sunday’s NASCAR Canadian Tire Series event at Mosport (Ontario), Federal Tories, including Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finley, sponsored car #29 – a Dodge Charger driven by Pierre Bourque.
NASCAR is a circus, which has one purpose – to promote the sale of high-powered engines, and petroleum products consumed rapaciously by those engines. The byproducts are greenhouse gases and noise, so really it is a good mix for politicians.

If you care about the environment, these are not the people you want in parliament enacting laws and spending our tax dollars.

Source:
http://www.dianefinley.ca/EN/5922/56716
http://www.frontstretch.com/otherpr/9919/

2007-06-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

I watched CNN this morning at about 8:30am. It consisted of footage of flash flooding damage in Texas, destruction in the Middle East, deaths and injuries from street drag racing and other mayhem, all sponsored by car commercials.
We don’t need to see the misery and suffering of people in Texas since nothing we can do can prevent it, unless you think flash-flooding is worse because of human-caused climate change.
We don’t need to see the dead bodies on the street and hear the panicked commentary from observers who watched the dragster careen off the telephone pole and into a crowd of spectators – unless you think banning drag racing and other auto sport would help ease human-caused climate change.
We don’t need to see the death and misery in the Middle East either, unless you think that it is caused by war over petroleum deposits which may be themselves the cause of human-caused climate change.
And least of all do we need to see the commercials for a Dodge Ram 3500 truck or super-fast, fun-to-drive sports cars which are, beyond doubt, contributing to climate change.

Btw, the Federal Tories just sponsored a Dodge Charger stock car in a Canadian NASCAR race at Mosport on the past weekend. Now that's government leadership!

******

Mylifebits
Gordon Bell, genius researcher at Microsoft in San Francisco is fastidiously recording his whole life, or at least all his e-mails, correspondence, papers, books, photos, in part because memory is so cheap now – a tera-byte hard drive goes for about $500 retail. This may relieve him of having to remember a “bunch of stuff.”

******

June 18th 2007 - CBC
Bruce Party of Queen’s University, Economic Law, said – no point to Kyota. It requires a Global Treaty, including major contributing polluters.
“We still live in an industrial civilization. The major feature of an industrial civilization is that.. economic activity is related to use of fossil fuels. .. Economic prosperity is directly linked to fossil-fuel use.”

A subsidy-free energy market.

Changing to more energy efficient light bulbs is a waste of time and energy, and because it distracts us from the problem by making us think that we are helping, it harms us. Get rid of the notion that you can solve climate change by nickel and diming your way towards Kyoto.

The premise of Kyoto is way off base. Developing countries must be allowed to catch up.”

That is racial suicide.

India and China produce hugely more greenhouse gases than Canada.
Perhaps a brutal example would serve to illustrate:
Reducing Canada’s per capita emissions by 50% by 2050 would be the equivalent of removing half the population or about 16 million people.

If Canadians produce 4 times more, no let’s be generous, say five times more greenhouse gas than Chinese, then to match Canada’s cuts under Kyoto, China would have to lose 80 million people. Then we would made equal sacrifices towards solving the problem. However, to put this in perpective, Canada would then have a population of 16 million people (about what we had in 1957,) while China’s population would have been reduced from a current 1,400 million people (1.4B) to a paltry 1,320 million people (1.32B)

******

Global warming has the potential to cause World War Three.
China, India and other developing countries aren’t going to give up their dream of a life like we have in the West. They want fridges and stoves and air conditioning and the freedom granted by automobiles. This development of industrial economies means the increased use of energy. They will not refrain from using coal, oil, natural gas as fuels.

Oil resources are increasingly scarcer, DAY-BY-DAY, as we have passed peak oil production in the world.

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/

They will fight over control of these resources, JUST AS THE USA IS DOING NOW in the Middle East.

Tensions will escalate. Politicians and dictators alike will see that they have nothing to lose by using military force. Some will use tactical nuclear weapons. The consequences of this can be imagined by anyone who has watched the Middle East power struggle since Israel was established in 1948.

******

White #29 car sponsored by Federal Conservatives – Idiots. This will go down as yet another huge political blunder by the Federal Conservatives. Not only does it clearly signal that they have no interest in achieving goals defined under the Kyoto accord because nothing could more clearly demonstrate a complete disregard for the value of oil as the profligate waste symbolized by motor sport. NASCAR celebrates the global warming crisis and their complete ignorance of the crisis by burning up hundreds of gallons of precious petroleum products in a two-hour long spectacle of high-powered cars uselessly, racing around an oval. The whole point of which is to sell more high-powered, gas-guzzling automobiles. What could be a more despicable display of carbon fuel waste?
Our politicians really know how to pick their causes.

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/story/2007/06/18/conservatives-nascar.html

******

7 Canadian children were saved from a kiddy-porn ring along with 24 other children.
24 people were arrested.
This sting / arrest / investigation cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars, during which time thousands of children starved to death in Sudan and dozens of corrupt criminals profited by diverting UN supplies into black market sales.
7 children were killed yesterday in Afghanistan during fighting.

Dozens of homeless were put out on the streets by the closing of a shelter.

******

Nuclear plant to be built in Grande Prairie region.

To produce hot water to loosen up oil shale deposits west of the Alberta Tarsands a nuclear power plant will be built in that region. Oil will become increasingly valuable as a source of lubricants and for chemicals produced from petroleum beyond its use as cheap fuel.

******

John Mighton, The End of Ignorance, released today.
Kids have much more ability in math than it appears.
jumpmath.org

******

First Global Warming Lawsuit Filed Against Government of Canada
29 May 2007

Saturday June 16th

2007-06-16T17:36:00.000-07:00

Last evening, Friday, I rode the bike out to Armstrong to Eileen's house 27kms at 29kph.
It was calm, clear, mild, perfect for a bike ride.

This morning, I rode the bike 47kms from Armstrong to Vernon via the Yankee Flats store.
Sunny day to start, no wind, perfect for the bike ride.
Then 30 minutes after I got to Vernon it started to rain. Bummer.
I was looking forward to a dip in the lake then a few hours of work to make some money, but I wussed out of visiting prospective clients in the downpour.
Maybe I'm not cut out for riches.
As Gertrude Stein said,
"Of course I want to be rich,
I just don't want to do what there is to do to become rich."

World Fresh Water Crisis

2007-06-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

"Twenty-two countries in Africa are without [safe drinking] water. People just have no access. South Africa is in very, very serious trouble. [In] many parts of Latin America, although there is water, the ordinary people have no access to water unless they're wealthy. Mexico City is running out of water; the whole Mexican Valley is in serious trouble. China is paying for its economic miracle, becoming the economic superpower of the world, so-called, by destroying its water tables. Two thirds of the cities in northern China are now in severe water scarcity situations. Seventy-five percent of all of India's rivers and waterways are polluted beyond use, as are 80 percent of China's."

"To me, this water crisis is the comet. It's here. … [T]he human family, the Earth is about to experience a water crisis of monumental proportions. It is, in my opinion, the worst, most frightening environmental threat that exists, more than climate change, more than the oceans, more than anything. This is the one."

Source: Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Council of Canadians
November 5, 2004

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0111_041105_maude_barlow.html

Daughter of Erin

2007-06-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

Called a meddlesome witch by the Brits,
this black-haired beauty, pride of County Claire,
this daughter of Erin, this Nightingale,
stole the heart of young William whose air
praised her walk, and the stones beneath her feet.
She cast off the crone
to stride as a Queen,
did young Kathleen.
But Billy did not win her hand; this water hyacinth,
with her labyrinthine lust,
and in-your-face politics,
did time in Holloway,
her youth martyred by an unjust Crown.
Iseult, and Geroges, by Lucien,
gave silent testimony to the strength
of her patriotism. Though she lost her husband
and her youth to British greed and cruelty,
she gave it willingly. Now interred in Glasnevin,
with Pearse and Plunkett,
her beauty is her legacy.

This poem about Maude Gonne, the unrequited love of William Butler Yeats, I have posted in response to Library Princess's post of a poem about Yeats by W.H.Auden.
Oh, btw, I wrote it, for whatever that is worth.

Coal’s Knockout Blow To Kyoto:

2007-06-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

“By 2012, expected cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions under the Kyoto treaty will be swamped by emissions from a surge of new coal-fired plants built in China, India, and the United States.”

SOURCES: UDI-PLATT'S, US ENERGY INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION, AND INDUSTRY ESTIMATES; SCOTT WALLACE – STAFF

The desire for profit is overwhelming the desire to produce clean electricity.
China is planning the construction of 562 coal-fired generating plants by 2012. They will use traditional “dirty” coal-burning technology. There is no economic incentive to use Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) technology which extracts sulphur and CO2 before it goes up the stack - but which plants cost 15%-25% more than traditional, less efficient, designs.

India is planning 213 similar plants and the US 72 plants.

Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 emissions by some 483 million tons by 2012. These 850 new plants will produce about 2.7 billion tons of CO2.

This alone peels the death knell of Kyoto agreements.

The cover story on this month’s Discover magazine asks, Can the world survive the return to coal?

If IGCC technology is employed in the pre-burning phase AND if efficient emissions scrubbers are used at the exhaust phase, coal-fired electricity generation plants could replace petroleum fueled plants, thus deferring the energy crisis another 250 years based on current coal reserve estimates, BUT currently there is no incentive to do this. They will build dirty ones anyway because the consumer demands electricity to power their fridges, TVs, washers & dryers, next their hybrid cars and, oh yes, the streetlights!

Better invest in companies manufacturing SCUBA gear!
Cf, John Brunner’s dystopic masterpiece: Stand On Zanzibar.

Additional sources:
http://www.engineerlive.com/european-process-engineer/17475/and3625-trillion-investment-in-new-coalfired-plants.thtml

Reason #2 why US / Canada won't be Kyoto compliant anytime soon!

2007-06-11T14:25:00.001-07:00

The City of Calgary is currently replacing its streetlights with low – wattage bulbs citing the following:

"Energy prices reached an all time high in
January 2001. The streetlight system is
The City's single largest electricity
consumer. The City needed to find a way
to reduce costs in operating the streetlight
system. By going to lower wattage fixtures,
we will use less energy which will help
keep operating costs down. Using less
electricity reduces the greenhouse gas
emissions from gas and coal-burning
generators. When all the residential
streetlights have been replaced, carbon
dioxide emissions will be reduced by
approximately 16,000 tonnes a year."

Source:http://www.calgary.ca/docgallery/BU/roads/streetlights/pamphlet.pdf.

Commendable. However..

At the same time we must recognize the growth that is taking place in cities not only in North America but also the rest of the world. The world when viewed from space is spectacular. We see cities lit up at night for security reasons, glowing brightly. 90% (or some large number) of the populace is sleeping. We are lighting the cityscape for the criminals and the security forces employed to protect us against them.

As the quote form the City of Calgary above notes:

"The streetlight system is the City's single largest electricity
consumer."

The SINGLE LARGEST CONSUMER of electricity is the streetlight system. Security of property and persons is undeniably an important concern, and not until the devastation implied by global warming is realized will citizens and property owners act to turn out the lights. Only when they have weighed the relative costs inherent in the two scenarios will they act.

Worse, 90% of electricity in Alberta is produced by burning COAL.

On the one hand there is the actual cost of loss to property through break-ins under cover of darkness, and other night time crimes, including muggings, etc.

On the other hand is the more widespread and insidious costs of global warming, such as higher food costs, water shortages, losses due to fires (uncontrolled because of water shortages) and so on. Actually the list is extensive but space prevents me listing all of them here.

At present, you can sleep soundly in Calgary because you can park your new SUV under a streetlight where it will be safe – thieves prefer to steal cars parked under cover of darkness. Of course if you didn't drive a gas-guzzling, CO2 emitting monster in the first place, and went to bed at a decent hour you wouldn't need the street lights in the first place. But that would be a lifestyle change wouldn't it?

Only when it is realized that ignoring global warming will cost more than keeping the lights burning all night will people be willing to turn out the night lights and return to what it was like in the 19th century – when there were only 1 or 2 billion people on the planet. Overpopulation is an intrinsic part of the climate change / global warming problem, but that's for another post, another day.

Kyoto is a Fraud

2007-06-08T18:47:00.001-07:00

Global Energy Crisis: Why the US won't play along.

Worried voices can be heard around the world these days, speaking in strident tones about the horrors of climate change. They demand that the G8+5 summit in Heleigendamm next month for example, be about action, action taken to reduce carbon emissions by forced agreement. The U.S. is balking at this saying that remedies must take the form of technological solutions rather than by forced measures.

The American position is understandable enough, given that their economy would suffer dramatically if carbon-reduction measures were forced on it. The U.S. is top dog in the world at the moment and it would be foolish to think that they will give that up without a fight. Isn't that exactly what they are proving in Iraq and Afghanistan? While the military action in the Middle East is ostensibly and idealogical conflict fought against the bogey-man of the "terrorist," and while nobody is saying it, the real reson why the U.S. is there and why they aren't leaving anytime soon, maybe never, is oil. Peak oil production in the continental U.S. was reached in 1969 (see Hubbert report: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil) and world oil production is predicted to be reached by 2010. This means the cost of retrieving each barrel of oil from then on is going to become increasingly more difficult and expensive, so the value of oil reserves that are relatively easy and cheap become more valuable. They lie in the Arab countries of the Middle East. No superpower can afford to let those reserves fall under the complete control of regimes antagonistic to their cultural agenda.

The American cultural agenda can be read by viewing the commercial messages aired every 15 minutes on network television. It is an agenda of motor vehicles using petroleum products, drugs derived from petroleum and other products from plastic disposable diapers to processed foods derived from or packaged in plastics, themselves derived from petroleum products.

The voices heard around the world should be worried. Americans aren't giving up their suburban lifestyle anytime soon. And the alternative is worse.

Coal gas has long been known as a source of energy, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and chemicals necessary to industry. Many regions produce their electricity by burning coal. Any reduction in the use of petroleum products will likely result in an increase of coal usage. Coal burning produces more greenhouse gases than does burning oil. In addition it is higher in sulphur and other deadly pollutants.

But back to the U.S. and global warming.
The threat assessment of global warming has included: disruptive weather in the form of violent storms, flooding, wind damage, altered growing seasons leading to crop failures, even long-lasting drought. None of these threats are greater in the minds of the White House and the American people, than the thought of the end of the era of the automobile. It is a nation founded on personal freedoms and the automobile has become the over-riding symbol of that freedom. To be unable to "get away" from your problems by going for a drive, or unable to go visit a loved one anytime you feel like it, or to have access to a resource (like food) simply by hopping in your vehicle and going to get it, is anathema to the American way of thinking, and contra-indicated by their whole social planning strategy, centred as it is, on suburban living. They would rather give up unassisted breathing than give up their automobiles, and that is exactly what they will be doing if they start using coal as an alternative source of fuel. People in Taiwan and mainland China wear surgical masks as they walk down the city streets or travel by motor scooter about their daily lives, because the air is harmful to breathe. This is the fate of North American cities. Like the frog boiling gradually in the pot of water as the heat is turned up, we, the citizens of North America, just like those in Asia, will asphyxiate ourselves before we give up the automobile and its associated freedoms.

Therefore, we may conclude that the U.S. government will not untertake ant action that will mean the reduction in the use of the personal vehicle by its citizens. The dynamic isn't as simple as the political rhetoric: we serve the people and they want their cars. It is more subtle. The government, any government, exists to serve its dominant class (see John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards for a fuller exposition). In the Western nations and increasingly throughout the world the dominant class has become the corporation. The corporations sell goods and services and influence the government with huge amounts of cash and considerations at the personal, party and public levels as well as intense lobbying by highly proficient professionals. These corporate interests profit by pandering to the tastes of the multitudes without regard to their direct well-being. The corporation after all is designed to look after the well being of only one group: their stockholders, and the stockholders typically want only one thing: profit.

Technological solutions to the coming oil shortage will be found. Given that massive profits can be had by pandering to the comforts of the masses as in cheap, personal transportation, the solutions likley won't be "Green", ie. Friendly to the environment, polar bears and such. However, declining air quality has a more insidious effect. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of the disaster awaiting us as rampant insecticide use meant declini9ng bird and non-harmful insect populations. Recently reports of honeybee population decline has agricultural experts worried as the bees are the best, maybe the only effective, long term means of pollinating plants, the stuff we eat. Food production can be affected more drastically by a scarcity of insects than by erratic weather. Air pollution kills insects – the good kinds- and that starves the birds and that affects humans in ways perhaps not yet understood.

The overwhelming message seems to be: ya gotta give up the cars, and the consumptive lifestyle that goes with it. But the automobile itself, or rather, the internal combustion engine, is not the problem. It is the plenitude of them. In 1850 there were only one billion humans on the planet. Today there are 6.7 billion humans. If population had stalled at say 1920 levels when the automobile began its heyday, global warming wouldn't even be a topic of idle discussion. And even if we were to reduce the greenhouse gas production per capita by 50% not the 10% or 20% talked about by Kyoto, it won't make a bit of difference to climate change since that takes decades but it will take only one more lifetime for the population to double to 12 billion people (estimates vary, some predict 11 billion by 2050.)

Let me say that again,

even if you halve the greenhouse gas output per capita, it means nothing to global warming if the population doubles.

Will the population double before we have technological solutions to transporrtation needs, flora and fauna preservation issues and catastrophic weather phenomena?

update

2007-06-08T18:37:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I haven't blogged lately.
I've been busy.
It's June 8th.
Since January I have been in a play and a drama festival - we received 4 awards including best ensemble cast - from Jeff Hyslop (Phantom of the Opera)
I was part of a team that won the BC Provincial Basketball Championships M55+
I've been training for Ironman Canada 2007 on Aug 26th.
Playing tennis twice a week.
Haven't written a thing, well a few things, but not much.
Okay I'll post one now.

2007-01-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

Something about romac's latest post inspired this poem - if that nomenclature is deserved.

First Lines

Tragedy is a funny thing,
The moment you meet, you know
There will be an ending,
As inevitable as a sunset,
Whether it is a birth, a prang,
New Year’s Eve, in an elevator,
On the road, in a saloon or a graveyard,
And the things you say,
That just pop into your head:
"That’s a lovely hat; it suits the shape of your face,"
I love that colour on you; it makes your eyes so arresting,"
"Nice shoes; wanna fuck?"
seem so melancholy when they become nostalgic.
No laughter, not a belly-laugh, a guffaw,
nor even a chuckle
can dispel the sadness that settles on the mind,
like a cloak of night, soft, even, smothering, numbing,
- all hues diluted into shades of gray,
by time, emotional overload, ennui
like the taste of coffee grown cold on the windowsill
in the light of an overcast morning,
sweet, sticky, sickening – like blood on rain-slickened pavement,
never able to satisfy a longing for the warm, musky smell
of her rain-dampened hair
nor recall a single instant of joy,
nor ease the bowel-watering, lip-trembling pain,
funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.

Bander

Christmas 2006

2006-12-28T09:27:00.000-08:00

The sun crested the eastern hills at 8:32am as viewed from my office window. It was clear and cold, minus nine degrees, no wind. Steam rose from the vents on the office buildings across the avenue. Few cars littered the snowy street. Most of the workers were still enjoying the holiday break I suppose.
I considered my resolutions for 2007.

In 2007, I will:

1. not make disparaging comments about other road users.

2. make more charitable donations in 2007, starting with buying a lottery ticket every week for the whole year.

3. Write more poetry, at least during April, napowrimo at PFFA.org

I gotta move the car before the parking Nazis give me a ticket. I will return to this later.