I am sure that some politicos would prefer certain things remain buried in what seems to be a collective public amnesia. Thankfully, the Internet is the gift that just keeps on giving, as this piece from Press Progress reminds us:
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Thursday, July 17, 2014
A Darwin Award Contender?
Given that we are in the midst of summer, a little change of pace seems in order. Read this story and watch the accompanying video to see if the developer of a rather unusual homemade pesticide solution merits consideration for a Darwin Award nomination.
UPDATE: Things Should Really Start To Get Interesting Now
As just reported by the CBC, the RCMP has decided to lay charges against disgraced Senator Mike Duffy. Let's hope the 'fat lady' sings loudly:
UPDATE: The Puffster is facing 31 charges.
UPDATE: The Puffster is facing 31 charges.
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
From The Climate-Change File: The Signs Are Getting Increasingly Ominous
A note from The Mound of Sound with the header, The Tundra's a poppin' alerted me to this strange tale from the far north in Siberia, where a giant crater has appeared.
Says the Mound:
Russian helicopter crews stumbled across what appears to be an 80-metre wide crater in Siberia. They thought it might have been a meteor. Wrong. Russian scientists believe it was gas, probably methane, from melting permafrost that formed a bubble and finally blew up. The helo crew posted a great video of it on YouTube. No one has any idea how deep the hole is but it’s obviously very, very deep.
Makes you wonder if this is a fluke or if we’ll be seeing these in our high north before long. It also begs the question of how much highly pressurized methane must have been released into the atmosphere.
Maybe this dramatic event will... nah, this ominous sign of climatic disaster won't make any difference in the policies of our overlords.
Says the Mound:
Russian helicopter crews stumbled across what appears to be an 80-metre wide crater in Siberia. They thought it might have been a meteor. Wrong. Russian scientists believe it was gas, probably methane, from melting permafrost that formed a bubble and finally blew up. The helo crew posted a great video of it on YouTube. No one has any idea how deep the hole is but it’s obviously very, very deep.
Makes you wonder if this is a fluke or if we’ll be seeing these in our high north before long. It also begs the question of how much highly pressurized methane must have been released into the atmosphere.
Maybe this dramatic event will... nah, this ominous sign of climatic disaster won't make any difference in the policies of our overlords.
Did She Really Say That?
I have a measure of sympathy for Irene Hubar, who reportedly spent over $1 million to refurbish a building in Hamilton's downtown core, only to encounter difficulty in leasing it out to commercial interests. In her view, the problem is with the 'street people' who loiter outside, scaring away potential tenants that she is trying to attract.
However, her outrageous assertion to a city hall task force, which you will hear at the beginning of the following clip, goes far beyond anything a democratic and free society could ever countenance, but it is one, I suspect, that the corporate agenda would wholeheartedly embrace:
However, her outrageous assertion to a city hall task force, which you will hear at the beginning of the following clip, goes far beyond anything a democratic and free society could ever countenance, but it is one, I suspect, that the corporate agenda would wholeheartedly embrace:
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Updated:Do They Not Get Any Canadian News In Peru?
I had to wonder after reading this story and watching the video below. After all, asserting to be Mike Duffy's daughter is not something that most people would claim, given the porcine senator's domestic notoriety:
UPDATE: Macleans seems to have removed the embed code for the video, but you can still see it by clicking on the story link above.
UPDATE: Macleans seems to have removed the embed code for the video, but you can still see it by clicking on the story link above.
A Mound Of Sound Guest Post: Climate Change By The Numbers
One of the great malignancies of the 20th century was the spread of neo-classical economics. the macro- and micro-stuff that you probably had to learn in university.
I did a good bit of fraud work in my legal career. One of the key ways to unravel a well-crafted fraud was to ferret out the inconsistencies, the gaps, the irreconcilable contradictions. Neo-classical economics, being a work of fraud, also is replete with inconsistencies, illogic and irreconcilable contradictions, but it bundles them all up and jettisons them under the category of “externalities.” It’s sort of like your teenager shoving all the dirt and debris under the bed before proclaiming his room ‘clean’ before demanding the keys to the family car.
The use of externality is a dandy way of keeping incidental costs off the balance sheet. Carbon emissions? An externality. Impacts on climate change, ditto. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands? That too.
In yesterday’s Guardian there’s an item that reveals the face of climate change since the 1970s in 8 charts. It’s taken from a UN study.
What is most telling are two bar graphs toward the end of the article. One of these is titled, “Disasters ranked by reported deaths (1970-2012)”. The countries that dominate that list are Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Mozambique – essentially the Third World. The other is entitled, “Disasters ranked by economic losses (1970-2012)”. Here the top players are Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Andrew and Ike along with flooding in China and Thailand.
What this reveals is that for the Third World, climate change is a matter of life and death. For the developed and developing countries, it’s an economic problem. Economic challenges are approached from a “cost/benefit” basis. That’s where externalities, such as all those Third World deaths and suffering, come into play. Even though the industrialized world is responsible for almost all of the greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution that are wreaking death and suffering in the Third World, we externalize that. We keep it off our books. It’s not relevant.
What have we become?
I did a good bit of fraud work in my legal career. One of the key ways to unravel a well-crafted fraud was to ferret out the inconsistencies, the gaps, the irreconcilable contradictions. Neo-classical economics, being a work of fraud, also is replete with inconsistencies, illogic and irreconcilable contradictions, but it bundles them all up and jettisons them under the category of “externalities.” It’s sort of like your teenager shoving all the dirt and debris under the bed before proclaiming his room ‘clean’ before demanding the keys to the family car.
The use of externality is a dandy way of keeping incidental costs off the balance sheet. Carbon emissions? An externality. Impacts on climate change, ditto. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands? That too.
In yesterday’s Guardian there’s an item that reveals the face of climate change since the 1970s in 8 charts. It’s taken from a UN study.
What is most telling are two bar graphs toward the end of the article. One of these is titled, “Disasters ranked by reported deaths (1970-2012)”. The countries that dominate that list are Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Mozambique – essentially the Third World. The other is entitled, “Disasters ranked by economic losses (1970-2012)”. Here the top players are Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Andrew and Ike along with flooding in China and Thailand.
What this reveals is that for the Third World, climate change is a matter of life and death. For the developed and developing countries, it’s an economic problem. Economic challenges are approached from a “cost/benefit” basis. That’s where externalities, such as all those Third World deaths and suffering, come into play. Even though the industrialized world is responsible for almost all of the greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution that are wreaking death and suffering in the Third World, we externalize that. We keep it off our books. It’s not relevant.
What have we become?
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