A Few Thousand Dead Indians

What makes me mad? People like Saskatchewan’s infamous shock-talk-jock John Gormley, who thinks the world needs fewer “activists”.

Here’s the resulting story from a recently released PLUSD cable from the Kissinger Files fit together with a Cablegate cable.

Then US Ambassador David Mulford urged the Indian government to “drop its claims against Dow” in a cable sent on September 18, 2007.

In reply, then Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia assured Mulford that the federal government does not hold Dow responsible for the cleanup but is unable to withdraw its claims against the company because of “active and vocal” NGOs.

Boston Marathon Attacked by Bombings

A typically joyful day in Boston was marred by a terrorist bombing where two explosions killed multiple people, and injured at least 50 with injuries as serious as amputations.

It’s a grim reminder that peaceful life in North America is very much taken for granted, and our innocence will again be exploited by those who’ll seek to use this bombing as a means to remove more freedoms from the American people.

Reddit has more links than you’ll care to view. Following the attack on 9/11, I read everything I could, watched every video angle, probably searching for answers; Dreaming of a way to turn back time to prevent it. There will never be a way to undo things like this. We need to make sure that our societies don’t create people willing to commit these crimes against humanity.

WikiLeaks: Special Project K is for Kissinger

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/321097232516542464

#WikiLeaks put an extraordinary amount of work into #PlusD. wikileaks.org/plusd/about/ Keep them strong! shop.wikileaks.org/donate—
M Cetera 「エム」 (@m_cetera) April 08, 2013

Soon, as media and bloggers sift through the new leaks, there will be revelations to help clarify history and better understand how the United States ended up where it is today.

Oil Spills Create Jobs

I’m severely disappointed in the lack of vision that conservatives have regarding our economy. Faced with information that burning a lot of fossil fuel is not able to be sustained without Catastrophic, Repulsive, Atmospheric Pollution (CRAP), their response tends toward ignoring evidence of damage to their environment in favour of delaying the predictable economic train wreck that would occur if fuel production were to halt in the span of months or a year.

Jobs are being created to create the doomsday device known as the KXL pipeline. Jobs will be required to [partially] clean up the many spills it will create. Doctors will be needed to treat the cancers created by the soil and water contamination, and the burning of the fuel.

@Rhino_Bob @votelau the long term goal *is* to wind down oil production as much as possible. Cleaner forms of energy are better for life.—
John Klein (@JohnKleinRegina) March 31, 2013

@JohnKleinRegina @Rhino_Bob @votelau
Sorry, NO viable solution to end use of fossil fuels (cars, plastics, power prod, etc) = pipe dream.—
Chad (@Chad4Mayor) March 31, 2013

Yet when asked if they’d like to wind down fossil fuel production in favour of renewable sources, they answer “No!” because they can’t envision it ever being an equivalent and essential source of power. When you ask them if they believe in higher education, most will say they do, choosing (at that time) to instead embrace the idea that short term expense and investment can lead to longer term gain through a change in skills and information. There are plenty of conservatives at schools of business.

So, why rush into upgrading ‘ethical’ oil infrastructure, instead of renewable energy manufacturing and design?

Group says latest oil spill is a preview of Keystone's "nightmare scenario" huff.to/10jaGJI—
HuffPost Canada (@HuffPostCanada) April 01, 2013

And seriously, if the tar sand oil companies can’t stave off repeated spills in the months leading up to an approval of KXL pipeline, how can anyone believe they’ll suddenly stop leaking oil all over the place once there is less pressure to behave because they’ll have the pipe built?

WikiLeaks: Major Revelations Is What Journalists Do – See @carwinb

There’s some crow to eat this morning, for anti-Assange, anti-Wikileaks people.

Last year we got confirmation in the form of a WikiLeaks-Strafor leak of all things, that Assange had been secretly indicted in the US, for his journalism.

On January 26, 2011, Fred Burton, the vice president of Stratfor, a leading private intelligence firm which bills itself as a kind of shadow CIA, sent an excited email to his colleagues. “Text Not for Pub,” he wrote. “We” – meaning the U.S. government – “have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect.”

The news, if true, was a bombshell.

Well, it’s true. It’s not unexpected if you follow people who actually care about journalism and the truth. And it’s led to Assange being trapped in various prisons in and near London, while the UK, Swedish, American, and Australian legal and political systems toy with his freedom.

The American admission that they are still seeking to charge Assange with crimes, despite his activity falling under First Amendment protection for journalists, demonstrates the reason he’s opted to stay out of a Swedish jail.

The Swedish prosecutor who refused to travel to London to interview Assange in order to proceed with the case they want to build against him, has LEFT the case.

AA’s lawyer has been fired, and a new one has been chosen and approved by the court. AA is one of Assange’s accusers in Sweden.

And more shocking, a Swedish judge is set to speak publicly about what he’d do if he was directly handling Assange’s case! Just this week, Toronto’s Mayor Ford ended up in hot water for making radio comments about an active case in the Canadian justice system.

Speaking to Fairfax Media, Mr Assange condemned Judge Lindskog’s planned discussion of his case.

“If an Australian High Court judge came out and spoke on a case the court expected or was likely to judge, it would be regarded as absolutely outrageous,” he said.

“This development is part of a pattern in which senior Swedish figures, including the Swedish Foreign Minister, the Prime Minister and Minister for Justice, have all publicly attacked me or WikiLeaks.”

Justice Lindskog is chairman of the Supreme Court of Sweden, the country’s highest court of appeal. In announcing his forthcoming lecture, Adelaide University observed that “as one of Sweden’s most eminent jurists, he is uniquely able to provide an authoritative view of the Assange affair”.

… which is precisely why it’s not supposed to happen in public, until at least the accused has been acquitted if charged. Assange has still not even been charged with a crime in Sweden, so he can’t even formally defend his innocence in the matter. If he submits to the politically motivated extradition to Sweden, he’s justified in knowing that Sweden will eventually send him on to face political charges in the United States.

Nixon Was Scum

Win at any cost. That seems to have been Nixon’s election campaign strategy, and it worked. Had LBJ notified the public of information the FBI illegally gathered from an ambassador using a phone tap, then the future may have been very different.

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations – he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks… but said nothing.

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This tree was at Rideau Hall last time I checked in 2002:

WikiLeaks: Hollywood Hatchet, Swedish Swindle

The problem with how Sweden, the UK, and the United States have been treating Julian Assange of Wikileaks, has dragged on for years. It’s left the foremost journalist in the world stuck in a London apartment building that houses the Ecuadorian Embassy where Assange is trapped as a political prisoner. He sought asylum from the Swedish extradition order, and Ecuador granted him that request. Assange’s home country of Australia has sided with the United States in wanting him imprisoned and taken offline, because they’ve failed to negotiate his safe return to Australia or Ecuador where he could be free.

In February there was a great response to a New Statesman article by a former Assange supporter who has now betrayed him by working for Hollywood/CIA who is set to smear him in a widely distributed film.

Khan complains that Assange refused to appear in the film about WikiLeaks by the American director Alex Gibney, which she “executive produced”. Assange knew the film would be neither “nuanced” nor “fair” and “represent the truth”, as Khan wrote, and that its very title, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, was a gift to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that could doom him to one of America’s hellholes. Having interviewed axe-grinders and turncoats, Gibney abuses Assange as paranoid. DreamWorks is also making a film about the “paranoid” Assange. Oscars all round.

It’s also worth reading this summary by WikiLea’s J. Farrell, of Assange’s present legal and political problems:

Over a lunch you [, Khan,] questioned this fear of extradition to the US, and when I asked you what you would do in his position you refused to answer the question. I asked you more than six times what you would do in his shoes. Having offered to cooperate with the Swedish investigation non-stop for the past two years and been refused with no proper explanation, and believing that you would end up in an American prison for decades, in solitary confinement and under SAMs, what would you do? You never gave me a concrete answer. Instead, you skirted the question with another question and discounted the numerous legal opinions out there, favouring instead an article by David Allen Green. I reiterated that Julian had never said that it would be likely in practice that he would face the death penalty, although the Espionage Act permits this. But more to the point, and one that everyone always ignores, there was (and still is) the fear of being extradited to face life imprisonment and almost certainly torture or other inhumane and degrading treatment for his publishing activities.

I told you that the Swedish authorities could, if they wanted to, charge Julian in absentia. Even if they were to do that, they should, according to their own procedures, conduct an interview with him before requesting his extradition. I repeated that he remains available even in the embassy for questioning by the Swedish authorities should they wish to employ the standard procedures they use regularly in other cases.

I think it was David Allen Green who I was arguing with once on Twitter about WikiLeaks. He’s clearly not very objective, and is out to present the situation in a way that will result in Assange ending up imprisoned.

In response to the sexual assault allegations, here are people who recognize what is going on:

Khan is rightly concerned about a “resolution” of the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of falsehoods demonstrated in the evidence in this case, both women had consensual sex with Assange and neither claimed otherwise; and the Stockholm prosecutor Eva Finne all but dismissed the case.

As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote in the Guardian in August 2012, “. . . the allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction . . .

“The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will . . . [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step to their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

They are afraid of Skype, or a plane flight to London. Here’s a fricken map for them to find Julian Assange for that interview they claim to want on behalf of Assanges’ accusers.

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Wall’s Leaky Logic

Brad Wall went to Washington in order to pitch the Keystone XL pipeline project. In doing so, he made some really absurd claims, that CTV failed to juxtapose against the scientifically accurate situation that Wall mischaracterized. Joe Oliver of the Conservatives has also been making totally absurd claims about Canada’s environmental track record under his government’s [lack of] leadership.

“Saskatchewan’s environmental record is not good.” – Global TV news clip from 2009.

It’s totally irresponsible journalism by the Canadian Press to allow the Premier to make the opposite claim without also clarifying his remarks, or offering the comments from someone with a factual response to his fiction.

Here’s the economic case, here’s the energy security and oh, by the way, we care about the environment and here’s what we’re doing with respect to the environmental piece of this.”
“We need to indicate that we’re serious about the environment, because we are,”{… delusional or two faced, I must add.}

This was a horrendously unbalanced CP article. Experts can refute the “Conservative” premier’s claims that Sask. can care about climate change while pushing the carbon-budget-obliterating KXL pipeline project.

Wall’s claim is analogous to a captain saying that he’s serious about keeping a ship afloat by plugging a hole in starboard side, while boring a bigger hole in the port side. It doesn’t matter if water intake is reduced in one side, if the ship’s still getting flooded.

The premier added he’s confident Keystone will soon be approved, particularly following the U.S. State Department’s draft environmental assessment of the pipeline that was dismissive of many of the environmental movement’s concerns about it.

That State Dept. report was actually written by a KXL friendly contractor, we soon later learned. Hard to believe Wall didn’t know the integrity of the report is in doubt. What is not in doubt among scientists is the potential carbon from the tar sands, when burned, will far surpass the carbon budget our climate could possibly withstand for a less than 2 degree change in our climate’s temperature.

Thinking Is Not Hard

Thinking is not hard to do, but some people treat it like others should do it for them. Clicking that link may be painful, as it has details of a state representative saying cyclists pollute worse than car drivers because they are exercising and breathing out more CO(2) in doing so. I guess the worst thing you could do is get in a car, go to the gym, and get on a stationary bike, eh?

Idiots are all around us, and sometimes they are elected as government representatives. Because this story casts cyclists in a negative light, I suppose you’ll be hearing about it on Gormley’s radio show later on. You can then expect the usual cast of zombie callers recounting the last time they were irritated by a cyclist on a street they owned.

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There’s nothing more polluting, in every sense of the word, than a Republican on a high horse.

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Yesterday I noted on Twitter that there are many easy changes someone can make in their weekly routine, to make a dent in how much climate change (air pollution) they directly and indirectly create. For instance, someone can cut meat out of one of their days in the week, to have at least a 1/7th impact immediately on their demand for meat. If the demand falls enough, fewer animals will need to be raised to make farmers the same amount of money. More importantly, meat requires much more water and energy input for the same amount of food energy plants can directly provide to humans.

Some (intentionally) hard of understanding trolls came by to mock the information. It’s hard not to laugh at someone who thinks its hard to point out a time when Saskatchewan has faced a water crisis. Although the title is worded in a clumsy way, Forbes helps explain why basing so much of the world’s food supply on meat, is a folly.

This information didn’t slow down the trolls though, who went on to suggest that I’m a damned dirty easterner, never grew up on a farm, and couldn’t have the faintest idea of what it takes to understand the food system. Besides all that, I apparently want all people to stop eating all meat, and starve. It’s hard to argue with iron-clad logic like that, eh?

Some of these comments come from people who earlier chided me for thinking of solutions to our oil dependence. When did conservatives start subscribing to pre-Copernicus thinking? There are centuries of tradition after that sort of anti-science, anti-discovery thinking to “conserve” with their defence of the status quo. There’s no need to be so anti-intellectual and anti-solution.

#ForwardOnClimate Support in Regina: Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline

Stephen McDavid interviewed by CBC/SRC about climate change action:

Stephen explains that the pipeline is a line in the sand. Using it, is crossing that line. I’ll explain why there is a line, further on in this post.

I was also interviewed. The CBC reporter was pleased to learn from me (off camera) that there is a car share co-op in Regina.

I know some people don’t see the big deal with the Keystone XL pipeline, thinking it’s just another way that people can make money. It’s more like a doomsday device, than economic stimulus. Taking into account the truth that burning all of the bitumen in the Alberta tar sands will create enough carbon dioxide to push climate change past +2 degrees Celsius, a pipe intended to be used for that purpose will be seen as a crime against humanity by most people within a few short generations of now. Already, some people understand it to be that.

To meet a halfway reasonable carbon budget in our atmosphere, there’s no good use for the Keystone XL pipeline. To have to shut it down, and clean it up later in order to correct the error today in building it, is a huge folly that Obama can stop.

It’s widely accepted by people that our daily lives cause pollution, and it’s a sort of price we pay for progress. More people need to question what sort of progress we’re striving for as a species. It’s not like we’re trying to stop 7-Eleven from selling drinks that cause diabetes and obesity and kills a few thousand humans indirectly; we’re trying to stop investment in a technology whose use is known to cause so much pollution as to create catastrophic changes to our atmosphere, and will hasten the extinction of countless species and displacement of countless people. It’s a very, very big deal, and that the Harper government in Ottawa sees fit to label peaceful protesters as “adversaries”, “enemies of the state”, and “terrorists”, is in itself terrifying.

Here are the numbers behind why we must not burn all of the fossil fuel we are technologically capable of extracting with today’s technology.