Democracy In Crisis

This is a clearer and more succinct explication of the rise of dangerous right-wing politics than I think I have ever heard.

It might be tempting to view the political success of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as something uniquely American. But, argues Gary Younge, rightwing populism and scapegoating of society’s vulnerable is cropping up all across the west. This is what happens when big business has more power than governments

A Sign I Would Love To See In Canada

This is how a politically disgruntled Brit is dealing with his frustration over the Tories.



Anyone in Canada up for a little creative protest?

The Real Problem With Contemporary Journalism

The current scandal engulfing the CBC and Amanda Lang has made its way overseas into the cross-hairs of The Guardian's George Monbiot.

After providing a summary, with appropriate links, of the sordid Lang tale that encompasses massive conflict of interest and management collusion, Monbiot has this to say:

CBC refused to answer my questions, and I have not had a response from Lang. It amazes me that she remains employed by CBC, which has so far done nothing but bluster and berate its critics.

But the CBC's indefensible stance is not the real subject of Monbiot's essay, merely part of the context for his thesis:

[T]hose who are supposed to scrutinise the financial and political elite are embedded within it. Many belong to a service-sector aristocracy, wedded metaphorically (sometimes literally) to finance. Often unwittingly, they amplify the voices of the elite, while muffling those raised against it.

Studies and statistic prove his point:

A study by academics at the Cardiff School of Journalism examined the BBC Today programme’s reporting of the bank bailouts in 2008. It discovered that the contributors it chose were “almost completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other City voices. Civil society voices or commentators who questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were almost completely absent from coverage.” The financiers who had caused the crisis were asked to interpret it.

The heavily biased reporting on that catastrophe, however, was only representative of a deeper malaise:

The same goes for discussions about the deficit and the perceived need for austerity. The debate has been dominated by political and economic elites, while alternative voices – arguing that the crisis has been exaggerated, or that instead of cuts, the government should respond with Keynesian spending programmes or taxes on financial transactions, wealth or land – have scarcely been heard. Those priorities have changed your life: the BBC helped to shape the political consensus under which so many are now suffering.

And what about fair and balanced reporting? A fiction, according to Monbiot:

The BBC’s business reporting breaks its editorial guidelines every day by failing to provide alternative viewpoints. Every weekday morning, the Today programme grovels to business leaders for 10 minutes. It might occasionally challenge them on the value or viability of their companies, but hardly ever on their ethics. Corporate critics are shut out of its business coverage – and almost all the rest.

On BBC News at Six, the Cardiff researchers found, business representatives outnumbered trade union representatives by 19 to one. “The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world,” the study said. This, remember, is where people turn when they don’t trust the corporate press.

He ends by listing the media's myriad failures, and the grave consequence of those failures:

...their failure to expose the claims of the haut monde, their failure to enlist a diversity of opinion, their failure to permit the audience to see that another world is possible. If even the public sector broadcasters parrot the talking points of the elite, what hope is there for informed democratic choice?

Monbiot's piece should be required reading for all concerned about the condition of that great protector of democracy, the fifth estate. As well, we would be indeed foolish if we failed to understand that the insights he offers apply, not just to Great Britain, but to Canada and much of the rest of western world, as well.

Climate Change Adaptation

As the effects of climate change become more pronounced, adaptive measures will need to be taken alongside of measures ameliorating the rate of change (if that is in fact still even possible).

One such step has been undertaken in California, a state that has been especially hard hit by drought. Orange County has undertaken an ambitious waste water recycling regimen that will likely become the norm in other parts of the country and world facing similar conditions.

Possibly The Most Important 60-Minutes You've Spent In A Good, Long While

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, delivers a stark warning and a call to arms in this year’s Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute address. Monbiot warns that we’re about to feed the environment into the gaping maw of the financial sector so responsible for its current degradation.

Monbiot says that neo-liberalism will complete the devastation of our already reeling environment. He points out, in words that ring true for Canada also, that we lack the political leadership we need so desperately to protect our environment.

“This is the horrendous mistake that New Labour here and the Democratic Party in the United States have made. ‘We’ve got to win the next election so we’ve got to appease people who don’t share our values, so we’re going to become like them. Instead of trying to assert our own values, we are going to go over to them and say, “Look, we’re not really red; we’re not scary at all. We are actually conservatives.” That was Tony Blair’s message. That was Bill Clinton’s message. That, I’m afraid, is Barack Obama’s message. ...We’ve ended up with a situation where there are effectively no political alternatives to neoliberalism being advanced by the ...government. In which the opposition is, in almost every case, failing to oppose. It is in this position because it has progressively neutralised itself by trying to appease people who do not share its values.”


Does that sound familiar? It does to me. Monbiot captures the abandonment of the Left and centre-left in Canada by New Democrats and Liberals alike. They’re all neoliberal petro-pols and, as such, richly deserving of our contempt and loathing. Monbiot warns of the darker side of neoliberal politics – the inability to support anything but neoliberal solutions to our environmental threats. Foremost of these, he warns, is the madness of “natural capital” – monetizing the environment, component by component.

“You are effectively pushing the natural world even further into the system that is eating it alive. Dieter Helm, the Chairman of the Natural Capital Committee, said, ‘The environment is part of the economy and needs to be properly integrated into it so that growth opportunities will not be missed.’

“There, ladies and gentlemen, you have what seems to me the government’s real agenda. This is not to protect the natural world from the depredations of the economy. It is to harness the world to the economic growth that has been destroying it. All the things which have been so damaging to the living planet are now being sold to us as its salvation: commodification, economic growth, financialization, abstraction. Now, we are told, these devastating processes will protect it.”

“It gets worse still when you look at the way in which this is being done. Look at the government’s Ecosystems Market Task Force, which was another of these exotic vehicles for chopping up nature and turning it into money. From the beginning it was pushing nature towards financialization. It talked of ‘harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that these blended revenue streams and securitizations enhance the return of investment of an environmental bond.’ This gives you an idea of what the agenda is...

“What we are talking about is giving the natural world to the City of London, the financial centre, to look after. What could possibly go wrong? Here we have a sector whose wealth is built on the creation of debt. That’s how it works, on stacking up future liabilities. Shafting the future in order to serve the present, that is the model. And then that debt is sliced up into collateralized debt obligations and all other marvellous devices that worked so well last time round.

“Now nature is to be captured and placed in the care of the financial sector, as that quote suggests. In order for the City to extract any value from it, the same Task Force says we need to ‘unbundle’ ecosystem services so that can be individually traded.

“That’s the only way in which it can work – this financialization and securitization and bond issuing and everything else they are talking about. Nature has to be unbundled. If there is one thing we know about ecosystems, and we know it more the more we discover about them, is that you cannot safgely disaggregate their functions without destroying the whole thing. Ecosystems function as coherent holistic systems, in which the different elements depend upon each other. The moment you start to unbundle them and to trade them separately you create a formula for disaster.”

Monbiot concludes that the only way to save our planet is to utterly reject neoliberalism, no matter the name of the party that embraces it. What he’s saying is that we have to reject not just the Conservatives but also the Liberals and the New Democrats. He says the message from these parties is “follow us and we’ll give you a slightly less worse government.” He’s right and that’s just what the Liberals and the New Democrats have on offer. They’ve already gone to the Dark Side, you just need to be honest with yourself and admit it.

MoS, the Disaffected Lib

UPDATED: From The Mound Of Sound: A Basis For Optimism

The Mound writes:

Hi Lorne. I spotted this article in the ‘comments’ section of The Guardian. It’s been a while since I heard anything this encouraging on the climate change front:

It’s something akin to an epidemic. In the Australian state of Queensland, solar power has become cheaper than coal-generated electricity. In fact, solar power would be less expensive than burning coal if coal was somehow provided free. Writing in The Guardian, Giles Parkinson explains Australia’s rooftop solar revolution.

“Last week, for the first time in memory, the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day.

“For several days the price, normally around $40-$50 a megawatt hour, hovered in and around zero. Prices were deflated throughout the week, largely because of the influence of one of the newest, biggest power stations in the state – rooftop solar.

“’Negative pricing’ moves, as they are known are not uncommon. But they are supposed to happen at night, when most of the population is mostly asleep, demand is down, and operators of coal fired generators are reluctant to switch off. So they pay others to pick up their output.

“That’s not supposed to happen at lunchtime. Daytime prices are supposed to reflect higher demand, when people are awake, office buildings are in use, factories are in production. That’s when fossil fuel generators would normally be making most of their money.

“The influx of rooftop solar has turned this model on its head. There is 1,100MW of it on more than 350,000 buildings in Queensland alone (3,400MW on 1.2m buildings across the country). It is producing electricity just at the time that coal generators used to make hay (while the sun shines).

“The impact has been so profound, and wholesale prices pushed down so low, that few coal generators in Australia made a profit last year. Hardly any are making a profit this year. State-owned generators like Stanwell are specifically blaming rooftop solar.”

Parkinson explains that even if coal was free, the energy providers would still have to charge 19 cents per kWh to cover grid costs and overhead whereas rooftop solar is achieving costs of 12-18 cents per kWh and is expected to come down as low as 10 cents per kWh. The forecast is for solar to be installed in 75 per cent of houses and 90 per cent of corporate buildings by 2023.

King Coal still has bags of influence with the neo-conservative Abbott Government and the industry is doing what it can to staunch the spread of solar rooftop power. Fortunately the fossil fuelers and their political minions are waging a battle that’s already lost.

UPDATE: I thought I should update this with an item I found at the Sydney Morning Herald discussing how Australia's rooftop solar dynamic is leaving conventional electricity providers facing a death spiral.

Guest Post: The Mound Of Sound

Yesterday, inspired by a link sent to me by The Mound of Sound, I wrote a post on some of the dire implications of the surveillance state and the preparations being made by The Pentagon to deal with mass civil breakdown.
Today, a guest post by The Mound offers a sharp counterpoint to the pessimism of that post:


I thought I was a pessimist until I began delving into online courses on war studies, globalization, global food security, etc.

As Doyle’s Holmes said, “the game’s afoot.” Stuff that would have been considered alarming a generation ago now occurs daily and almost without notice. Our privacy, that one right to which all others are anchored, is gone. Instead of fighting to protect us, our governments increasingly employ the latest technology to intrude on our daily lives. By stripping away our privacy, governments are able to redefine democratic dissent as subversion, even treason.

There’s talk of revolution seemingly everywhere. It may be the inevitable end result of the world paradigm shift enacted by Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney. Today the Pentagon is preparing for ‘mass civil breakdown’ and preparing to use military force within the United States against civilians in flagrant violation of that country’s posse comitatus rule. Open the link, read it and see if it doesn’t make your stomach churn.

In yesterday’s Guardian there’s an exploration of ‘open source revolution.’ It’s an idea from former CIA spy, Robert David Steele, and it’s an idea worth considering. It may even be our kids’ last, best hope.

Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now present in the United States and Britain.

Steele's book is a must-read, a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new civilisational paradigm that simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting critique of the prevailing global order. His interdisciplinary 'whole systems' approach dramatically connects up the increasing corruption, inefficiency and unaccountability of the intelligence system and its political and financial masters with escalating inequalities and environmental crises. But he also offers a comprehensive vision of hope that activist networks like Reclaim are implementing today.

"We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making," he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. "Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted."

Today's capitalism, he argues, is inherently predatory and destructive:

"Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditised by the Industrial Era."

Open source everything, in this context, offers us the chance to build on what we've learned through industrialisation, to learn from our mistakes, and catalyse the re-opening of the commons, in the process breaking the grip of defunct power structures and enabling the possibility of prosperity for all.

"Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the 'utopia' that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach."

The goal, he concludes, is to reject:

"... concentrated illicitly aggregated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth."

This is the stuff of the ‘social contagion’ that so worries the Pentagon. Whether it will be anywhere near as utopian as Steele envisions is far from clear. If so, it certainly won’t be democratic if it’s to be truly benevolent.

It’s obvious that Steele supports Steady State economics and the rejection of neo-classical economics models of the type still taught in our universities. We will shift to steady state principles because it’s what is demanded when the world runs out of stuff – and we are. It is a transition from a perpetual, exponential growth-based system to an allocation-based system, the sort of thing we have resorted to during wartime. The only alternative to that is a fairly-brutal neo-feudalism but the peasantry is too well armed this time around.

I don’t know if I’ll see this in my lifetime but I expect many of you will. History has shown that, while revolutions can be foreseen (as the Pentagon is doing right now), there’s no way to determine when the actual tipping point will occur. These things usually take everyone at least somewhat by surprise which explains, in part, why they often become ugly, brutal and confused.

Let’s hope Steele is right because what he foresees is not revolution as much as a massive reformation that overthrows our political, social and economic models. Bliss.

UPDATED: They'll Be Watching You

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you.

-The Police - Every Breath You Take

Recent revelations, some of which I have written about, should make us all acutely aware that in the surveillance state, which now describes much of the world, our privacy is more a cherished illusion than it is a reality. Not only has the Canadian federal government been enjoying easy access to our digital information but also, as we recently learned, it has sent out a directive to all federal departments to report any demonstrations, however big or small, to the Government Operations Centre. Chillingly, a leaked email said, "We will compile this information and make this information available to our partners..."

But it turns out that the above only shows the tip of a very large iceberg.

Yesterday, The Mound of Sound sent me this link from The Guardian. Entitled Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown, the piece should give all of us, no matter where we live, profound pause:

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis (emphasis added) – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

The above would seem to provide an ominous clue as to its larger purpose. The fact that the Minerva Project was launched the same year as the banking crisis, a crisis that led to deep and extensive civil unrest, suggests that its purpose is control and containment and, by extension, maintenance of the status quo. Back to that in a moment.

Wide-scale surveillance is a given in this quest for 'understanding':

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

Basic tenets of democracy appear to be of no concern to The Pentagon. Indeed, protests to bring about political and economic change are viewed as palpable threats:

Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

The narrow perspective of the military, which sees all disruptive activity as a threat to the status quo, is confirmed by Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in Washington DC. who previously exposed some truths about the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme, whose scenarios

"adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic situations "in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order."

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club.

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

To say that this entire mentality is a deep affront to basic tenets of democracy is to state the obvious. To think that this is only a theoretical construct is to be unspeakably naive. Although examples of state repression as a response to protest and unrest abound, one need only remember what happened when the Occupy Movement hit its stride. Closer to home, of course, was the June 2010 G20 Summit debacle in Toronto. Or take a look at how Brazil is currently dealing with protests during the World Cup.

And things will not be getting any better. Climate change, probably our greatest threat, will spark more and more unrest, as will the Harper government's sanctioning of the Northern Gateway Project.

From all of this, one thing is abundantly clear. Rather than constructively responding to citizen concerns, the state will do everything in its power to protect the interests of those who really matter to it. Hint: it isn't us.

And finally, this warning from Dwight Eisenhower, spoken over 50 years ago as he prepared to depart from the U.S. presidency, seems eerily prescient:



Thanks to Anon, who provided the link to the following video, which significantly updates things:

The Window Of Opportunity Is Growing Increasingly Short

So says Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we are to take action to limit the global average temperature increase to two degrees Celsius:

Six years ago we said that emissions would have to peak by 2015 if we wanted to hold them to 2C. The cost rises the later you do it. Countries have to decide what would be the implications of inaction."

You can watch the brief video explanation here.

Canada's Sad Devolution

What was once Canada the cool, the country a 1991 Economist cover story called the "post-modern nation-state", has now devolved into a rightwing hellhole.

So says The Guardian in an article entitled Sadly, Rob Ford epitomises what Canada has become. Using Toronto's Chief Oaf Rob Ford and the hard-right policies of Stephen Harper as exemplars, the writer, Matthew Hays, concludes that our country has lost its way.

While one may not agree with all of the conclusions drawn, it is once again sobering to see ourselves as other see us, thanks to the misbegotten policies and contemptuous behaviour of our democratically-elected 'leaders.'

On Bad Days And Defiance

Yesterday was not a good day for me. First, I awoke to read about the government raid on the Guardian office resulting in the destruction of computers containing some of the material leaked by Edward Snowden on illegal state surveillance. Eerily reminiscent of the U.S. Department of Justice raid on the Associated Press back in May, there is little doubt in my mind that these are actions designed to cast a deep chill, not only on journalists themselves, but also on their sources, many of whom demand an anonymity that can no longer be guaranteed.

The second blow to my day was learning that Elmore Leonard, a peerless master of crime fiction, a writer of prodigious output, had died at the age of 87. If you have never read one of his post-western novels, give one a try. If, like me, you have an affinity for things slightly off-kilter, you will appreciate Leonards's slightly bent characters and impeccable ear for language and dialogue. Even though he enjoyed a long life, I am saddened that I will never again read a new work by him.

While nothing can stop the tide of time and mortality, much can be done to stand together against the tyranny of the state. The basis of that stand has to be access to information that allows us to decide for ourselves where truth lies, not where the state and the corporate-driven media wants us to believe it lies. And the basis for that information must be unfettered journalism, not journalism cowed and confined by intimidation tactics. In today's Star, Heather Mallick writes passionately about the issue.

Entitled Like food, we need good reporting to survive, Mallick, reflecting on the outrage at the Guardian, observes that there is a

... common attitude floating in the ether: that secret information must not be reported. Citizens — including in Canada, a most secretive country — must not know about who governs us, how they behave and how they keep us under surveillance so that we may be quickly pulled in on a hook.

She goes on to make two assertions that seem irrefutable to me:

Opposing reporting is like opposing food. We need food the same way we need information about where and how we live, globally, nationally and locally. Those intolerant of lactose and gluten may not like traditional milk or bread. But we still need and like food.

And:

Without reporting, we fail as a democracy.

Creeping state interference with our ability to know, understand and assess information and activities does not bode well for our way of life. People who think otherwise, embracing and/or promoting willful ignorance instead of enlightenment, are doing great harm to each of us.

They are the real enemy we should all be on guard against.

Chalk Up Another One For Orwell

Or, to update the metaphor, computers being destroyed by the govenment:

The message is clear: citizens do not have the right to material that would allow them to decide for themselves whether the overarching and illegal domestic spying being carried out by western 'democracies' is justified.

Following revelations of the baseless detainment of Glenn Greenwald's partner at Heathrow Airport on Sunday for nine hours, along with the confiscation of his computer equipment, we are now learning that Britains's GCHQ raided the offices of The Guardian to destroy computers containing data leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, said “shadowy Whitehall figures” had ordered the destruction after his paper refused to hand over files on American mass surveillance programmes sent to it by Mr Snowden.

Mr Rusbridger said the computers were turned into “mangled bits of metal” after the incident and warned that the “pointless” vandalism represented part of an increasingly “formidable” effort to curb freedom of the press.

Both the detention of Miranda and the destruction of the computers are clearly intimidation tactics, the message of which is clear: You are nothing, you are powerless before the state, you continue to exist only at our sufferance.

Hyperbole? An overreaction on my part? Would it were so.

Click here to read the reaction of Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger to this bald flexing of state power.

As well, Glenn Greenwald's reaction to the state's mistreatment of his partner is one of defiance and contempt:

Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.

If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.

You can read Greenwald's entire piece here.

Forced Feeding At Guantanimo

I really questioned whether I should put the following video on my blog, so graphic is it in its depiction of the forced feeding that 40 of the detainees in Guantanimo are currently being subjected to. Rapper Mos Def volunteered to undergo the procedure, for purposes that I think will become obvious if you have the stomach to watch it. Frankly, I had to look away twice.

The Cost of Profound Ignorance

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I have to admit that the profoundly ignorant deeply distress me, especially those who revel in that ignorance, wear it as a faux badge of independent critical thinking, and refuse to entertain the possibility of error.

Take, for example, climate-change deniers. Despite the overwhelming evidence that it is taking place, indeed, accelerating at unanticipated rates (see, as an illustration, Kev's graphic at Trapped in a Whirlpool) and has almost universal agreement amongst scientists that it is mainly human-caused, they blithely dismiss such data as mere 'opinion.'

I had reason to reflect upon this sad fact the other day when I ran into a neighbourhood woman walking her dog. As is the norm when talking to people we don't know well, we discussed the weather, specifically the incessant heat, humidity, and drought that has plagued my part of the country this summer.

While I realize that the volatility and harshness of any one season cannot be attributed to climate change, I opined that perhaps we are paying for our environmental 'sins.' Immediately she snorted and pointed out that there had been a dustbowl in the thirties. I responded by saying that the problem now, unlike the thirties, is that a pattern has clearly emerged in which the frequency and extent of meteorological volatility stands in marked contrast with previous periods.

She informed me that she doesn't 'believe' in climate change, and that the aberrations we are now experiencing are simply part of 'natural cycles.' Her logic eluded me, and I had to wonder when belief in scientific data became optional and simply a matter of opinion.

It does not bode well for our survival as a species, does it?

Well, time to go out for a bike ride. This morning is one of the few days this summer without a humidex.

UPDATE: The Guardian reports the following:

In a survey of more than 1,000 readers of websites related to climate change, people who agreed with free market economic principles and endorsed conspiracy theories were more likely to dispute that human-caused climate change was a reality.

As well, you might find this of interest: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic

The Guardian Writes About The Occupy Wall Street Movement

For those interested, there is a thoughtful article on the implications of the Occupy Wall Street Protest found, not in an American newspaper, but in The Guardian. Entitled Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination, it provides both the context of the movement and its implications for the future.

For anyone fed up with the status quo and the fact that nothing substantive changed after the 2008 meltdown, it is well-worth reading.