Sunday 29 August 2010

let it go

Bam be lam!
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
   Whoa Black Betty
Bam be lam



let it go ‐ the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise - let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go ‐ the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers ‐ you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go ‐ the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things ‐ let all go
dear

so comes love


   The cat’s in the well
The wolf is looking down
The cat’s in the well
The wolf is looking down
He got a big bushy tail
Dragging all over the ground

The cat’s in the well
The gentle lady is asleep
The cat’s in the well
The gentle lady is asleep
She ain’t hearing a thing
The silence is stickin’ her deep

The cat’s in the well
And grief is showing its face
The world’s being slaughtered
It’s such a bloody disgrace

The cat’s in the well
The horse is going bumpety bump
The cat’s in the well
And the horse is going bumpety bump
Back Alley Sally
Is doing the American jump

The cat’s in the well
And Papa is reading the news
His hair’s falling out
And all of his daughters need shoes

The cat’s in the well
And the barn is full of the bull
The cat’s in the well
And the barn is full of the bull
The night is so long
And the table is oh so full

The cat’s in the well
And the servant is at the door
The drinks are ready
And the dogs are going to war

The cat’s in the well
The leaves are starting to fall
The cat’s in the well
Leaves are starting to fall
Goodnight my love
May the Lord have mercy on us all

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple
      pin—
[They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!']
   Black Betty had a baby
Bam be lam
Damn thing gone blind

Adoration of the Magi, Balthazar detail, Hieronymus BoschAll this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.



[
I do not like this cummings' poem, it is lame, unpoetic, stupid even (I mean, 'so comes love' ? give me a break, puh-leeze), and I considered leaving off the last two lines which would about half fix it, but I didn't, respect for the dead I suppose,

and you know, they make Eliot out to be such an intellectual (and he was certainly) but there are touches ... the pause you see here before 'pin' and twice before 'This' are in the typography of the 1940/1968 Faber & Faber edition I hold in my hands tonight though they are not always shown on Internet versions, so, not 'entirely' intellectual then ...
]

dawn is coming, the racoons are hissing and scrapping in the parking lot, rabid I wonder? the first gull sits on his lamp-post shouting out so shrilly, "It's all about ME!"

ok, just for the Halibut, here's another bit of bum-boy comic relief from Paul Krugman ... and Johnny Cash with the Orange Blossom Special to take us right on outta here.

And I ain't comin' back 'till I don't have to. I don't care if I do die do die do die do die do. :-)how long can I do without this Internet shit I wonder? probably not long ... have to find out the hard way I guess ... be well gentle reader.


The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

   The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Lord, it's a bourgeois town
Uh, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
  Oh the baby had blue eyes
Well it must have been the captain's
Whoa Black Betty
Bam be lam
 





Postscript:

[
nothing I have seen on the Internet, however, not the porn certainly, is as daemonic as HTML, a syntax so arbitrary & arcane has to be the work of the Devil doesn't it? and can anyone who knows it really think properly about anything else? the revenge of the know-nothing self-serving nerds, and just when you have learned enough to survive comes another wrinkle, another layer, CSS? one has to laugh]

SockeyeSpencer Tunick, Big ChillMyfi BaronMyfi Baron
Spencer Tunick's latest at the Big Chill festival in England is apparently on a global warming theme, and the first image I saw of it was the one above, black two shades of blue & white, and I thought, "oh, colour! he's branching out," and then when it seemed the black arms & hands were somehow beseeching, "ahh that's it, he's getting at the racial aspect," (which is central to me f'rinstance), but if you Google for more images you will see pink & yellow as well ... so, I have no idea what he's on about, (and neither, I think, does he) ...
Tuira Kayapo 2009Get Out of Belo Monte - Altamira 2010The last rays of sunset shining on my tree.Sockeye

Theo Colborn's admin flunky, Chris Ribbens, don't take no shit from the hoi polloi, Nosiree Bob! ... maybe they are just getting old and cranky, I can't say ... ask a simple question and get stonewall incomprehension & bafflegab, whatever ... fuck 'em then!

so tonight I am thankful for the press, a 2007 Guardian article eventually led me to an international organization, AMAP - Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, and to a US government one, NIEHS - National Institute of Environmental Health Science, and their journal, EHP - Environmental Health Perspectives, and a substantive update on the subject since Theo Colborn's Our Stolen Future in 1995/6:

Declines in Sex Ratio at Birth and Fetal Deaths in Japan, and in U.S. Whites but Not African Americans, EHP, July 2006.

and some direct downloads from AMAP (you have to download 'em to read 'em): 2009 Human Health Report & Arctic Pollution 2009, and there are others of interest on the Assessment Results sidebar at their site.

this looked interesting too - especially since it is so recent, the abstract says that the excess of girls in the North, or Greenland at least, has now swung to an excess of boys - but this Arctic Institute of North America is a k-k-Canadian outfit and they keep their articles well locked up ... at least they are more-or-less apologetic about it.

and last thing of all, and the best thing of all, here's a bright ray of hope coming from Christine, a 15 minute video, Coalition of the Willing from a group of UK filmmakers that sums things up very well indeed.

(they have hosted it on Vimeo which is not the best, pause it while it loads, or, if that doesn't work - use KeepVid under IE, right-click and 'Save Target As' for a local copy you can view on whatever you use)





Appendices:
1. Man-made chemicals blamed as many more girls than boys are born in Arctic, Paul Brown, September 12 2007.
2. Population, Sex Ratios and Development in Greenland, Hamilton & Rasmussen, March 2010.
3. This Is Not a Recovery, Paul Krugman, August 26 2010.



Man-made chemicals blamed as many more girls than boys are born in Arctic, Paul Brown, September 12 2007.

· High levels can change sex of child during pregnancy
· Survey of Greenland and east Russia puts ratio at 2:1

Twice as many girls as boys are being born in some Arctic villages because of high levels of man-made chemicals in the blood of pregnant women, according to scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap).

The scientists, who say the findings could explain the recent excess of girl babies across much of the northern hemisphere, are widening their investigation across the most acutely affected communities in Russia, Greenland and Canada to try to discover the size of the imbalance in Inuit communities of the far north.

In the communities of Greenland and eastern Russia monitored so far, the ratio was found to be two girls to one boy. In one village in Greenland only girls have been born.

The scientists measured the man-made chemicals in women's blood that mimic human hormones and concluded that they were capable of triggering changes in the sex of unborn children in the first three weeks of gestation. The chemicals are carried in the mother's bloodstream through the placenta to the foetus, switching hormones to create girl children.

Lars-Otto Reierson, executive secretary for Amap, said: "We knew that the levels of man-made chemicals were accumulating in the food chain, and that seals, whales and particularly polar bears were getting a dose a million times higher than that existing in plankton, and that this could be toxic to humans who ate these higher animals. What was shocking was that they were also able to change the sex of children before birth."

The sex balance of the human race - historically a slight excess of boys over girls - has recently begun to change. A paper published in the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences earlier this year said that in Japan and the US there were 250,000 boys fewer than would have been expected had the sex ratio existing in 1970 remained unchanged. The paper was unable to pin down a cause for the new excess of girls over boys.

The Arctic scientists have discovered that many of the babies born in Russia are premature and the boys are far smaller than girls. Possible links between the pollutants and high infant mortality in the first year of life is also being investigated.

Scientists believe a number of man-made chemicals used in electrical equipment from generators, televisions and computers that mimic human hormones are implicated. They are carried by winds and rivers to the Arctic where they accumulate in the food chain and in the bloodstreams of the largely meat- and fish-eating Inuit communities.

The first results of the survey were disclosed at a symposium of religious, scientific and environmental leaders in Greenland's capital, Nuuk, yesterday, organised by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Bartholomew I, which is looking at the effects of environmental pollution on the Arctic.

Dr Reierson said the accumulation of DDT, PCBs, flame-retardants and other endocrine disrupters has been known for some time and young women had been advised to avoid eating some Arctic animals to avoid excess contamination and possible damage to their unborn children.

Dr Reierson, said blood samples from pregnant women were subsequently matched with the sex of their baby. Women with elevated levels of PCBs in their blood above two to four micrograms per litre and upwards were checked in three northern peninsula's in Russia's far east - the Kola, Taimyr and Chukotka - plus the Pechora River Basin.

To check the results the survey was widened and further communities, including those on Commodore Island, were investigated. The results were now in for 480 families and the ratio remained the same.

He said full results for the widening of the survey would not be published until next year but preliminary results for Greenland showed the same 2:1 ratio in the north.

Aqqaluk Lynge, the former chairman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference who hails from Greenland, said: "This is a disaster, especially for some 1,500 people who make up the Inuit nations in the far north east of Russia.

"Here in the north of Greenland, in the villages near the Thule American base, only girl babies are being born to Inuit families.

"The problem is acute in the north and east of Greenland where people still have the traditional diet.

"This has become a critical question of people's survival but few governments want to talk about the problem of hormone mimickers because it means thinking about the chemicals you use.

"I think they need to be tested much more stringently before they are allowed on the market."

Backstory

The Inuit are nomadic in nature, having survived for thousands of years using formidable hunting skills to seek out the bowhead whale, seal, caribou and walrus. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), an international body, was founded in 1977 to represent the rights of the approximately 150,000 Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Chukotka (Russia). With relatively low levels of educational attainment and few opportunities, violence, alcohol and drug dependency are a growing problem as the Inuit try to safeguard its traditions.




Population, Sex Ratios and Development in Greenland, Hamilton & Rasmussen, March 2010.

Abstract

During the 20th century, Greenland society experienced a dramatic transformation from scattered settlements based on hunting, with mostly turf dwellings, to an urbanizing post-industrial economy. This transformation compressed socioeconomic development that took centuries to millennia elsewhere into a few generations. The incomplete demographic transition that accompanied this development broadly followed the classical pattern, but with distinctive variations relating to Greenland’s Arctic environment, sparse population, and historical interactions between two cultures: an indigenous Inuit majority and an influential Danish minority. One heritage from Danish colonial administration, and continued more recently under Greenland Home Rule, has been the maintenance of population statistics. Time series of demographic indicators, some going back into the 18th century, provide a uniquely detailed view of the rapid hunting-to-post-industrial transition. Changing sex ratios—an early excess of females, shifting more recently to an excess of males—reflect differential impacts of social, economic, and technological developments.




This Is Not a Recovery, Paul Krugman, August 26 2010.

What will Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, say in his big speech Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyo.? Will he hint at new steps to boost the economy? Stay tuned.

But we can safely predict what he and other officials will say about where we are right now: that the economy is continuing to recover, albeit more slowly than they would like. Unfortunately, that’s not true: this isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policy makers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.

The small sliver of truth in claims of continuing recovery is the fact that G.D.P. is still rising: we’re not in a classic recession, in which everything goes down. But so what?

The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment. We need about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising, and much faster growth to bring it significantly down. Yet growth is currently running somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, with a good chance that it will slow even further in the months ahead. Will the economy actually enter a double dip, with G.D.P. shrinking? Who cares? If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.

All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial.

After its last monetary policy meeting, the Fed released a statement declaring that it “anticipates a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization” — Fedspeak for falling unemployment. Nothing in the data supports that kind of optimism. Meanwhile, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, says that “we’re on the road to recovery.” No, we aren’t.

Why are people who know better sugar-coating economic reality? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that it’s all about evading responsibility.

In the case of the Fed, admitting that the economy isn’t recovering would put the institution under pressure to do more. And so far, at least, the Fed seems more afraid of the possible loss of face if it tries to help the economy and fails than it is of the costs to the American people if it does nothing, and settles for a recovery that isn’t.

In the case of the Obama administration, officials seem loath to admit that the original stimulus was too small. True, it was enough to limit the depth of the slump — a recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office says unemployment would probably be well into double digits now without the stimulus — but it wasn’t big enough to bring unemployment down significantly.

Now, it’s arguable that even in early 2009, when President Obama was at the peak of his popularity, he couldn’t have gotten a bigger plan through the Senate. And he certainly couldn’t pass a supplemental stimulus now. So officials could, with considerable justification, place the onus for the non-recovery on Republican obstructionism. But they’ve chosen, instead, to draw smiley faces on a grim picture, convincing nobody. And the likely result in November — big gains for the obstructionists — will paralyze policy for years to come.

So what should officials be doing, aside from telling the truth about the economy?

The Fed has a number of options. It can buy more long-term and private debt; it can push down long-term interest rates by announcing its intention to keep short-term rates low; it can raise its medium-term target for inflation, making it less attractive for businesses to simply sit on their cash. Nobody can be sure how well these measures would work, but it’s better to try something that might not work than to make excuses while workers suffer.

The administration has less freedom of action, since it can’t get legislation past the Republican blockade. But it still has options. It can revamp its deeply unsuccessful attempt to aid troubled homeowners. It can use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lenders, to engineer mortgage refinancing that puts money in the hands of American families — yes, Republicans will howl, but they’re doing that anyway. It can finally get serious about confronting China over its currency manipulation: how many times do the Chinese have to promise to change their policies, then renege, before the administration decides that it’s time to act?

Which of these options should policy makers pursue? If I had my way, all of them.

I know what some players both at the Fed and in the administration will say: they’ll warn about the risks of doing anything unconventional. But we’ve already seen the consequences of playing it safe, and waiting for recovery to happen all by itself: it’s landed us in what looks increasingly like a permanent state of stagnation and high unemployment. It’s time to admit that what we have now isn’t a recovery, and do whatever we can to change that situation.


Sunday 22 August 2010

southern sudroun Southron.

Kepand na sudroun bot our awin langage, and speikis as I lernit quhen I was page. (a Scottish bishop in 1515 or so)
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers' cat.yes, there were Southrons in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings too - but that's not it, and the OED is just talking about distinguishing Englishmen from Scots (and Geordies) demonstrating that petty parochialism is everywhere alive and active and has been, but I am thinking of the southern United States tonight, the word I learned as a boy for them was Southron,

my grandfather came from Maryland (which my aunt understood as the source of our generosity & graciousness), not quite deep south maybe but beyond the Mason-Dixon line at least, Pennsylvania to the north but with Virginia on the warm southern side,

so, though I was strongly attracted to Pynchon's Mason & Dixon - I imagined that it might have to do with Slothrop's reintegration (it at least several senses), I was not able to read it, the capitalized proper nouns did me in, I tried several times but it stopped me cold, still, there is an echo of the infamous subject/object split that lingers around the phrase Mason-Dixon, before Charles Taylor turned 'authenticity' on its head I used to take some comfort in imagining Southrons as less infected by distances in their internal landscape (yes, plural 'distances' and singular 'landscape' - collective maybe - objective correlative and alla' that) ... gone forever, oh well.

Aida Muluneh went to high school in Calgary she says - you can tell by the way she talks, and as with Fiona Lowry last week, the ideology puts me off, still, there is some quality ... "A kernel of truth in a bushel of vicious nonsense," as Northrop Frye put it in The Double Vision ... much more than a kernel here certainly, and there is even a Cuba connection (yep! gotta learn Spanish!), I had to laugh at 'Flamingo' dancers, and she has some uncertainty about the 'i' before 'e' rule - good to see the Calgary standard is no higher than in the ROC (these snippets of images expand if you click on them):
Aida MulunehAida MulunehAida Muluneh, Woman in doorway.Aida Muluneh, Spirit of sisterhood.Aida Muluneh, untitled.Aida Muluneh, Meeting at the window.Aida Muluneh, Priest standing in the door way of his church.Aida Muluneh, Woman sitting in a room.Aida Muluneh, Praying by the church gate.Aida Muluneh, Guy walking near old Havana.Aida Muluneh, A couple going for a ride after their wedding ceremony.Aida Muluneh, Flamingo dancers at a local bar.
more at Tadias & her film The Unhealing Wound (nowhere available for viewing that I could find, on-line or otherwise) & her collection at Photo Shelter (which site seems now to be defunct?).

it all reminds me of Jesse Winchester singin' Nothing But A Breeze one night in Peterborough long ago but there is nothing to play for you at YouTube, oh well.

Theo ColbornTheo ColbornTheo ColbornTheo Colbornhere's Theo Colborn, some links that I posted a few weeks ago: herself at Wikipedia, & her book Our Stolen Future (which I have now read most of), her project, TEDX - The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, and a video The Male Predicament (35 min.),

it turns out that the generic human is female and that males are custom jobs, imagine!

the book (there are some cheap copies at Abe Books) is properly compared with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and if it doesn't scare the shit right out of you then I don't know what would ... luckily she has a sense of humour, a lot of the discussion is about penises and vaginas and such and in an effort (I think) not to repeat herself she uses all sorts of entertaining euphemistic synonyms, "plumbing" & "machinery" and so forth,

what I have not found yet is demographic statistics indicating male/female birth ratios which would seem to me to be the bottom line & conclusive argument, you can follow the 'Aamjiwnaang' keyword in the index (in the sidebar to the left of the screen) for the story of what is going on there, a place where the statistics are a macabre reiteration of a line from the Beach Boys' hit Surf City ... "Two Girls For Every Boy!"
DIG IT!
in one of Theo's stories she is looking out the window of some hotel or apartment condo in Washington DC, I imagined that she was looking south, hence the Mason-Dixon connection.

Brian McMullanBrian McMullanBrian McMullanthe St. Catharines City Council eventually passed a resolution to support the coal phase-out in Ontario as reported in The Star, they didn't quite go willingly, luckily Angela Bischoff from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance - OCAA, and who also runs Greenspiration, got wind of their recalcitrance and organized an email campaign which seems to have been effective, municipal politics is murky ... in a nutshell - page 38 of the Agenda indicated a cop out: "That the report from Transportation and Environmental Services Department dated June 23, 2010, regarding The Ontario Clean Air Alliance' s Resolution Regarding Coal Phase Out, be received for information purposes. FORTHWITH." but page 40 of the Minutes shows a significantly strengthened resolve: "That the report from Transportation and Environmental Services Department dated June 23, 2010, regarding The Ontario Clean Air Alliance's Resolution Regarding Coal Phase Out, be received for information purposes; AND that the City of St. Catharines request the Government of Ontario to direct Ontario Power Generation to put its coal plants on standby reserve and only operate them if they are absolutely needed to meet our Province's electricity needs. FORTHWITH."

when the smoke cleared (so to speak) I began to see this Mayor and his Councillors (Mayor Brian McMullan, Councillors Jeff Burch, Dawn Dodge, Mark Elliott, Heather Foss, Bill Phillips, Peter Secord, Len Stack, Jennifer Stevens, Greg Washuta, Bruce Williamson; Absent: Councillors Andrew Gill, Joseph Kushner) as adults, did they just read the writing on the wall and knuckle under? or did they really change their minds? that I can't say, but they did stand up and be counted, this is good, we need fewer politicians and more adults.

Comics From The 10s:
MalvadosMalvados
Come here Frederick.
You are old enough now to know the joys of adult life.
What's in the box Dad?
Nothing.

In the &^%$# Globe?! No telling where they'll turn up I guess :-)speaking of adults, here's one standing up and showing his face in Friday's Globe (of all places),

the hoi polloi are not particularly mindful, easily swayed, and it would be also be easy to infer a small-minded Canadian mentality from a few reports I have seen of western radio talk-shows calling for these Tamils to be expelled, what on earth do these people think is going to happen when there are not 500 refugees but millions?! if we had leaders with heart it could just as easily go the other way and probably will even without the leaders, and in fact seems to be.

Larga de ser um algoz Stephen Harper!

but ok, what about the Canadian Senate? any adults in there do you think?

their priority is obvious - they delayed their vacations marginally to pass a money bill and then went gaily off without passing C-311, in a choice between The Economy and The Future of the Planet We Live On they picked The Economy, "Can't stand in the way of progress eh?" and then this week their committee endorsed offshore drilling, and this with the connivance of Grant Mitchell the Liberal 'champion' of C-311 in the Senate ... doh?! so I sent him an email calling his vacation undeserved and his organization ridiculous, he didn't like that and we exchanged views, but what else can you call it?

a close look at the Globe article shows you how far out of the loop they are, the picture shows jack-up rigs, which are not used in deep water, and the Beaufort Sea and Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait are deep as deep can be as I understand it, even Lancaster Sound is 500-800 metres, and they placed Mr. Mitchell in Newfoundland instead of Alberta where he comes from ... making it very clear just exactly how important this all is to Gloria Galloway & to the Globe and Mail (k-k-Canada's National Newspaper), that's to say 'not at all.'

I grew up believing the guff I was given, the members of the Senate hold their seats for life, and this is good because it provides for a sober second look at things before they become law ... and so forth, and I still believed it when I was banging in lawn signs for Preston Manning's Reform Party (even though he didn't), but the House of Commons passed C-311 and now it looks as if the Senate's selfish stalling will scuttle it (okokok - C-311 doesn't go far enough anyway, ok? I know that, but it was at least something! ok?) and it is clear they just don't get it on offshore drilling either ... these things are IMPORTANT, so what else can you do? they're not elected, the only suasion you can apply is that you will support the ending of their institution, it would be a fine joke if the one thing that Stephen Harper did with his (ridiculous) ideology that corresponded even vaguely with reality was to chip away at the Senate,

here, you can watch Grant Mitchell for yourself talking about Bill C-311, I have to wonder why he uses the word perhaps? make up your own mind,

he tells me that I have been brainwashed into being overly critical of the government and that this plays into Harper's hand, I don't know ... we have until 2015 to turn around CO2 & equivalent emissions and I just don't see our government (or any government) doing what it takes to accomplish that turn around in time ...

Argyle SweaterI wish I did but I don't. I wish someone would convince me otherwise but they haven't, and I don't really want to think about it anymore - it is just too fucking depressing ...

The last (and possibly only) defence of an idiot is a grin. :-)but then, I just so happen to have a sort-of a built-in defence against depression, OEM equipment so to speak,

my father took from those Maryland ancestors I was talking about before a deep & wide sense of humour, (he also took their racism but that's another story and he did so get over it in the end), he had a great big laugh and he could make my mother laugh too when he let it out, he said my grandfather was the same - first page he looked at in the paper was the comics, and by luck or by genetics or by training & example & imitation or by the hormonal influences of the hottest horseradish I have ever tasted, I got some of it too God bless 'im.

And the IQ is long-gone anyway. :-)have to check it out with Theo Colborn and see if that endocrine disruption thing works on your sense of humour as well as your IQ?

as for the Southrons ... well, they lost the war, didn't they?

Be well.

Frisbee the Cat.Frisbee the Cat.Frisbee the Cat.




Postscript:

My garden.My garden.oops, almost forgot the garden,

the yam is still going ape-shit Jack In The Beanstalk, even the puniest of the original sprouts is climbing and climbing, and here's something - there must be some kinn'a endocrine disruption goin' on in here because one of the leading yam tips has split in two, probably that damned Lake Ontario water (see Waterlife)

the ginger grows like a swan, or like someone doing the breast-stroke, or two tandem side-strokes ... in that aerial internal camera ... and indeed, another ginger sprout has poked up striving, makes me think of Wyatt's sonnet ... "With naked foot, stalking in my chamber," (also here)

and ahh, the aloevera/babosa always reminds me of sweet Brasil,

in the south-facing window (which was too hot for the aloevera in the winter direct sun last year) are desert herbs, sage & rosemary so far, thyme to come, trite as trite can be eh?

FRADES have re-established the orphanage in a new location, there are numerous photographs here (if you can survive the diabolical Kodak software), there is a story, and then there are layers upon layers of understory in these photographs, you could pull a Chomsky and test for 'It's all about ME!' by counting the protagonists, you could study hand gestures & facial expression & body language carefully, there is even an architectural understory (how close is the well to the outhouse?)

Gerald BattiyeGerald BattiyePatricia BackPatricia BackRachelle ElienRachelle Elien
(but I only saw a few real laughs)

Christ! I can't believe it! I went down to the Green Party's national convention on Friday, bad enough they brought in a foul-mouthed and stupid (either quality by itself would be ok y'unnerstan') and approximately female comic from The Royal Canadian Air Farce to entertain after dinner, Jessica Holmes, she was followed by Don Drummond, ex economic mucky-muck & Pooh Bah of the TD bank, to tell the assembled multitudes about the inevitability of growth (!) ... I just left ... for good I think, more next week.




Appendices:
1. King coal’s Ontario decline, Peter Gorrie, August 13 2010.
2. Rob Ford and the ding of truth, Rick Salutin, August 20 2010.
3. Senate gives thumbs up to offshore drilling, Gloria Galloway, August 18 2010.



King coal’s Ontario decline, Peter Gorrie, August 13 2010.

St. Catharines’ city council recently voted in favour of shutting Ontario’s remaining coal-fired generating stations earlier than the promised Dec. 31, 2014.

Hamilton, Guelph, Kitchener and Toronto’s Board of Health have also called on the province to advance coal-freedom day by at least a couple of years.

Two advocacy groups — the Ontario Clean Air Alliance and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment — encouraged the votes as part of their campaign to reduce the health impacts of the four power plants.

The common impression is that the coal-fuelled stations, which a few years ago produced one-quarter of Ontario’s electricity, will continue at that rate until, all of a sudden four years from now, they’re mothballed.

In fact, the plants — the two small northern stations near Thunder Bay and Atikokan, the larger Lambton facility at Sarnia and North America’s biggest, Nanticoke, on Lake Erie’s north shore — already account for less than 10 per cent of Ontario’s electricity generation. Last year’s figure was 7 per cent. It will likely higher this summer, since temperatures and demand are up, and low water levels have cut the output from hydroelectric stations by about 20 per cent.

At their current production, based on a 2005 study, the coal plants are responsible for 123,000 cases per year of asthma and minor lung ailments, as well as 246 deaths across Ontario, says the clean air alliance’s Jack Gibbons.

An apparently simple change could cut the death toll by more than 200, the groups say.

Today hydropower and nuclear are called on first to meet electricity demands, usually followed by coal, then natural gas. Coal is favoured over gas for cost reasons. If the order were reversed, the coal plants would generate, on average over a year, less than 1 per cent of the province’s power — a virtual shutdown.

Compared with coal, gas plants spew 98 per cent less of the chemicals that cause lung ailments and 60 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The change could save 1,000 lives over the next four years, says Gideon Forman, who heads the doctors’ association.

Our air would still be polluted, especially on hot, muggy days when we’re sweltering in air that has passed over the American Midwest and its dozens of coal-burning power plants. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced plans to clean up those plants, but lawsuits and political backlash are bound to delay that effort, probably by years.

But it is significant that despite this summer’s heat, we’ve had fewer smog alerts. The gradual reduction of coal generation, particularly from Nanticoke, is clearly making a difference.

Those in charge insist they’re weaning us off coal as quickly as possible. There are barriers:

* The gas plants can’t yet ramp up into full production as quickly as coal to meet peaks in demand. Improvements are a year away, says Terry Young of the Independent Electricity System Operation, which manages the system.


* There are no alternatives to the two northern plants.


* Nanticoke will still be needed occasionally when construction of new transmission lines reduces the flow of power from the nuclear plants and wind farms near Lake Huron.


* Coal plants must keep burning a bit of fuel when they’re on standby; otherwise, they can’t power up quickly.


Forman has been rebuffed by Conservative Leader Tim Hudak, greeted cautiously by the NDP’s Andrea Horvath and is to meet next month with Energy and Infrastructure Minister Brad Duguid.

It’s great that we’re using so much less coal. A policy of gas first whenever technically possible would be even better. It might not lower the dirty fuel’s contribution all the way to 1 per cent, but anything to hasten its demise would be a positive step.




Rob Ford and the ding of truth, Rick Salutin, August 20 2010.

Champlain faced similar immigration conundrums in his time

Americans gripped by immigration and ethnicity issues should glance for perspective at the large print on the base of the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor … Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me … Canadians with similar anxieties about immigrants and refugees – categories that were often historically identical – should think about Samuel de Champlain, who founded our country in the early 1600s.

Champlain’s immigration policy was unusual, since he and the settlers he brought from France were the immigrants. In a way, it was the native peoples already here who had the first immigration policy; they welcomed newcomers, in the absence of reasons not to, as if good things were likely to arise from new arrivals. Champlain seemed to admire that.

So his immigration policy was also a policy of conquest, in an era of conquest. Yet, approaches differed. In the Spanish West Indies, he’d seen an empire enslave native peoples and work them to death, literally and collectively, then import new slaves from Africa. He also rejected the British route in Virginia or New England, of keeping apart from native peoples while pushing them off their land. His way was to treat prior inhabitants with individual and national respect: Learn from them, trade and live with them, intermarry. “Henceforth we shall be one people,” he said.

It’s a more creative and humane approach than trying to assimilate the “others” to your own values, which are always a mixed bag. It opens future possibilities. The young men Champlain sent to learn native languages often intermarried, as did French families of high rank into similar native families. Eventually, this process led to the Métis nation, “the only ethnic group created indigenous to this continent,” says Champlain biographer David Hackett Fischer.

I’ve been reading his book this summer up in the region Champlain knew as Huronia, between Georgian Bay and Lake Ontario, where he spent a year and got to know a complex agricultural society with many towns, a political structure and enough surplus corn to export to other native peoples. Mr. Fischer says Champlain’s enlightened openness came from having fought during 40 bloody years of religious war in Europe and feeling there had to be a better way. He calls it a “generational phenomenon,” comparable to the Lester Pearson generation of “wise men.” They lived through two world wars and a global depression; they responded with the UN and the welfare state. They make the Stephen Harper generation look callow, but that may just show that hard experience is a better teacher than stiff ideology.

The alternative mindset, now widely on offer, involves escalating exclusion and delegitimization, as if saying: First they came for the refugees, but I wasn’t a refugee. Then they came for the immigrants. Then they came for citizens but ones who weren’t like “us,” such as Muslims in the U.S., who are told to be “more sensitive” when building mosques. But sensitive to whom – “real” Americans? Or you get Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford, who said this week that, in a perfect world, there’d be no immigration here.

Yet, his words have not the ring but a certain ding of truth. He says, “We can’t even take care of our 2.5 million people,” and it’s true – though he doesn’t name the reasons. Policies such as free trade and globalization sent away vast numbers of jobs in small manufacturing and their spinoffs that generations of new immigrants did, whose taxes, in turn, supported decent services. Many of those tut-tutting Rob Ford backed those economic policies and still do, lending them a whiff of hypocrisy discernible to stressed-out voters. He’s hit the mood, though not the essence, of our situation. I imagine Champlain faced similar conundrums in his time.




Senate gives thumbs up to offshore drilling, Gloria Galloway, August 18 2010.

Drilling Rigs in Halifax harbour.A Senate committee says there’s no need to prevent companies from drilling for oil in Canadian coastal waters.

With oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and Chevron drilling deep off the Atlantic coast, the Senate committee on energy, the environment and natural resources launched a study in May to determine the potential for a similar calamity in Canada.

In particular, the committee looked at whether calls for a moratorium on drilling in Canadian waters were well founded. After hearing from 26 witnesses, the committee concluded in its report released Wednesday that they are not.

"No evidence was adduced to justify any such ban or suspension and the committee is recommending that the said Chevron operation continue as planned, under close scrutiny and supervision by the regulators," the report says.

The bipartisan committee did, however, say there is a need to examine the structure of regulatory boards to determine if there is a "material conflict" between their roles as promoters of development and environmental stewards.

The committee also recommended that the regulators and industry take a hard look at the condition under which relief wells should be drilled. A relief well to take pressure off the BP well that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico has taken many months to drill.

But David Angus, the Conservative who chairs the committee, told a news conference Wednesday the senators were satisfied that the safety precautions currently in place are sufficient to prevent a similar disaster in Canada.

Senator Grant Mitchell, a Liberal from Alberta, said the report aimed to balance economic and environmental concerns and pointed out the huge financial benefit to Canadians that flows from allowing companies to drill offshore.


Sunday 15 August 2010

direst illth & a stup'd fuh'n ol' Hippie

at a Climate Change Conference.
or: "He cannot distinguish solecism from barbarism, milord."
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

I had just finished my first reading of Tim Jackson's Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (thanks to the Toronto Public Library) when my own copy arrived in the mail from Earthscan and I began a more relaxed look at it, and also arrived Peter Victor's Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster, I will look in a minute to see which of them used 'illth' ... ahh, it was neither of them, Tim Jackson employs four Forewords to his book, and the first is by Herman Daly, and it is Daly who uses 'illth' ...

great word! 'illth'

it's in the OED, means what you think it would, one of the citations there bears repeating: “A hundred sovereigns may be no wealth, but the direst illth, to the drowning wretch in whose pockets they serve only as a load to drag him to destruction.” (G.B. Shaw)

sometime in the summer of 1968 I was hitch-hiking down the Burin Peninsula with a girlfriend, the road wasn't paved in those days, we stopped at a diner for a coffee & sandwich, in came three Mounties who plugged the jukebox with I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee three or four times until we left, we picked up a ride right away in the back of a dump truck and moved on down the road ... 'high camp' I guess, is that what you'd call it? here's Merle Haggard and Merle again and the Beach Boys singin' it,

so, I spent the weekend at a Climate Change Conference,

I met Ron Plain face-to-face, and a girl, Gracen Johnson, and I heard Greg Allen & Ralph Torrie speak from up close - those were the best things,

otherwise it was mostly a bust, I'm sorry to say it, but there it is eh? ... right away I had a problem with the name of it, do you see? the problem being that it really didn't have a name, despite the organizers being from the Green Party of k-k-Canada and the early presence & involvement of Elizabeth May, it was explicitly explained to be 'non sectarian' ... hence the need for the indefinite article I guess ...

Q: What did you do this weekend?
A: Oh, I went to a climate change conference.

or something, maybe not having a name reveals too much, maybe it leads to identity crisis, I dunno, whatever ... what I experienced had to do with me (obviously), it has to be said like that (unfortunately), it has to be like that (inevitably) ... "It's all about ME!" do you see? this ME thing must be a virus, and I must've caught it from an incautious kiss, I'm sorry Miss ...

being born on the 13th isn't all it's cracked up to be :-)being born on the 13th isn't all it's cracked up to be (see Briar Rose, Sleeping Beauty)

it was relentless, I could not keep up with the sheer pace of it, sitting, squirming, hour after hour in the heat with no time off to kibbitz ... eventually I scribbled DAEMONIC! in my notebook, a man, a doctor, Alan Abelsohn, began to speak about the medical impacts, I felt an uncontrollable urge to blurt out, "does my paranoid schizophrenia figgure in there somewhere?" but I knew that was a bad idea so I staggered up & outside for a smoke ... and then just didn't go back inside again, that was Saturday,

Sunday I managed to get there because I wanted to hear Ralph Torrie, as luck would have it I heard Greg Allen as well, I was mistaken in what I said about Greg Allen in the last post, he is eloquent & knowledgeable & coherent & convincing & positive - quite a combination, I did have a question for Ralph but the microphone was immediately hogged by the usual suspects, the organizers were incapable of properly introducing anyone and they were also incapable of asking "Is this a question or is this a speech?" I tried to get a photograph but he was gone by the time I turned around so I just left,

I wanted to post these links to Ralph Torrie speaking at the Corporate Knights' E3 Roundtable in Toronto in May: 1 2 3; and to one of the men he shared the stage with, Lawrence Solomon: 1 2; and to Greg Allen's The Energetic City presentation: 1 2, the third part of Ralph's speech has got a hitch in it somewhere, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sorry about that (the technical incompetence of these so called Corporate Knights is matched only by the Green Party of k-k-Canada), if you run it through Keepvid it seems to work ok.

Elizabeth May, Ron PlainI have mentioned Ron Plain here before, I did manage to get his picture with Elizabeth May, I included Elizabeth in the picture because Ron told me that she had come there to Aamjiwnaang (God bless her!)

three hours drive west, like he says, and nobody knows where it is or what's going on there,

he taught me how to say Aamjiwnaang, which I have forgot already ... or not,

a relentless series of presentations, my mind blurred under the onslaught - and that's speaking as someone who knows the material somewhat better than superficially I think it is fair to say, well enough to know that some of the presenters had not done their homework,

here's another good thing that came out of it: the first clue (luckily it was up-front - she was the second speaker) was that Gracen Johnson is not full of herself, you could even say she is 'humble,' that might be exaggeration since she is so young, but if you did say 'humble' then you would have to couple it with something else like 'with some steel showing' to get the whole picture, but that wouldn't be quite 'balanced' either because she is in fact slim, quiet, reserved, a girl, a quandary, a hopeful glimpse of a real person struggling (and managing) to establish connections,

in the subsequent Q&A someone somehow picked up on violence out of what she had said, I tried to inject a little Noam Chomsky into it, oil on the water in a manner of speaking, but I don't think they heard me, I know they didn't ...

there were a few other clues, I will go through my notes later and see if any of them are worth recording,

Elizabeth May, Ron Plainwhat I think of as 'the counterforce' was only enunciated clearly by Ron Plain (that I can remember) when he said (something like) "the only value in events like this is in whatever contacts we manage to forge with one another."

there it is again: "We must love one another or die." (just in case, gentle reader, you were wondering 'Clues to what?')

I failed in this respect, I tried (I know it's lame to say that but there it is eh?), I gave them proofs, and came away feeling more like an outsider than ever, alone with my only friend - despair, oh well ... I was not the only one either, there is a young man who often shows up at these sorts of events, one of the 'usual suspects' and I have tried talking to him, saying 'Good Morning' & 'Good Afternoon' and I have tried making sense of the ellipical questions he inevitably asks, but they don't make sense to me and all I do in the end is bear a kind of hand-wringing k-k-Canadian witness that makes me know that the Good Samaritan has not shown up yet on the scene and is probably not coming ...

a man named 'Old Karajá' was killed in the town of Santa Terezinha in the Brasilian state of Mato Grosso, the name reported is Matukari Karajá, it was a fluke that I later discovered Matukari means 'old man' in the language of the Karajá - talk about a generic murder? a generic murder of a generic person - who was quite possibly satisfied or even gratified to be called by any name at all - I can't say,

You only get what you can handle. :-)Ron also said "You only get what you can handle," ... and he got that right too,

be well gentle reader.



Postscript:

Stupid old fart! :-)as usual I forget where I am going and only remember when I am half-way there and begin thinking I am done, turn back and discover that I have forgotten my keys,

my thinking around the planet has been converging, first of all because my mind, such as it is, wants to find convergence, if not Doonesbury's 'divine harmonic' kind then any kind whatever (was it Doonesbury who did that one?),

the directions of Bill McKibben (once you manage to discount his fucking ego) and Clive Hamilton (once you warm his cool to serving temperature) seem to me to be converging to lead me down this garden path to thinking that it is all connected to a sort-of secular Good Samaritan which I sum up using Auden's phrase "We must love one another or die."

and there is another convergence going on here as well, I thought Hamilton's throwing in civil disobedience at the end of his book was a lame sort of sop when I read it ... but through the flickering jaggers and out-of-synch audio and just-plain-not-there (in short excurciatingly excreable & execrable) video came a ghost of Bill McKibben talking about civil disobedience too, hummm ... and Noam Chomsky's caveat that if there is to be violence then there must be a VERY strong case made for it, and stumbling onto the aversion of the North American Mainstream Media (and leftstream media too for that matter) to even mention the aquittals of the EDO Decommissioners and the rest - you can see where this is going right?

every time I see Elizabeth May speak she ends by invoking hope, which is exactly the right thing to do, but like a Pollyanna nit-wit laying on random grace notes she is not able to carry it off, she says, "Oh, you must not fall into despair, you must have hope" and stops, gives no fucking clue about how to get there from here except, "Write to your MP - they really care," it makes me want to yell at her (the way you yell at people on TV Jeopardy or Wheel Of Fortune when they get soooo close), in fact I wrote her a stern letter a while ago including this point but she did not deign to respond (though she did cash the cheque :-)

so how do you get there from here? (as the Scotsman said to the Eskimo) ... well, at the end of her speech she could say, "Now, turn to your neighbour there in the seat beside you, and if you already know the person on your right then turn to the left, and when you get up to leave the hall, walk with this person as far as the street, find out their name and where they come from and what they do or did, find out what languages they speak, exchange emails, follow it up later, within a week, by actually sending an email, don't get into their car or visit until you know them better, but ... ESTABLISH CONTACT! There is no hope if there is only one." Ivan Illich said so (or if he didn't he meant to).

the only one I saw with the wits to do something like this was Andrew Knox talking about Transition Town, good on 'im!

Kellie TranterKellie Tranterthings in Australia are quite different, Clive Hamilton's descriptons of the bully tactics of deniers there do seem exaggerated - but they are not, here's a tempest in an Australian teapot: an article by Kellie Tranter, and a kind-of sort-of rebuttal by three (apparently prominent) Australian deniers complete with footnotes yet! which I have not followed up on but a quick look at the authors of the articles being cited may give you a clue, the comments on the original articles are interesting as well,

I first stopped to read what Kellie had to say because she is a lawyer, and because I am still musing about the differences between legal and moral arguments, and still musing about the EDO Decommissioners & Raytheon 9 & B52-Two and so on, the pictures of her I have posted are a kind-of sort-of social commentary as well, they were self-selected - both were lifted from her website, and they seem very 50s to me, I know I know I know - it is a mortal sin to make any disparaging remarks about Australians being behind the times.

the wheels of American Justice grind more quickly than the k-k-Canadian ones I guess, here's Massey's CEO Don Blankenship in the courts over the Upper Big Branch explosions already - only 4 months (!) - now that I look at him again I notice a certain 50ish cast there too eh?

and the plural of subpoena chosen by Bloomberg is interesting, looks like putting on airs,

"I was told we'd sail the seas for American gold, we'd fire no guns, shed no tears, now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett's Privateers."

“If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law,” said Winston Churchill, some people say the deniers are primarily fuelled by dislike of authority & regulations & bureaucracy, Sarah Palin mavericks and so on, and then Ralph Torrie stands up and says that he too set out to 'challenge authority' - just to show that there may be a disconnect somewhere in this general area,

while I was fossicking down under (as it were) I discovered Fiona Lowry, these images have an ideological bent which I don't necessarily like or agree with, but they have some other quality as well (aside from nudity) which appeals to me, here:
Fiona Lowry, What I assume you shall assume.Fiona Lowry, What I assume you shall assume.Fiona Lowry, Bones.Fiona Lowry, God and Sam Colt make all men equal.Fiona Lowry, It's confusing when they kill the innocent.Fiona Lowry, They have eyes that they might not see.
it was when I read the title It's confusing when they kill the innocent, that I decided to take the time to post the images, if you are interested in the ideology you can find it elsewhere starting with the link above.

Sue CooperSue Cooperoh my, almost forgot to include Susan Cooper, the Nunavut Judge who shut down seismic testing in Lancaster Sound this week, here's a copy of her decision, there is also something called the 'Triton Report' which apparently justifies the testing, it is floating around but I can't find a bona-fide copy anywhere, what I did find was this report on the NIRB FTP site, they probably meant to lock it up and forgot (?), down around page 13 it specifies the sound levels involved - the testing equipment delivers on the order of 200 dB at 500 metres away, what I remember is that 125 dB is about at the 'threshold of pain' at a distance an order of magnitude less, doh! are the ears of sea mammals so different from the ears of human mammals? listening to 10 times the threshold of pain causes just about immediate and permanent deafness in humans eh? and that's in air which is, I think, more elastic than water?

these were the only two pictures of Sue Cooper that I could find, it looks like there may have been some hard miles in there somewhere, can't say, hope not ... she should get the Order of Canada for this injunction, that's my vote.



Appendices:
1. Mais um Karajá assassinado!, Gilberto Vieira dos Santos, 11/08/2010.
2-1. Climate change 'brown wash', Kellie Tranter, 26 July 2010.
2-2. Suing the sceptics, Anthony Cox & David Stockwell & Jo Nova, 11 August 2010.
3. Massey Executives Face Subpoenaes in Probe of Mine Blast, Jeff Plungis, Aug 11 2010.
4. Nunavut judge grants temporary injunction against seismic testing, Randy Boswell, August 8 2010.


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Mais um Karajá assassinado!, Gilberto Vieira dos Santos, 11/08/2010.

No dia 5 de agosto foi encontrado morto nos arredores da cidade de Santa Terezinha - Mato Grosso (MT), Matukari Karajá, senhor de aproximadamente 50 anos de idade, morador da Aldeia Macaúba, Ilha do Bananal. Estava desaparecido há alguns dias e seu corpo, já em estado de decomposição, apresentava ferimentos de faca e pauladas.

Ele foi visto com vida pela última vez na festa de encerramento dos Jogos Regionais, que acontecem no mês de julho em Santa Terezinha. Testemunhas dizem que ele estava bastante bêbado na ocasião.

Os Karajá, que são o grupo humano de mais longa permanência no Araguaia, têm sofrido inúmeras violências ao longo do contato com a sociedade não-indígena. São freqüentes as mortes em decorrência dos efeitos do alcoolismo, como quando voltam para suas aldeias de canoa e se afogam no rio Araguaia. As cidades ribeirinhas que se instalaram em locais próximos às suas aldeias favorecem o consumo de bebidas alcoólicas vendidas por comerciantes inescrupulosos.

No mês de julho, quando acontecem festivais de praia em Santa Terezinha, Luciara e São Félix do Araguaia, a população Karajá fica exposta a sérias situações de risco, sobretudo os jovens. Consumo de álcool e outras drogas, prostituição de menores, doenças graves como DST-AIDS, hoje fazem parte do cotidiano das aldeias.

Devido a essa situação, acabam sendo vítimas de um enorme preconceito por parte da população não-indígena, que, em geral, os discrimina diariamente. Entretanto, o fato de Matukari estar possivelmente alcoolizado não dava a ninguém o direito de assassiná-lo. Espera-se que as autoridades locais concluam o inquérito iniciado e que os responsáveis por mais esse ato de violência contra os Karajá não fiquem impunes.



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Climate change 'brown wash', Kellie Tranter, 26 July 2010.

Recent reports confirm that 2010 could end up being the warmest year since measurement records began in 1880. That may help explain the unseasonable misery for hayfever sufferers - does it feel like midwinter, with the wattle already out? Then again, the politicians are also out.

Back at the lab the pleas from scientists "to act now" have long faded. No doubt they've already bought land in more temperate climates and planned their retreat to higher ground. Who could blame them? If you knew what they know you'd want to escape the force of the herd, hell-bent on "moving forward" into an overpopulated and under-resourced future where winter will be the season of choice.

If you were to ask any of our current elected representatives what needs to be done politically, economically and socially to limit any increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius, what chance is there that you'd hear a rational, financially viable and carefully articulated plan? How confident can you be that these people won't get you killed?

As climate change comes back onto the political agenda with the forthcoming election, so too will come the spawning of those pushing for inaction.

With no sign of immediate large-scale emergency measures - which is what's needed to limit any increase in global temperature to 2C - green groups need to identify where the resistance to change lies, how it inveigles itself into political respectability, and how it can be exposed for what it is and thus more effectively targeted.

Courtesy of the ACCC we all know the consequences of "green wash", but what about the flip side? Shouldn't the ACCC also be telling us about "brown wash"?

Section 52 of the Trade Practices Act 1987 provides that a corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive.

At a state level fair trading acts mirror the consumer protection parts of the Trade Practices Act. The Fair Trading Act (NSW), for instance, provides that "a person shall not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive. It defines "trade or commerce" to include "any business (which includes a business not carried on for profit and a trade or profession) or professional activity".

Now suppose you're a "brown washer" and you put yourself up as an expert on the issue of climate change. You knock up a book on the subject. You're paid to deliver lectures, and you're using the lectures to promote your profession or trade as an author. Hundreds attend and many purchase your book because they are relatively unsophisticated in scientific matters and want to know more. You're in "trade or commerce".

Your book is successful. Your representations, if repeated, are likely to sway the minds of some who interest themselves in the questions posed by you. They may also interest policymakers, think-tanks, various foundations and mainstream media, not just because of alleged "scientific validity" but because they might, for example, be useful in pushing a line that is of short-term economic benefit for some people or alternatively in promoting newsworthy conflict.

Your representations include that carbon dioxide isn't all that important to the Earth's radiation balance, that we can go on burning fossil fuels with gay abandon, and that climate scientists are frauds, manipulating data and pushing a message to deindustrialise the modern world. You'd reminisce about past climate change, calling on this as comfort that somehow the change that's coming will not be relevant, and you'd earn some nice royalties along the way.

You don't mention, nor do you offer any evidence to refute or alternative hypotheses to explain, that carbon dioxide affects global temperature due to the well-known greenhouse effect, or that no known factor apart from greenhouse gases can account for the past century of warming - not solar cycles, nor cosmic rays, not magnetic fields, not urban heat effects.

You fail to mention the consistent global scale temperature trends of the past century: the ocean warming far away from cities, the ice sheet melt and sea level rise, and the melting of mountain ice caps. You ignore the direct satellite measurements that have tracked the gradual progression of the enhanced greenhouse effect: the measurements that show the widening gap between the solar radiation going in and the longwave radiation getting out. You show five years of data to make a point that you know is invalidated by a longer time record.

For someone claiming to have a scientific background, isn't the written publication and oral presentation of those representations misleading or deceptive? How can a person who claims to be an expert in climate science - even though you may not have specialist qualifications in the field - and who claims to have examined the evidence ignore the most important scientific evidence?

Why don't you deal with this evidence? Could it be incompetence or ignorance, that you're not aware of it? Could it be ineptitude or cowardice, that you can't answer it or won't try to? Could it be cowardly self-interest, that facing it would make the premises of your arguments untenable and your output unsaleable? Could it be calculated deception, that acknowledging scientific truth would invalidate your fallacious assertions and hence your entire position, so that self preservation requires that you deny its existence?

Opportunistic exploitation of a pseudo-scientific position is all very well - "never let a chance go by" is the credo that set us on this course - but as our environmental predicament becomes more dire you shouldn't be surprised if financially-backed green groups consider legal action to put a stop to it.

There is a view, widely and quite properly held, that care must be exercised before courts are asked to make orders restraining statements made in the course of public discussion. But that sympathy for honest and open debate won't come to the aid of those whose printed works and publicly espoused "expert" views are deliberately misleading, whose actions are commercially motivated and who deliberately aim to enshroud the masses in falsehoods and exaggerated claims of uncertainty to avoid tackling the issue of climate change.



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Suing the sceptics, Anthony Cox & David Stockwell & Jo Nova, 11 August 2010.

Kellie Tranter's "Brown-washing" article was incorrect, inaccurate, based on fallacies of ad hominem, reasoned by mere authority, and was stocked with countless unsubstantiated claims about imaginary malfeasant authors. It's so vacant, and lacking in any reasonable argument that it doesn't just reflect badly on the author, it begs us to ask why our tax dollars are being used to propagate this kind of generic un-researched smear.

Kellie Tranter attacks imaginary people, who she doesn't name, doesn't cite, and doesn't quote. She accuses them of misrepresentations that she doesn't specify. Surely Australian tax payers expect that commentary they pay to promote ought to at least be based on some research, by someone who has some familiarity with the topic?

Kellie Tranter wants to sue sceptics using the Trade Practices Act (TPA) and its state equivalents, but this is legally tenuous. Generally litigation under Part V of the TPA requires two things. Firstly the target must have created the perception of expertise and secondly used that perception to promote a defective product which people rely on to their detriment.

The irony here is that it is the believers in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) who are pushing a product, not the sceptics. And it is the general public who are being forced through their power bills and the cascade throughout the economy of the cost of the CAGW 'solutions' to rely on the product of CAGW to their detriment.

But this confusion is typical of the Tranter article; everything she accuses sceptics of doing; inference and innuendo, scaremongering, lack of transparency, profiteering and obfuscation are labels which apply to the CAGW supporters. Indeed the money for those with pro-CAGW lectures, books, junkets and committees vastly outdoes the rewards of scepticism by 3500: 1. And the promised profits of the carbon-trading schemes eclipse the scientific funding even more so.

The sceptics offer products for voluntary private purchase. Citizens have to pay CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology and the Department of Climate Change. No one is forced to buy a book from a sceptic, and non-fiction books don't have a Charter to provide balanced, impartial information, but government departments do. Who, exactly, fails their contractual duty?

The allegations of "vested interests at work" is not just a vague and lazy ad hominem by Tranter, it's also demonstrably, outrageously wrong. No fossil fuel money is coming to The Climate Sceptics; it is obviously all being spent on that clunker of an idea, carbon capture or clean coal. Given that CAGW is the Zeitgeist it is bizarre to even suggest that sceptics are motivated by money, glory or status. Most of them have the seat out of their pants and operate on the smell of an oily rag. The motivation of most sceptics is that they dislike and oppose the fundamental untruth of CAGW and the great detriment the proposed remedies will have on humanity. They are also concerned about the effect that CAGW will have on the integrity of science as an honest, transparent broker of evidence and information. The University of East Anglia e-mail scandal and the defects of the 3 enquiries exonerating the scientists involved have greatly eroded public trust in science. It is those white-washes that Tranter should be concerned about not an imaginary "brown-wash".

The only plus is that Tranter's claims for civil action are not as egregiously anti-free speech as other proposed legal actions are. James Hansen, Joe Romm, Al Gore and Paul Krugman want sceptics to be charged with criminal offences including but not limited to "treason against the planet". Other CAGW believers like Clive Hamilton want the democratic process to be suspended, while erstwhile Senate candidate Lee Rhiannon runs workshops training people in how to break the law and be civilly disobedient. Robert Manne just wants us all to do what the clever AGW scientists tell us to do.

Bring on the legal cases. The sceptics win.

CAGW has already been put under legal scrutiny. In 2007 Al Gore's pro-AGW film, "An Inconvenient Truth", was brought to court by a parent who objected to the screening of Gore's film in schools. The English High Court found the film had at least nine inaccuracies, that the film was a political work and if shown without warning of its inaccuracies would be political indoctrination. No one appealed the decision.

Closer to home in 2007 the Queensland Land and Resources Tribunal dismissed action brought by the Queensland Conservation Council against Xstrata in relation to the CO2 emissions which would be caused by its Newlands coal mine expansion. The tribunal found evidence supplied by the Australian Conservation Foundation was exaggerated.

Recently, in the NSW Land and Environment Court, an action brought by members of the green group Rising Tide, had its first stage thrown out. The Court ruled that Macquarie Generation had an implied authority rather than just a licence to emit CO2 during the production of electricity; that is electricity could not be produced without emissions. Rising Tide was represented by the taxpayer funded NSW Environment Defender's Office (EDO). Persisting, as groups spending other people's money usually do, the EDO is now seeking a limit on CO2 emissions; in effect, limiting electricity production. If the Greens hold the balance of power after the federal election it will not matter if this head of claim fails as well because Green policies, which include closure of coal power energy, will have the same result.

Some sceptics have suggested climate scientists are frauds who manipulate data, but hasn't Tranter noticed that none of the accused has launched legal proceedings to protect their names? Perhaps the legal maxim, "he who seeks equity must do equity" applies? And if climate scientists have nothing to hide, why do they expend so much effort hiding their work?

Tranter speaks generically on behalf of "victims" who are well paid, and well supported by the government and media, against sceptics who are usually volunteer grassroots workers with nothing to gain financially.

She dutifully repeats evidence that is irrelevant: sea-levels and glaciers would rise and melt regardless of the cause of warming, and indeed they started doing that 100 years before human emissions increased, and the rate hasn't changed. She is so ill-informed she isn't aware most of the satellite measurements she quotes only point to projections of 1.2 degrees or less of warming, and not to the catastrophic sensational headlines. She accuses sceptics of using short data that's invalidated by longer trends. The bad joke is that her side thinks 130 years of records is "long term" and ignores that warm period 1000 years ago that invalidates their own argument. 2,6,7,8

The modellers can't predict or explain the past warm periods when CO2 was low. There is little correlation between CO2 movement and temperature on any time scale except one where temperatures drive CO2. Relative humidity levels in the upper troposphere are not rising, 10,11 temperatures haven't warmed as much as the models predicted, believers can't name any empirical evidence supporting their catastrophic claims, but sceptics can name several independent studies all suggesting CO2 will only make a minor difference. 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 12

Her favoured experts have been caught avoiding Freedom of Information requests, talking about deleting records, trying to hide data, and all stand to lose status and money if they say anything other than "there's a catastrophe". Which begs the question: who should sue who?

References

1 Douglass, D.H., J.R. Christy, B.D. Pearson, and S.F. Singer. 2007. A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions. International Journal of Climatology.

2 Huang, S., H. N. Pollack, and P. Y. Shen (1997), Late Quaternary temperature changes seen in world-wide continental heat flow measurements, Geophys. Res. Lett., 24(15), 1947-1950.

3 Idso, S.B. 1998. CO2-induced global warming: a skeptic's view of potential climate change. Climate Research 10: 69-82

4 Lindzen, R. S., and Y.-S. Choi (2009), On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L16705, doi:10.1029/2009GL039628.

5 Lindzen, R. S., and Y.-S. Choi (2010), On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications (Submitted to Journal of Geophysical Research, February 2010)

6 Loehle, C. and J.H. McCulloch. 2008. Correction to: A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-tree ring proxies. Energy and Environment, 19, 93-100.

7 McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick, 2003. Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy database and Northern Hemispheric average temperature series. Energy & Environment,14, 751-771 (PDF).

8 McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick, 2005. Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance. Geophysical Research Letters, 32, doi:10.1029/2004GL021750.

9 McKitrick, Ross R., Stephen McIntyre and Chad Herman (2010) "Panel and Multivariate Methods for Tests of Trend Equivalence in Climate Data Series" in press at Atmospheric Science Letters.

10 Miskolczi, Ferenc; (2010). "The Stable Stationary value of the Earth's global average atmospheric Planck-weighted green-house gas optical thickness. Energy and Environment, volume 21, number 4, August 2010

11 Paltridge, G., Arking, A., Pook, M., 2009. Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Volume 98, Numbers 3-4, pp. 351-35).

12 Spencer, R.W., Braswell, W.D., Christy, J.R., Hnilo, J., 2007. Cloud and radiation budget changes associated with tropical intraseasonal oscillations. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L15707, doi:10.1029/2007/GL029698;




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Massey Executives Face Subpoenaes in Probe of Mine Blast, Jeff Plungis, Aug 11 2010.

Massey Energy Co. executives will be subpoenaed in the U.S. investigation of a deadly West Virginia coal mine explosion that a safety regulator today called “a preventable occurrence.”

The Mine Safety and Health Administration and state regulators have so far interviewed 166 people about the April 5 blast at the Upper Big Branch Mine, Joseph Main, assistant secretary of Labor for mine safety, said on a call with reporters. Main said executives will be summoned and declined to comment on the possibility of a subpoena for Massey Chief Executive Officer Don Blankenship.

“To accommodate moving the investigation forward, there is the use of the subpoena process to effectively conclude the interview process,” Main said. “We are going to scour the earth to determine what happened at the Upper Big Branch Mine.”

The explosion in the rural West Virginia mine killed 29 workers, the worst such U.S. coal-industry accident in 40 years. The Labor Department said in a report to President Barack Obama in April that most mine blasts of that magnitude are sparked by accumulations of methane, combustible coal dust and air.

Massey fell $2.11, or 6.4 percent, to $30.99 at 4:01 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, and has declined 43 percent since the explosion.

Investigators at the West Virginia mine are searching for methane detectors, Main said. A large portion of the mine remains unmapped and the investigation isn’t complete, he said.

Methane Detectors

Investigators are examining eight detectors used in the mine before the explosion, Main said. Data from four has been extracted with additional testing to be conducted, he said. Officials think other units from the mine are missing, he said.

Main and Kevin Stricklin, MSHA’s assistant administrator for coal, disputed a Massey statement they said was made to the families of the workers who died that a 150-foot crack along the mine’s long wall of coal may have allowed a buildup of methane to trigger the explosion.

Investigators have seen “floor heaving” and cracks that would be expected in longwall mining, and none were “close to 150 feet,” Stricklin said. Investigators have seen cracks 6 inches deep and 8 inches wide of varying lengths, he said.

“There hasn’t been enough evidence amassed yet to reach any conclusions on the causes,” Main said.

Massey posted pictures on its website today and said the photographs had been shown to relatives of the blast’s victims.

‘Fully Examined’

“These photos show a crack in the mine floor in the longwall section of the UBB mine,” Shane Harvey, Massey’s vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. “The crack along with other potential sources in the mine need to be fully examined by company, federal and state investigators.”

The West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training is conducting its own investigation. The U.S. Labor Department and the state office decided early on subpoena all witnesses after a few employees failed to show up for interviews, Main said.

Massey’s upper-level managers will be interviewed “in the next month or so,” Stricklin said. “We want them all in here. We want to interview all of them.”



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Nunavut judge grants temporary injunction against seismic testing, Randy Boswell, August 8 2010.

A Nunavut judge has handed the Canadian government a significant setback in the Arctic after granting an injunction sought by several Inuit communities from Baffin Island that blocks a planned seismic survey in the environmentally sensitive waters of Lancaster Sound.

The controversial proposal to use sound blasts to probe the sea floor off of Baffin’s northeast coast — an area also slated to become a national marine conservation area — had raised concerns about a possible new Arctic oil and gas target and potential harm to marine mammals from this summer’s testing procedures.

Both federal Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis and Environment Minister Jim Prentice — who has described the species-rich sound as the “Serengeti” of the Arctic — have insisted that the seabed scan is neither a prelude to petroleum exploration nor a danger to the narwhals and beluga whales for which the waters are a crucial habitat.

But the planned survey had also sparked an uproar among Inuit representatives over what they considered inadequate community consultation.

And the project had even drawn the German government into the fray — in support of the survey — since its science ministry’s research ship Polarstern was scheduled to perform the work on behalf of Natural Resources Canada.

The federal government issued a statement on Sunday acknowledging the court decision "preventing the commencement of the Baffin Bay area marine seismic survey," but noting that "Natural Resources Canada remains committed to the goal of its geo-mapping program, which is to increase our knowledge of the geology of the north."

The release added that "this scientific information will also be valuable in establishing a proposed marine conservation area in Lancaster Sound" and stated that the court ruling "has no impact on the other surveys currently taking place in the north."

First reported by Postmedia News in April, the uproar over Lancaster Sound recently prompted Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to accuse the Conservative government of “rushing ahead with oil exploration” while touting plans to create a marine wildlife sanctuary “in exactly the same place.”

In the decision issued Sunday, Judge Susan Cooper of the Nunavut Court of Justice ruled that: “I am satisfied that Inuit in the five affected communities will suffer irreparable harm if an injunction is not granted.”

The Qikiqtani Inuit Association, which represents several Baffin Island communities opposed to the survey, had argued that the acoustic pulses used in seismic testing could harm wildlife and therefore disrupt traditional hunting practices in waters near the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage.

Backed by the Iqaluit-based environmental group Oceans North Canada, the QIA sought an injunction last week to stop the tests and hearings were held Thursday and Friday.

Cooper noted that “there is evidence before the court that the proposed testing areas are both calving areas and migration routes for marine mammals.”

Her ruling added that “there is also evidence that the channel between Colberg Island and Devon Island is narrow, and a disruption of migratory patterns would divert marine mammals from their usual migratory route into Jones Sound.”

The QIA issued a statement following the decision expressing satisfaction with the outcome but concern over the events that forced the issue into court.

“”It is very unfortunate that with the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and a territorial government, Inuit still need to fight to have their voices heard,” said QIA president Okalik Eegeesiak.

“QIA firmly believes the best way to research, explore and develop within Nunavut is through partnership with Inuit. I look forward to the day when the advice of Inuit and their representative organizations is sought prior to seeking project approval.”

The German embassy in Ottawa issued a statement last week defending the safety of the planned probe and offering a special seat to an Inuit observer aboard Polarstern to monitor the seismic testing.

Prior to the ruling, a spokesman for the Alfred Wegener Institute — the German research body that oversees the Polarstern’s research program — had told Postmedia News that AWI scientists were “irritated” by the controversy in Canada but would comply with any court decision.

“It’s very simple,” said AWI spokesman Ralf Roechert. “If there will be a court decision not to do seismic surveys in Lancaster Sound, we won’t do it.”

But he added that “it would be a lost chance to gain valuable scientific data.”