One of the tactics we see regularly in use by governments is “silencing by intimidation” – where opponents of an issue are labelled and dismissed as “extremists”, threatened by legal charges that can’t possibly be upheld and which are aimed purely at trying to silence critics. Now we have the latest “card” in this game, where charities are being threatened with removal of their charitable status if they don’t bow down to Conservative political ideology.
Here in Canada, the Harper government refuses point-blank to engage in any discussion with its critics or opponents. At the last election there were numerous cases where people were removed from Conservative “debates” and presentations for no other reason than the fact that they weren’t fully-paid-up members of the Conservative collective ass-kissing community. Harper and his party can’t tolerate dissent in any form it appears.
Now they’re extending this to threatening charities with the removal of their charitable status simply for supporting causes that go against Conservative policy. Tides Canada, for example, recently had its charitable status threatened for supporting ForestEthics - an organization that opposes the dubious Endbridge pipeline.
The Harper government has called people against the Endbridge pipeline “enemies of the government of Canada”. They’re wrong. I’m an enemy of bullies, of anyone who tries to browbeat, threaten and lie in order to achieve their own selfish goals. I believe in democracy, for everyone, not just the self-serving rich and powerful; if this makes me an “enemy” then we have lost democracy completely.
The pathological Conservative government lists the following as “adversaries”: the media, the biodiesel industry, environmental and Aboriginal groups. “Allies” listed are: Energy companies, the National Energy Board, Environment Canada, business and industry associations.
This isn’t a government representing people; these are the tactics of the bully pure and simple. Even if you agree with the development of the pipeline, this behavior is still wrong. Tell Harper you don’t want a country run by bullies.
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
- Thomas Jefferson
Recently published research shows that Americans are drinking more soft drinks than ever before, as much as 13 billion gallons each year, making them the “largest source of added sugar and excess calories in the American diet”.
The figures are staggering.
“According to the National Soft Drink Association (NSDA), consumption of soft
drinks is now over 600 12-ounce servings (12 oz.) per person per year. Since the
late 1970`s the soft drink consumption in the United States has doubled for
females and tripled for males. The highest consumption is in the males between
the ages of 12 – 29; they average 1/2 gallon a day or 160 gallons a year.”
Do the math on that.
A can of soft drink contains roughly 10-12 teaspoons of sugar - yep 10 or 12 per can!
Half a gallon represents around five cans per day, giving us around 50 or 60 teaspoons of sugar.
A teaspoon of sugar is around 50 calories. So we’re talking about an intake of around 2500 to 3000 calories per day, just from soft drinks.
That’s the equivalent of the total recommended daily intake for a male to maintain a healthy weight, and that’s without eating anything!
When you also take into account that people are also eating a lot of pre-packaged junk food, in extremely large servings and people are increasingly sedentary, it really is no surprise at all that we’re facing an obesity epidemic.
Of course there are always the rose-tinted spectacle wearers who will say, “It’s all good. No harm, no foul.” etc. The problem is that obesity comes with a very large cost that affects all of us regardless of whether we personally are obese or not.
Recent studies in both the Unites States and Canada reveal the staggeringly high costs of obesity: $140 billion in the U.S. and over $1.8 billion in Canada. Just imagine the benefit to everyone if the healthcare systems received this level of funding increase…
The Earth doesn’t follow a truly circular path around the Sun; the real orbit is slightly elongated in to an oval that is slightly off-center. This means that Earth has an aphelion (furthest point) and a perihelion (closest point).
We just passed the perihelion (January 2/3 for this year) so we’re pretty much about as close as we get.
So why is it so bloody cold!?!?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15677595
So Rick Perry, guardian of religious insanity and memory loss, would abolish the Depts. of Commerce, Energy and Education…
I suppose it makes sense really. The banks and financial services markets are
allowed to behave in any way they want and bailed out with public money when they screw up, so why do you need anyone to watch them?
The U.S. steals most of it’s energy reserves from other countries through unfair
trade agreements and allows its citizens to squander them at will, so no need for
any energy regulation either.
And as for education? Well, hell, we know for sure the U.S. doesn’t need any of
that high-falutin nonsense…
Today would have been Carl Sagan’s 77th birthday. My first introduction to him was, like so many people’s, through watching Cosmos in my teens. I was already completely obsessed with anything space, science, or science fiction related when the show aired, and its combination of stunning visuals, atmospheric music, and exploration not only of what makes us human, but also how we relate to the Universe around us, had me hooked immediately. Sagan’s passion and enthusiasm was truly infectious and couldn’t help but overflow the confines of the small screen. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, I have to highly recommend it.
Carl Sagan was a scientist, an explorer, skeptic, humanitarian, and visionary; he is sorely missed. One of the strongest memories I have is his “Pale Blue Dot” speech, which is as poetic as it is humbling. I present it here in tribute to this great man:
“”We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
R.I.P. Carl Sagan. 1934-1996
The Financial Stability Board, backed by the G20 members, was set up in 2009 after the financial meltdown to monitor and regulate international banking.
Last Friday they announced their list of banks “too big to fail”; this list includes twenty-nine banks. It probably comes as no surprise that many of those listed were also recipients of some of the largest bailouts from their respective governments. These include:
- Bank of America – $45 b
- Bank of New York Mellon – $3 b
- Citigroup – $45 b
- Commerzbank – $11 b
- Deutsche Bank – $12 b
- Goldman Sachs – $10 b
- JB Morgan Chase - $247 m
- LLoyds Banking Group – $60b
- Morgan Stanley – $10 b
- Royal Bank of Scotland - $70 b
- State Street – $2 b
- UBS AG – $65 b
- Wells Fargo $25 b
Add all of that up and you have over 350 Billion dollars of bailout; not including many other international banks I haven’t listed that were also recipients of bailout money or at least ‘protected’ in one way or another from the consequences of their selfish and stupid gambles.
These banks, their directors and staff continue to be the beneficiaries of huge profits and disgusting bonus rewards, while the rest of us work our collective asses off to pay for their mistakes. This is a level of payback that will see us through most of our lifetimes and more than likely into our children’s lifetimes.
The reason we are in such a mess is because when things started to go wrong in 2007/8, all of these banks were considered ‘too big to fail’ and were handed barrow loads of cash with no strings attached. Even while taking this money, the bankers continued to pay themselves huge salaries and ridiculous bonuses, rewarding themselves for their ‘success’ with amounts beyond avarice.
And now the FSB is making exactly the same mistake. Lessons from history are often difficult and painful – but now we don’t even learn them after the fact. Parasites like this should be left to fail; they need to learn the lessons and consequences of their own actions.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana 
An article published by the NPR reveals the astonishing detail that part of the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq includes $20 billion spent on air-conditioning. This figure was estimated by Brigadier General Steven Anderson, a now -retired chief logistician for the Pentagon.
So let’s see:
- NASA annual budget – $5 bn (2011)
- Estimated cost to finish and Launch James Webb – $3 bn
- Estimated cost to build a space elevator – $6-20 bn
Even this doesn’t scratch the surface of the sheer waste involved here. The article goes on to detail how the fuel to power all this air-conditioning is transported through extremely risky convoys, putting countless lives at on the line.
Of course, you could argue that the soldiers are putting their lives at risk to protect democracy and deserve to be comfortable, though that argument might not stand up to scrutiny. But there’s more to it even than that.
These soldier’s are living in temporary shelters – tents. Now everyone knows that tents aren’t great insulators – anyone who has spent a couple of cold days in one can tell you that. Well, all of these tents could be cheaply insulated using polyurethane foam spray, which cuts energy use by over 90%.
So the U.S. could save lives, cut energy costs, finance all of NASA, a space telescope and go a long way to building a space elevator – just by insulating tents.
Something I’ve seen a great deal of in previous jobs is a lot of bullying and attacks on people who spoke out about problems, or were critical of bad decisions or plans. Our corporate culture seems to be increasingly happy to employ a ‘shoot the messenger’ philosophy, in complete denial and disconnection with the reality of the situation they are in.
It’s not only me that seems to be affected by this. Several of my friends, and others I have worked with in the past, relate similar experiences. Increasingly the expectation is that we are all supposed to wander around like passive, silent sheep. If you are perceived to be ‘negative’ then you’re a bad employee: immediately suspicious, undoubtedly seditious and ultimately to be persuaded/manipulated/forced to move somewhere else.
A personal example of this which left me incredulous was during a meeting with senior representatives from a company. The project I was working on already had extremely tight deadlines and in the course of the meeting I was told that the system would now have to interface with two completely different hardware technologies.
My response was that this would have a very big impact on the delivery schedule. To my amazement the senior people started to laugh at this point! They also insisted that the project deadlines could not move because they had already promised the dates to clients.
I’m sure that the problem here is fairly self-evident. Double the scope of the project but keep the schedule the same? You would have to be a complete brain-dead moron person with limited experience to even think that THIS was vaguely possible.
I can understand that people don’t like bad news – who does? But to deny it and actively attack the people delivering it, that’s just dumb. We’re not the creators of these things, we’re just reporting reality. Guess what? That quart really doesn’t fit into the pint pot, no matter how hard you try.
On another occasion with the same company, we had a situation where a manager made a successful bid on a contract for a system that involved making significant changes to software components. The manager made up his own estimates for how long it would take to implement the changes without consulting anyone from the software team and without having any personal software development experience.
When the inevitable happened and everyone realised that the bid was completely undeliverable at the bid price and the schedule couldn’t be met due to the underestimates involved, it somehow became the software team’s fault. How does that work exactly? To get out of this the client was lied to, the software team was forced to do overtime for which they were never paid and were castigated routinely for being lazy and useless!
Maybe I’m weird or something. I prefer to know the real situation. Sure the truth can be hard to swallow, but at least if I know what it is, I have a fighting chance of being able to deal with it. If I just avoid or deny that then I’m screwed. Arse-kissing has always been a factor, but when all you have is that kind of person, don’t be surprised when the only thing you have left is a prune-like rear.
This seems to be an issue increasingly apparent in IT work, but recent news on NASA suggests that it is more wide spread.
Interestingly, the behaviours I am talking about are well known and documented organisational anti-patterns. In the same way that in Software Engineering there are documented good solutions for most basic situations, there are also documented bad solutions.
In the case in point we see clear evidence of ‘Management by perkele‘ – where subordinates are deliberately made to be fearful and uncertain in order to instill unquestioning obedience. There is also more than a hint of ‘moral hazard‘ too – where someone is insulated from the consequences of their behaviour and decisions. Finally, the ‘Groupthink‘ pattern is clearly evident too – where people stop promoting ideas that are outside the ‘comfort zone’ of the organisation.
It’s hard to see how any organisation can continue when it suffers from such well known flaws, but has we know bullies are always very inventive in justifying why they act the way they do. It’s also the sad fact that in our culture these types of actions and businesses get away with it because people are just too scared to speak out.
With regard to the ‘laughter’ experience I had. It was explained to me later that I hadn’t handled things correctly. What I should have done was to say nothing, gone away and considered things for a while, worked out the results of the changes and then come back to the senior people with these results.
At which point the answer would have been exactly the same. You see, I didn’t need to take time to consider things and work them out and mull them over. When you double the size of my project I know that the timetable has to shift – what do I need to think about? Not only that but, due to my wily, cunning, nasty, pessimist brain I can even take a pretty good guess as to the size of the timetable shift. Hmmmm hang on, off the top of my head here… ohhh double.
See, that was easy.
So heaven is a ‘fairy story’, declares Stephen Hawking in an interview with The Guardian newspaper. In the interview he relates how he regards the brain as merely a ‘computer’ that stops working when its parts break down, and that belief in heaven is a comfort for people afraid of the dark.
I can hardly wait for the mumblings, accusations and attacks to begin. Although this particular viewpoint has been stated many times in the past by many people (including myself), the fact that someone as high profile as Stephen Hawking IS saying it will no doubt have every religious extremist and nut-bag ’alternative living’ zealot in the world up in arms.
I remember discussing religion with a devout Muslim, during which I was asked what I believed in and answered simply “nothing”. My acquaintance indicated disbelief at this and suggested I must believe in Christianity or a number of other religious possibilities. I then explained that, as far as I was concerned, anyone who believed in such things was clearly both delusional and insane – “you’re all mad”.
I knew the person well enough to know that they were a gentle person and would not get upset by the expression of my opinion; though I would have said much the same even if I didn’t know that.
When I was younger I read a lot of books about myth and legend from multiple sources – Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, Indian, North American and more. They were always interesting and often had a lot in common with each other.
One of the things that struck me, even at such a young age, was that almost all of these tales were, at one time believed to be real; people actually worshipped, gave sacrifice, planned their lives on the basis of these screwy tales of god, giants, flying horses etc. and again which were clearly pure unadulterated rubbish.
So then when I looked at the ‘modern’ religions, it was clear that this was just more of the same. If these ancient legends were all wrong, how could the modern versions be any truer? Again it’s just nonsense of the highest order.
Apparently we are pre-disposed to believe in god and the afterlife, but I guess in my case the brain-washing didn’t take. Though, as the person leading that research describes himself as an ‘observant Christian’ and believes that God is ‘all-knowing, all powerful’, he can hardly be classed as an impartial observer. 
Let the mud-slinging commence!
Climate scientists need help
Climate scientists are under attack by unscrupulous pressure groups and various climate change denialists. These groups and individuals use court orders and “Freedom of Information” requests to effectively harass scientists. This witch hunt makes for a hostile environment for the scientists, while also creating doubt in the public perception of climate change, despite the fact that the victims have been cleared of all wrongdoing many times and climate change is accepted as fact by an overwhelming majority of scientists.
Is it any surprise that these denialist groups and individuals are funded heavily by the oil and coal industries and others who have a lot to lose if any real* emissions limits are ever enacted. This gives these groups a virtual bottomless pit of money to continue their actions against scientists and spread their FUD.
Now there’s something that you can do to help. The Climate Science Defense Fund has been set up to raise money for scientists under attack, the money raised goes towards legal fees to fight off these attacks.
* By real I mean not involving carbon ‘trading’ schemes that are nothing but ways to channel money towards fat banks and finance companies in the pretense of doing something about climate change.