“I felt like it is kind of an insult to be a denier for a long time,” said Sen. Bert Brown, last month at a parliamentary committee studying energy policies. “It feels pretty good this morning.”

What I find particularly disturbing about so many climate change deniers ending up being appointed to the highest levels of government, isn’t just that ignorant, anti-science, Harper cronies are running the country, but that they credit their embarrassing ignorance of science as one of the reasons they got the job! And they are proud of being stupid because stupidity brought them power! What an excellent message to send to children, eh?

You wonder why smart people get bullied for answering questions in class? Blame Conservative Senators, or the Culture of Dumb, that put them in charge of sober second thought. If Conservatives were actually concerned about coddling children, passing them along through school while being illiterate, and awarding them an E for effort (when they should actually get an F for failure), they wouldn’t appoint more than one illiterate jock to the Senate. Useful, illogical, dishonourable idiots should not be deciding our laws.

“I have to admit that what I read tells me that there is not a consensus among scientists,” Greene Raine, (former Olympic alpine skiing champion) another senator appointed by Harper, told the committee when it heard from Environment Minister Peter Kent, earlier last fall. “There are many different points of view and different kinds of research happening out there. One of the things that I am starting to see now is quite a few studies showing that we may be heading into a period of global cooling, which would maybe be a lot more problematic for Canada than global warming. Our country is on the cool side.”

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist at the University of Victoria who publishes research in peer-reviewed journals, noted that the skeptics who appeared at the committee in December were all over the map in terms of making arguments about warming, cooling, warming from the sun, or cosmic rays.

“It was like a shotgun of inconsistent arguments,” said Weaver, noting that evidence from research must be proven by science, without opinions involved.

There are many “different points of view” as Greene Raine says. If someone tells you that 2+2=5, that’s a point of view too. Is that point of view correct? Don’t expect an elected or appointed Conservative to give you the correct answer to that question if it suits their purposes to lie or promote a fiction. As Weaver states, these liars will try a shotgun method until one of their lies resonates or sticks for a while. Have you been caught in their blast of stupid?

==

Our ghoulish Globe and Mail thinks it’s a good thing that seniors will be without pensions, because they’ll have to work for their retirement instead. Kids looking for jobs must love this perspective too. Harper didn’t campaign on OAS cuts, but here they come anyway. Happy strong and stable majority, old dude Conservative voters. Not so smug now, are you?

==

Woman asks Obama to “dance a jig” after he offered to look at her husband’s resume! Truth is stranger than fiction. And I get the impression that CTV wants us to watch American football.

==

Canadian government website posts same press release for border Security and border Privacy, and few notice the DIFFERENCE. (Here’s the real “privacy” release, elsewhere.) For this huge oversight, a Flack Award was given to a Harper employee.

Here’s where I hypothesize why it’s more dangerous to be on a phone conversation, than chewing gum while driving (or walking). Gum chewing is a veritable automatic response to there being a food-like substance in your mouth — you chew. This is not the same as engaging in conversation, which requires the use of thinking and non-automated parts of your brain, the same parts that much be responsible for calculating trajectories of pending threats to your vehicle and others’ lives. Tying up your thought process with thinking of responses to the person you’re conversing with by phone is statistically proven to imperil your life. As if vehicles weren’t dangerous enough, we’ve started treating the blasted things like they’re working on Jestons’ autopilot, and are using them head-free, while on hands-free phones.

If smokers weren’t juggling a burning object at high speeds, I’d say it’s probably safer to be smoking and driving, cancer risk included, than to be involved in conversations on cell phones while driving through high incident areas like cities and intersections with regular traffic. The habit of putting burning tubes to ones mouth and breathing in and out are entirely automatic, hindering only the automatic processing that goes with driving once a driver is experienced. Talking intelligently, on the other hand, is hardly an automatic response for the human brain. Many people are not even able to hold intelligent conversation while not operating heavy machinery accelerated to dangerous speeds.

So, should the cell phone laws be amended to the unpopular position of banning in-motion/on-road phone conversations, leave the law half-hearted and half-headed by banning only one type of dangerous cell-phone activity, or be removed entirely for being half-wrong in recommending another unsafe activity to replace the very unsafe act of holding a cell phone conversation in your hand, and in your mind, while accelerated?

January 27, 2012

Governments of Canada and Saskatchewan Invest in Research on Oil
Production Technologies

Regina, Saskatchewan* A combined investment of over $800,000 by the
governments of Canada and Saskatchewan will help the Petroleum
Technology Research Centre (PTRC) and the University of Regina (U of R)
study innovative recovery methods for oil and gas production, as well as
reclamation of associated byproducts.

If there is any public funding of this magnitude announced for solar or wind, or other renewable energy research, I’ll be sure to let you know. Don’t hold your breath.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s important to know how to deal with toxic waste. I’d just prefer that the government legislate on scientifically recognized safe levels of waste to be in our air, soil, and water, and leave it to companies to not exceed them. If the government wants to help out energy industries, there are start-up green companies that could use the support a lot more than dirty energy coal and oil who can pay their own R&D bills with ease. I’m not anti-subsidy, I just would rather not subsidize industry that we ought to be winding down as much as possible, to survive.

Dear Prime Minister Harper,
Threatening charities as ‘adversaries’ of your government, is wrong.

The form response I got back started with:

Dear [Saskboy]:

Thank you for writing to the Prime Minister. In your e-mail, you raised an issue that falls within the portfolio of the Honourable Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources.

-Photo by Andrew Forget of QMI (http://www.torontosun.com/2012/01/17/singing-the-praises-of-joe-oliver)

Who knew that threatening charities was a responsibility of the Minister of Natural Resources? I would have guessed John Baird, or Peter McKay from a helicopter shouting obscenities at people on the ground.

Mm after I said the word vagina if for some reason inserted the word cock and balls as well.

So beware if you write your blog posts entirely through voice recognition you’re bound to end up with some interesting mistakes.

As most TED talks are, this is an amazing video on how to understand culture and arguments against copyright/SOPA. Youth consume and create content online, and childhood is now criminalized and forced underground, which radicalizes people both for and against the law. I’ll freely admit I take a radical view of copyright now to work around it when possible, and help balance the situation by leading others away from the boxes they are put into by companies like MPAA and Viacom. This doesn’t mean I take whole DVDs and make perfect copies to try and sell for a profit, it means I will use photos or video available online, put a funny caption inside it, and share that new article. And I download TV, and have for more than a decade before most people knew it was technically possible. Now most people take it for granted that they can PVRecord shows, or find them on The Pirate Bay.

Hey look, it’s a Creative Commons photo, coupled with a newsworthy image of Lt. Pike! With amusing caption and credit to those who provided the original works.

DFAIT hilariously has labeled First Nations as “adversaries” in their struggle to promote Tar Sand oil, and ship our brains out to the USA and China. The PMO calls environmentalists “enemies of the state”.

-A sample of Harper’s “enemies of the state”

Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has labelled aboriginal groups and environmentalists as “adversaries,” while describing the National Energy Board, an independent federal regulator of industry, as an “ally” in its public relations strategy to polish the image of Alberta’s oilsands, a newly released internal document has revealed.

The document outlines key goals for the government’s diplomats in promoting the industry, which is considered to be the fastest-growing source of global-warming-causing emissions in the country, and in lobbying against foreign climate change policies.

Rich U.S. groups that funded environmentalists also gave to Canadian government

Tax returns show the Canadian government has also been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in largesse from some of the wealthiest private organizations in the United States.

And some of that money came from the same U.S. groups that helped fund Canadian environmentalists.

The grants to the federal government come to light as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and the pro-oilsands website EthicalOil.org take Canadian environmental groups to task for accepting money from big American foundations to finance their campaigns against the oilsands.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver accused “environmental and other radical groups” of trying to use money from “foreign special-interest groups” to hijack hearings on a pipeline that would bring Alberta oilsands bitumen to a port on the British Columbia coast.

But the Canadian government seems to have no qualms accepting grant money from private U.S. foundations — including some of the same organizations that gave to Canadian environmental groups.

For example, U.S. tax records show the California-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave $750,000 to the David Suzuki Foundation and a whopping $40 million to the International Development Research Centre, a federal Crown corporation.

rwatson at ]saskpower.com[
Dear Mr. Watson,

I've found some troubling information on the SaskPower website. The first link is troubling because of what it leaves out. Solar energy, perhaps the best potential generation source of intermittent electricity, is not even considered? There's Photo Voltaic cells, solar power towers that operate with mirrors to generate heat, and net metered PV installations in operation today, and they aren't mentioned as a consideration for generation options? That's quite a gaping omission. I have a couple important requests listed at the bottom of this email, to address my concerns.

http://www.saskpower.com/future/?linkid=fridge_future_power_banner_april2011#/technology-options

This second link I found troubling because perhaps it explains why solar energy was omitted. The antiquated summary provided for PV (no mention of solar power towers), is from Y2K, a dozen years ago! Solar power technology has advanced since then, as I'm sure you must know.
http://www.saskpower.com/sustainable_growth/power_plan/generation_options/solar.shtml

"Solar converts the energy from the sun into electricity. At present, solar power is not suitable for large-scale generation in Saskatchewan because of its high cost and low capacity factors.
Solar research
In 2000, we installed a photovoltaic array at the Saskatchewan Science Centre for research purposes. Results showed that the cost savings realized from the solar energy system cannot effectively offset the capital costs for installation. As a result, this technology is better suited to niche applications where connection to the grid is uneconomical or when passive solar enhancement is desired. For the purposes of scientific demonstration, this project continues to be in operation."

A useful analogy of this summary is akin to saying in 2000 that full screen, smooth streaming video is not possible over the Internet. Now you can get that in your pocket on your smartphone, 12 years later. I request that you update your website with more recent facts regarding the two main forms of solar electricity (PV and heat-towers). If SaskPower does not have current research on these, I also request that you see that it happens soon, lest our province be left the laughing stock with our coal-fired electricity. And I'm interested to know if this gap in research and communication extends to the people in charge of moving SaskPower away from energy sources that are greatly harming our environment and survivability.

Sincerely,
[Saskboy]

cc. Honourable Rob Norris
Honourable Tim McMillian