Wikileaks’ founder is again being framed for a crime he didn’t commit in Sweden. You can read how I know he didn’t commit a crime there, here. The co-incidental timing of the charge with Wikileaks largest release of top secret American documents, is too great for people to brush off. The CIA or whoever orchestrated this is counting on the smear tactic sticking even after it’s formally discredited.
It comes as no surprise to most people, tar (oil) sand boosters or boo-ers alike, that tar sand strip mining increases water pollution in the mined region. The same is often said about the sites of uranium mines too, but this article focuses on tar sand pollution.
Governments in Canada are desperately trying to pull the wool over peoples’ eyes, and they might succeed. There are swarms of loyal monkeys pounding at a million keyboards in Canada, libeling the people responsible for the most believable research around tar sand mines and untapped bitumen deposits. I became curious why one of the monkeys commenting on the CBC.ca story mentioned David Schindler as a source of biased research.
Not being a servant monkey of the Conservative Party or Small Dead Animals crowd, I did a Google search to learn about this scientist who the right wing are vilifying. It turns out Schindler’s not famous for biased research (big surprise eh?), but he is famous for identifying well known water based pollutants as the cause of serious environmental degradation in other Canadian bodies of water. Do acid rain and phosphates sound familiar? They were among the last pollutants that Canadians gave enough of a damn about to actually make an effort to reduce through legislation.
No wonder the servant monkeys are working overtime to keep Schindler’s work out of the eyes of Canadians.
From NSERC page on Schindler:
Responsible for major advances in our understanding of the effects of phosphorous and acid rain on lake chemistry and organisms. This research was influential in leading to restrictions in phosphorous content in detergents and changes in air quality legislation in Canada, the United States and the European Economic Community. More recently, he has made important advances in our understanding of the effects of global warming and of increased ultraviolet radiation (from stratospheric ozone depletion) on boreal lakes.
There are ongoing efforts by people with more money than Bill Gates, to limit your freedom on the Internet. These people would provide you with inferior network services so you cannot compete in business, or entertainment, unless they say so. OK Go’s Damian Kulash explains in plain English how important it is that the people of the WWW win the fight against online segregation.
And here is is with his band, singing up a creative storm.
When I went to Vegas the other month, I lost $11US at the slots. I’ve put in about $80 lifetime at VLTs and casinos ($1 at VLTs, and I broke even). It appalls me that the AVERAGE Sask. household spends a month’s rent on gambling in a year. That it doesn’t bother Minister Cheveldayoff, says a lot about the priorities of the Sask Party government. It’s not there to protect people, it’s in the business of exploiting them, and is proud of it!
To Ken Cheveldayoff, the minister responsible for the Saskatchewan Gaming Corp. — which runs the casinos in Regina and Moose Jaw — the relatively high per-household expenditures are a good indicator that speaks to the quality of Saskatchewan’s casinos.
“I would credit SIGA and [SGC] gaming with marketing very well, with providing an attractive and a positive entertainment experience for people,” he said. “That’s why they keep coming back, that’s why they do well.”
Cheveldayoff said he’d rather govern a province that spends the most per capita on gambling than the least.
People with gambling problems are building our roads and hospitals according to Cheveldayoff. It’d be interesting to see how much money is spent on gambling addiction, and how many people have gambling problems in this province compared to other provinces.
It’s perhaps not a coincidence that in the same week that a Saskatoon bridge was shut down by inspections, that Highway 2′s important bridge between Saskatoon and Moose Jaw is ruined by a falling crane doing repairs. I recall a few years ago learning that Saskatchewan’s bridges do not get as many inspections as are required to keep all of them safe. Our politicians are spending our taxes on too many unimportant things, and are leaving our infrastructure to become substandard. My Dad could have been killed in the Highway 2 bridge collapse; he was on it less than 24 hours ago. Commenters on CBC.ca remarked having similar fears about their own families.
Today would be remarkably different had Sarah Palin and John McCain won the Presidency. There’d be thousands more US troops in Iraq and a role model in the White House that not even Dr. Laura S. could support. However, due to her racist tirade on the radio the other day, she couldn’t even support herself given what she wrote about Palin years ago.
Role models are very important. Children and young adults look to those who are visible and successful as a road map of what is acceptable behavior and emulate those actions over the morals and values their parents and churches have taught and tried to reinforce. It’s a tough go these days, when the “bad that men or women do” is used for entertainment purposes without judgment, or is excused because of political or financial considerations.
It’s good that there may be more role models returning from war overseas for American children.
If the spill was not “contained”: not toxic (as soon as it’s off the front page news)
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Scientists should examine the chemical and political properties of this “not toxic” oil, and determine if all oil can be converted to the not toxic variety. We owe it to our oil companies to ensure they can continue to fuel our economy and governments with the money needed to make oil not toxic.
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ADDED:
“Scientists are questioning the claim by the White House that most of the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has largely dispersed, Channel 4 News’s science correspondent Julian Rush learns.
[...]
“There clearly remain an awful lot of oil products that are unknown at the moment,” George Crozier, Director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, told Channel 4 News.
He worries that the low oxygen levels in the deep waters could mean toxic compounds in the oil will have time to accumulate in the gulf ecosystem – eventually working their way into the food chain.
But Crozier, like many Gulf coast scientists accepts that the Gulf is well suited to dealing with the oil: “This is not the end of the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf has the capacity to detox this exposure. But the question is, is it going to take days, weeks, months or years,” he says.”
It should go without saying that Americans are technically free to worship however they please, and someone doesn’t need special permission to allow people to pray on their private property. These morons who made and played this video on the radio have so tightly associated terrorism to Islam, that they think wherever Muslims are praying, it’s like a monument to the Sept. 11 attacks. It wouldn’t matter if this Mosque were on the other side of Manhattan, or in Afghanistan, the haters would hate it the same. There’s no peace in hatred, and hatred is the only reason Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of the racist-right in the US hate-media are fanning this flame.
If someone has a problem with the Mosque near the WTC site, they need to read the Constitution of the United States of America, and if they don’t agree with it, they are no better than people the American forefathers fought and killed off to gain freedom from tyranny. Unless the owner of the property that the Mosque will be on, says “This Mosque is a tribute to only the terrorists of the world,” then there is absolutely no reason to even bat an eye over this property development.
This is a temporary blog, as the main blog software is offline. You can access archives through archive.org in the meantime, with specific URLs. Contact saskboy at his hotmail.com address
