Peter Kent Didn’t Age Well

Kent looks the same… but his mind has left him.

Amazing CBC coverage of climate change from the early 1980s. Bob McDonald, Peter Kent, and others make appearances:
Attention Washington: Peter Kent explains Climate Change (the briefing you won’t see).

“The natural preoccupation with the weather tomorrow, the next day, or even Thursday, has distracted public attention from the longer term implications of the Greenhouse Effect.” – Peter Kent, 1984 on CBC

“The Greenhouse Effect must be considered as the world’s most serious environmental concern.” Now he’s the nation’s Environment Minister, and he acts like a POS. What he says does not match his, or his government’s actions. “December 2011 [Kent] announced Canada will withdraw from the Kyoto accord. Canada is committed to getting a new agreement, he says, but it won’t be easy.”

Some of the best/worst parts of the video included “adaptationalists” thinking increased temperatures and acidified oceans can just be adapted to (as mass plant and animal extinctions go on around us while we supposedly soldier on). Mass delusion allows humanity to carry on as it does to its certain demise. I think I know how things will go if an asteroid is observed & predicted to hit Earth within a decade… nothing, until the crash. Humans are pathetically bad at taking immediate action to prevent long term ‘fuzzy’ catastrophes.

This video shows how the Canadian Environment Minister has known for THREE DECADES of a coming calamity to his country (and the world), and now he’s in a position of power to act, and does nothing. Worse than nothing, since pollution is still increasing. His duplicitous actions (or incompetence) make me sick, and they are sealing humanity’s fate.

A News Hope

I missed this Rap News from last May. You won’t want to miss it. If it’s confusing though, you’ve got fifty minutes of documentary catch-up, plus some news footnotes to follow up on. Plus, it helps if you’ve seen Star Wars. If this is all greek/geek to you, it’s a good thing you’re reading my blog, you’ll be up to speed in ‘know time’.

I love that Hrafnsson’s daughter commented on the video. [Strange she missed an 's' in the name though ;-)]

Wikileaks: “A little group of activists…” – Julian Assange

On a Trek for Stars

I can’t simply make a fun Star Trek related blog post, I have to tie it into the Canadian political discourse also. So, here we go.

Ottawa Citizen reporter, Glen McGregor came up with a manifesto to guide modern journalism. He’s seen journalism fall prey to some ridiculous habits, like commenting on the tweets of celebrities as if they are newsworthy. It’s hard to deny that celebrity tweets are amusing, but they are rarely “newsworthy”. Journalists, in newspapers, should stick to roughly the guidelines in Glen’s #cdnpoli Dogme95.

A few days ago I posted a video of the International Space Station zooming over Regina. More recently, William Shatner who played James Tiberius Kirk on the sci-fi TV show Star Trek, tweeted to Commander Hadfield who is a Canadian working aboard ISS. Although it’s not really news, it does help promote the news that the Canadian commander is tweeting from aboard the space station, so it’s not so bad that CBC is using time to write about it, especially since it’s their entertainment/community team focused on it. It’s when they automatically make it a “Top Story” that I worry for the state of our country’s journalistic defenders.

@WilliamShatner Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we're detecting signs of life on the surface.—
Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) January 03, 2013

.@TrekMovie @Cmdr_Hadfield @WilliamShatner "I just love scanning for lifeforms" youtube.com/watch?v=dWBmaK… Tiny little life-forms. Where are you?—
Saskboy K. (@saskboy) January 03, 2013

@Cmdr_Hadfield So long as you're fixing the ISS warp drive, alien threats will consider you to be Scotty, not the token Red Shirt.—
Saskboy K. (@saskboy) January 04, 2013

Get ISS fly-over times at Heavens Above.

#IdleNoMore Prayer Rally in Regina

A bitterly cold -16 Celsius temperature didn’t deter over 100 people from turning out to voice their concerns about the Conservatives’ omnibus bill C-45 passed in haste last week. The people also were there to support the First Nations leaders who attempted to confront the MPs in the House, and now must be consulted by the Senate and the Governor General. C-45 removed long-standing federal environmental protection from most of Canada’s lakes and rivers, and the threat to water is not taken lightly by First Nations, organizers of the event explained.

- The crowd was in support of protected fresh water.

Victor Lau, Leader of the Green Party of Saskatchewan

ConCalls: Rex and Terry and CBC

My guess is that Rex Murphy and Terry Milewski don’t agree very often, but they were both right about the [il]legitimacy of the Conservative Harper Government, nine months ago.

Rex only slips in thinking Elections Canada had a “steely gaze”. Oops. Lots of oopses.

Can we now see why Stephen Harper and Dean Del Mastro were so eager to direct the opposition parties to send evidence to Elections Canada to conduct a 585+ day investigation? In the next video, RMG is brought up, specifically their Thunder Bay call centre. While Harper claimed only Conservative voters were contacted, CBC clearly presents non-Conservatives were contacted with misleading poll locations.

Early on in the media’s investigation, we learned that there was “hard evidence” “linking the Conservatives to bogus robocalls”. Also, there were calls from Conservative HQ to Racknine Inc. at the end of the election campaign.

And it’s very interesting to hear Matt Meier say a “party” abused his service, when he knew the Conservatives were the only political party to be exclusively using his robodialer. Perhaps he meant “party” in the more general sense of the word? The anonymous Conservatives who early on admitted off the record that it was an “independent contractor with ties to the Conservative Party” behind the Guelph con calls, were they trying to finger Sona, Prescott, or another?

–
Hat tip to James

Democracy Reruns

When you’ve blogged for as long as I have, I have the luxury of being able to reference my own writing for most subjects I’m interested in. So right now you get what on TV would be described as a “clip show”. It’ll be good, and some of it is old enough, you may not even remember seeing it before. Think of it as the greatest hits of 2011/12ish.

What was some news I predicted on March 16, 2012? That Elections Canada was aware of complaints implicating Conservatives across the country in an election fraud scheme, but EC pretended that the only significant place to investigate was Guelph.

So if it was the Conservatives, why didn’t they spoof their CID to minimize risk of detection? They were simply not concerned about the level of prosecution if they were even investigated by EC. However, Pierre Poutine may have had more to lose (or just different IT skills), so made an effort to conceal their identity if an investigation started. To me, that suggests there was a national coordination strategy from higher up the food chain than Poutine (Head Cheese maybe?), and we’re seeing different implementations of one objective: suppress non-CPC voters, by any non-violent IT means available.

Liar, Liar, Head’s On Fire

There’s an excellent animation of this sad situation regarding toxic fire retardants, in the video called “Story of Stuff”, which also explores the messed-up nature of our whole global economic system. It’s one of the decade’s must-watch videos.

We don’t want our heads to catch fire while we are sleeping, so our pillows have toxic flame retardants in them? What are we, fire-retarded? Turns out, yes, some of us are:

“A recent U.S. study found that children with higher levels of an older class of flame retardant chemicals called PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, showed lower IQs, shorter attention spans and weaker motor skills than those with lower levels.

Studies have found young children tend to harbour the highest levels of such chemicals since they tend to play on carpets and furniture, increasing their exposure. Some classes of toxic flame retardants, like many other chemicals, are also transferable through breast milk.

PBDEs and similar retardants are also linked to altered thyroid functions in pregnant women, as well as increased difficulty in conception.

The Canadian government has already banned two classes of PBDEs, but critics say that more action is needed. Environment Canada has announced it plans to ban a third class of PBDE by 2012, but legislation hasn’t been introduced.” – I added some emphasis in that quote from Marketplace. The chemical industry literally makes some of its customers less intelligent. Our children are forced to consume fire-retardant laced breastmilk, because of ineffective legislation, and greedy, manipulative corporations. I’d tell them to burn in Hell, but if they use enough of their product…

Justin Bieber and Chris Brown

Justin Bieber at the Grey Cup wasn’t the only ‘interesting’ pop music story of yesterday.

I’m not a Bieber expert (Belieber), but I did watch his biopic a few months ago, and he’s certainly got some real musical talent. How he is as a human being will probably degrade with his over-worldly fame, but he has a long way to drop before he reaches the level of Chris Brown. Brown got into an argument on Twitter yesterday with wise-cracking Jenny Johnson. Jenny was calling the woman-beating Brown names, and he called her names back (spelled badly) and told her to do graphic things with his male body parts before saying he was going to defecate on her “retina” (the part inside her eyes, so one must think he meant cornea unless he was trying to be impossibly ridiculous).

He then seemed to have quit Twitter (or his agent quit it for him, like Senator Brazeau), because last night during the game while I was trying to click his username, Twitter said the user didn’t exist. If only Rhianna could be so lucky (it was Brown who beat her face to a pulp the other year).

Of course Brown’s rabid fans are no model of civility either, with several of them sending death threats to Johnson. Here’s a sampling of some of the boors that are less violent, but still have questionable idols:

@JennyJohnsonHi5 now u victim huh?! U ain't worth of God's gift called LIFE!!!! It makes me sick to my stomach on thought of waking up as u!—
Filip (@filipdakic) November 26, 2012

But God says we are all prone to making mistakes!!! We should forgive the ones who r trully sorry for making em! U forgot that shit obv..—
Filip (@filipdakic) November 26, 2012

https://twitter.com/Cree_316/status/273055344878567424

https://twitter.com/ImariGabrielle/status/273055297587777536

I’ll take these ignorant kids over those “adults” listed above, any day:

https://twitter.com/kianadelury/status/272871730052210688

ConCalls: Sun TV – No Credibility #RoboCon

I’d say that Sun TV lost credibility in this video clip from March ’12, but they’d have to have credibility to begin with, in order to lose it.

The Sault Star (obviously a Sun affiliate) handily provides one bit of evidence to show the reporter/pundit in the video clip as incorrect about Elections Canada being unaware of illegal robocalls during the May ’11 election. The Star’s usefulness ends there though.

Check out CBC’s report instead.
“The emails show Elections Canada officials discussed putting out a news release to warn voters about the calls.”

Contrary to Sun’s claim that no reporters were aware of illegal robocalls, CBC was among the media to help warn Canadians there were fake Elections Canada phone calls being sent out in parts of the country.

Also, check out the Star’s ridiculously biased poll options:

CBC Porn? #CBCporn

Sun News has a reputation for not being very accurate, in an attempt to excite their right wing base. They also employ professional liars. One story told by SUN involves CBC broadcasting porn, which isn’t what they do, obviously. This exaggeration was repeated by a CPC candidate in #YYCcentre on Saturday night, and prompted her mockery on Twitter, nation wide. It remains a Top Trend on Twitter, hours later as I write this.
(www.torontosun.com/2012/02/01/is-the-cbc-paying-for-porn) No, they are not. Anyone taking Sun News at face value deserves the figurative egg that ends up on their face.

Reacharound For The Top #CBCporn—
Sol Chrom (@sol_chrom) November 18, 2012

Danger Babe #CBCporn—
Saskboy K. (@saskboy) November 18, 2012

The Tits Estate #CBCporn—
Christopher Bird (@mightygodking) November 18, 2012