Fair Use Note

WARNING for European visitors: European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent. As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies. You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities.

Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Monday, September 20, 2010

20 September - Articles & Opinions


Northern lights go online, live

 

Free website to include image gallery with still photos and movies from previous nights 



Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Northern+lights+online+live/3550408/story.html#ixzz106kCRw6f

Also Vancouver Sun


Toronto Sun

Stormy weather for IPCC

Disgraced’ boss of climate change panel faces heat over ‘shoddy’ work
Britain’s foremost magazine of weekly political and social commentary, The Spectator, wonders editorially how Rajendra Pachauri keeps his job.
Who, you might ask, is Rajendra Pachauri?
Well, he’s chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports on global warming influence governments (and journalists) around the world — and whose science in recent months has “been exposed as shoddy pieces of work which would have disgraced an undergraduate thesis.”
In any other business, The Speccy says, Pachauri would have long ago been bounced. Yet he remains on the job, secure until his term expires in 2014, while calling his critics “arrogant” and viewing dissident opinions as “voodoo science.”
( You'd think the pundits could call such an easy misrepresentation to identify  correctly : "Deniers" )




Alberta’s water watchdog under tighter scrutiny over oil sands

Minister Jim Prentice said Friday he was “disgusted” by images released this week showing deformities of fish pulled from the Athabasca. He made the comments two days after travelling to Edmonton to meet with David Schindler, a University of Alberta researcher who authored a report last month revealing levels of harmful elements, such as mercury, found in the Athabasca.


( I remember Apocryphical tales of Ralph Klein, Environment Minister, being shut down by Peter Lougheed when he tried to push environmental responsibility for the Oldman River. We shall see how much has changed...or not. )


Lawmakers want power to shut down 'pirate sites'

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20016995-261.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20#ixzz106ch5Pe9

The legislation comes after years of failed attempts by the United States to battle alleged pirate sites based overseas. None of those sites are more well known than The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent search engine whose three founders are from Scandinavia.

(
This immediately reminds me of unilateral U.S. 'sanctions.' This from the proponents of 'Free Trade.' And it remains a domestic mystery in the U.S.A. why the rest of the world would think they talk out of both sides of their face at the same time. )




Montreal Gazette

U.S. can't kick the protectionist habit



Economists keep on showing that "protectionism" does the opposite of protecting a whole economy, but powerful interests in the United States keep turning to protective measures of narrow benefit every time they think they can get away with it.
Campaigns to "Make it in America" and "Buy America" cropped up swiftly after the economic meltdown of 2008. Exporters to the U.S. -including Canada, the U.S.'s main trading partner -protested furiously, pointing out that for the economy overall, proliferating protective barriers only exacerbate a downturn, and could even push the world into a full-blown and protracted recession. Cooler heads finally prevailed and a government procurement agreement went a long way to resolving the Buy American problem.
But the U.S. economy is still struggling, especially in the Rust Belt of the Midwest and northeast. And Americans have not given up on protectionism. The latest scheme is the Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act. It comes as no surprise that the bill is sponsored by a Democrat from Ohio who's fearful about November's congressional elections.



Don't count on Ottawa to fund your retirement

 

Pay down debt and sell off possessions: Freedom, not stuff



Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/count+Ottawa+fund+your+retirement/3534750/story.html#ixzz106l5yd49



Las Vegas Review-Journal
Nevada unemployment rises to all-time high 14.4 percent 

The construction sector, restaurants and professional firms all added jobs in the month, but declines in Census jobs and other public-sector cuts offset that hiring to push statewide unemployment to an all-time high of 14.4 percent, the state Department of Employment, Training & Rehabilitation said this morning. That's up from 14.3 percent in July and 12.5 percent in August 2009.



The economic case for universal pharmacare ( Canada )

Click here to read the full report.


techdirt

MPAA Wants To Know If ACTA Can Be Used To Block Wikileaks?

The folks over at Open Acta Mexico sent over their report on an open information meeting at the Ministry of the Economy in Mexico about ACTA last week. There were two oddities that they called attention to. The first is that there was an MPAA representative at the meeting, who apparently asked whether or not ACTA could be used to block access to "damaging" sites like Wikileaks.  The ACTA negotiator who was there leading the meeting, Gilda Gonzalez Camarena, claimed that the negotiators met every day with the relevant Senate commission to keep them updated on ACTA negotiations. Yet, Open Acta Mexico notes that the Senate recently requested a full debrief on ACTA negotiators later this month. 

Blowing Whistles On War Crimes Is Not A Crime

Rallies organized by several groups are being held this week for Bradley Manning, charged with leaking the Wikileaks video of the U.S. Apache attack in Baghdad. Exposing war crimes, his supporters reasonably argue, is not a crime. Rally at the Marine Corps Quantico, where he is being held, here. Facebook page here.

We Have Gone Astray

It is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Writing in Ha'aretz, Bradley Burston prays for help to "turn this life around" and find justice for all. Until then, injustice prevails. From Mondoweiss, a tale of the Freedom Theater, the Palestinian rap group DAM's first open-air concert in Jenin, and the victims of the mundane cruelty of the occupation.

UK troops in Sangin did not die in vain, says Cameron

( Lots of Talk about 'success'....in the undefined mission "They made Afghanistan a safer place and they have made Britain a safer place and they will never be forgotten" and zero explanation how this is so. As far as 'not being forgotten' goes How an 1845 British Cavalry memo explains Afghanistan )

John le Carré: "The United States of America Has Gone Mad"

2003 Essay  
    America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. 
    The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press. 
    The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.
    But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet.
    Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: "Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.

Legendary British Author John le Carré on Why He Won’t Be Reading Tony Blair’s Iraq War-Defending Memoir

Are you prepared to kneel beside a dying soldier and tell him why he went to Iraq, or why he went to any war? I think that if anything has happened to Europe since 1945 that defines it, it is collectively Europeans do not believe in war anymore, until it comes as an absolute last resort, and then they’re going to do it rather badly. The United States, I think, still sees war as a necessary part of its existence. It’s impossible to maintain the military on that scale, a Pentagon on that scale, without turning it over. You’ve got to have officers who are experienced in command and control. You’ve got to have troops who have been bloodied. So, we were, in that sense, at odds. I was, as a European. I was at odds with the whole notion of a preemptive strike. And I think many Europeans have that in common, of course with very many Americans, too, feel the same. 


Food: The Ultimate Secret Exposed

The grocery store, along with your kitchen sink, are two of the most dangerous places in the world.
In a special video, Alex Jones addresses one of the darkest modes of power the globalists have used to control the population– food. The adulteration of the planet’s staple crops, genetically-altered species and intentionally-altered water, food and air all amount to a Eugenics operation to weaken the masses and achieve full spectrum domination.

Earth's Highest Coastal Mountain on the Move

The rocks of Colombia's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta -- the highest coastal mountain on Earth -- tell a fascinating tale: The mountain collides and then separates from former super-continents. Volcanoes are born and die. The mountain travels from Peru to northern Colombia and finally rotates in a clockwise direction to open up an entirely new geological basin.
Smithsonian scientists were part of a four-year project to study Santa Marta's geological evolution. Their findings are published in the October 2010 special issue of the Journal of South American Earth Sciences.Using the ancient magnetic field recorded in these rocks, the Smithsonian research group revealed Santa Marta's 2,200-kilometer journey from northern Peru to its modern position on the Caribbean coast of Colombia during the past 170 million years.

Geophysicists Show That Crust Temperature Variation Explains Half Of Elevation Differences In North America

No comments:

Post a Comment