Marina Silva - Rede Sustentabilidade.

Ordem e Progresso (e Amor).                                                                                 Up, Down.                       Good News! 

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Marina Silva's invitation to the encontro Rede Pró-Partido (with English subtitles). Registration closed on the 13th and I saw it too late to find out if people outside Brazil could sign up. There is quite lot in this short video if you watch and listen carefully. The Rede Pró Partido meeting took place today. 'Rede Pró Partido' is an interesting phrase - 'Pró' means 'in favour of' or 'towards' - hints of Diogenes and a lantern. The new party will be called 'Rede Sustentabilidade' / 'Sustainability Network' (Globo). Let's see if these Brazilians can actually build a functioning network ... I bet they can.   Ahh, I love that word guerreira!

[The first Canadian coverage I saw is in the Edmonton Journal of all places. The English Wikipedia has not caught up, but the Portuguese one more-or-less: Marina Silva, and co-founder Heloísa Helena.] 

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Down.

Keystone XL protest, Washington DC, White House, Wednesday February 13.

(See Forward On Climate, to the White House, February 17th above.)                 Up, Down.              Ash Wednesday 

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Today: Fifty people detained by police demanding Obama stop Keystone XL.    Keystone XL Protesters Seized at White House.    Protesters arrested at WH pipeline protest.    Activists arrested at White House protesting Keystone pipeline.    48 were arrested.   Video: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

That's the stuff! Good on you! 

Valentines Day may be bogus, Obama's State of the Union was almost certainly a charade, but this ... is the right stuff. Hell, I would'a taken another 17 hour bus ride just to be there and clap for them. Even if as a Canadian I might have choked at getting arrested (or can't walk this week, whatever).    Including Michael Brune of Sierra Club. So, he was serious a few weeks ago then, and he didn't waste much time getting on with it. Good on 'im!

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NEXT UP: FORWARD ON CLIMATE - SUNDAY FEBRUARY 17 at NOON
National Mall in Washington, D.C.    Watch these short videos. 

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Down.

Trying to nail down a blob of mercury; Clutching at straws; Whatever.

or: Wha ... ?    said Jack the lad.                                                                         Up, Down.           Year of the Snake 

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Contents:   THE MAIN THREAD: [Introduction,   Khomani: (The Gods Must Be Crazy, Bradford Keeney, Palimpsest, Progress), FAO, Idle No More)],   OTHER STUFF: [Belo Sun again, Cod, Naomi Klein again, Corporations, Luncheon with Enbridge, Real Climate],   Time Gentlemen Please.

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I'm sorry gentle reader ... It's a bust. I blew it! Lucky '13 nothin'! (Joking, sort of :-) Sliding back into a familiar holding pattern. My son thinks I am (just) waiting to die. This is not the case, but yes, I am waiting ("Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" ... "No sir, I do not bite my thumb at you sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.") and it has almost always been this way, separated by episodes of extreme good luck.    Theme music from our Lennie I guess: 'Light As The Breeze' (out of context of course) and sung this time by Billy Joel (or himself if you prefer).

[A-and, yes, there is a man somewhere here beneath this resplendent chemise. The only false line I can find in it is "I've lived too long on my knees," not exactly 'false' either, off, out of place? in the wrong song? whatever ...]

The process of psychotherapy was once explained to me as undoing a snarl one loop at a time (answer: as long as it takes). "You got to pick up every stitch." ... Al Kooper or Joan Jett, Julie Driscoll, Savannah Grace, Lou Rawls ... whatever ... you can run but you can't hide. This is a door, like Kafka's, made only for you and it will be right there waiting.

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In broad strokes what I am setting out to do here is ... Uh Oh! ... Can't remember! For a moment there it all seemed to fit into a sort of pattern ... now it's gone. Maybe it'll be back? 

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The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), I watched it with my kids. There was a small 'extra' on one of the CDs with a sequence about the evils of acquisitiveness among the women which I have never been able to find again - something about a sewing kit and a trunk? I have gone on here before about N!xau, the star of that movie: in 2006 and again in 2009. This time it is a (slightly more realistic) film: The Great Dance (2000) by South Africans Craig and Damon Foster. At one point (luck being frequently in the front part of the brain these days) someone says 'good luck'; here is a tiny clip of it: K'waa. (There is also the moment when someone says of a hunter who has had success, "His wife will like him tonight," which captures my imagination. :-)

Oupa Dawid Kruiper (1935-2012) and some of his family:

This k'waa/luck is in the click language, called N|u or N|uu or Nǁng or =Khomani, nearly extinct. (This turns out to be incorrect, there are more languages among the bushmen than these. See below.)

In the process of trying to spell 'k'waa' properly (the anal retentive phase kickin' in) I am brought (through the kindness of an Internet correspondent) to Bradford Keeney and several books of his on Khomani San spirituality:
         1999 Kalahari Bushmen Healers,
         2003 Ropes to God: Experiencing the Bushman Spiritual Universe, and,
         2010 The bushman way of tracking God. 

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I am suspicious of Keeney; he is too California-handsome; the books, even second-hand at Abe's, are too expensive for my current situation; BUT his early work, Aesthetics of Change (1983) is avaliable on-line; and in Chapter 1 the Introduction, is this nugget:

       During this time I taught a course in a small midwestern college on Carlos Castaneda. My first lecture presented material that 'proved' the authenticity of Castaneda's anthropological work. I reminded the class that Castaneda had received an MA and PhD from the Department of Anthropology at UCLA for his field research. All skeptical questions from the students were met with "convincing evidence" drawn from several books about the Castaneda phenomena (de Mille, 1976. 1980; Noel, 1976). The class session ended and stunned faces left the room wondering what it would mean to accept the proposition that such an alternative world of experience could be encountered.
       The second session began with an apology: I asked the students to forgive me for playing a trick on them. I announced that the Castaneda books were a hoax and that my aim in the previous session had been to show the class how easily they could be persuaded by 'authoritative' statements to accept an irrational story. Other evidence that I now introduced clearly "proved" the falseness of Castaneda's account and suggested that he had borrowed ideas for his invented account from the psilocybic visions of the botanist Robert Gordon Wasson. I added that Castaneda had on numerous occasions admitted making up the whole thing. The class then discussed how they had been tricked into believing in the authenticity of the stories.
       A week later I apologized again. This time I confessed to having previously deceived them by presenting a one·sided argument against Castaneda's work in the same way I had earlier argued for its authenticity. I explained that it was necessary to set them up as I had so that we could reach a point where more profound questions could be articulated. Several problematic issues were now apparent: What criteria for distinguishing fact from fiction are inherent in particular contexts? Does the fiction-nonfiction dichotomy itself arise from a particular world view? How real is real?

[Having noted on the very flyleaf a mis-quote of ee cummings. ... Well, we are all bunglers eh? The guy he mentions, Gordon Wasson, is worth looking up in Wikipedia, the 'discoverer' of silly-sibes apparently. More to come on Mr. Keeney (maybe) when I have had a chance to read some of his books.] 

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So ... this mental landscape becomes a palimpsest where romantic & sentimental notions, simple mistakes, intentional & self-serving (psychologically or economically or both) obfuscation, are step-by-step reduced to something more like essentials. A long process unlooping snags - but a Bahá'í might say a successful conclusion is ... inevitable?

[I have no idea if this is enough for you to see what I am trying to get at: trying to describe a therapy, a way forward involving neither palliative nor any Christian evolution towards human perfection; trying ... but the returning silence is that absolute; someone took me into a zero-echo room at a sound studio one time, that level of silence is what I get back from this blog.]

It is a similar, comparable, energy that drives ideologies such as the politically correct insistence on accentuating the positive, or the vicious downward spiral devolution of some relativisms, or inverted dismissiveness of anything even remotely ad hominem; leading respectively to superficial idiocy, total paralysis, and refusal to see human beings eating, shitting, fucking and so on.   Similar, comparable, but not the same, no.

Does it reduce the story of The Good Samaritan in any way to excise it from pious scriptural reverence? Is the delight I take in snowstorms any less because I am no longer 100% convinced that either the storm or this universe is driven by God?

There are many pitfalls, and in this culture of mirrors not enough of them influence reproduction (and consequently evolution - see The Darwin Awards). 

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There was a snowstorm recently here in Toronto. Delightful! Not a lot of snow, a few inches - maybe 10 over a couple of days; still, it was the biggest of the year so far. It is being compared with a storm in 2011 which got christened 'Snowmageddon' - which wasn't much either, the name turned out to be ironic. This one is unofficially 'Nemo' (meaning 'no one'). Not a whit less beautiful for any of that.

The one that finally stops food getting into the city one day in a not too hypothetical future and reduces the city's life expectancy to single digit days probably won't even have a name.

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Ah ... forgot to finish about k'waa - turns out it is not =Khomani at all, maybe Khoekhoe or !Xoon. Someone who understands these languages tells me that it maybe sounds more like, "This is hard man!" or, "I am sick and tired of doing this." Probably felt like a good idea at the time for the directors to embellish.

And that was not the only adjustment of perception for the sake of good film. Louis Liebenberg who seems to be some kind of tracker/anthropologist had his name taken off the credits (see: Persistence Hunting by Modern Hunter-Gatherers, 2006).

Just imagine for a moment that we went about telling each other what was actually happening? Even approximately.

A footnote on notions of progress from Gwynne Dyer: Tyrants are still with us, but we’re making progress, Friday February 8 (also at Georgia Strait). 

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Equivocating with the FAO:    For several years I have been watching the Global Food Price Index (FPI) - a useful tool. It used to come to me monthly in a .pdf attached to an email newsletter. Then the newsletter got dropped and the helpful little graph got buried on the website with nothing directing you there unless you know where it is (or none that I can find). Here: World Food Situation / FAO Food Price Index.

So naturally I wondered about this? If you follow later entries to the FAO tag on this blog you can see some of that wondering.

I do still have residual faith in this Abdolreza Abbassian fellow, so eventually I sent him a polite email asking. I had an answer from a functionary, apparently annoyed at the question, denying that such a thing was happening at all. Evidence is evidence but you'll never get a straight answer from a bureaucrat unless you've got him pinned (and who can be bothered anymore).

On the other issue he said, "With regard to the drought in the United States last year, the crop which suffered most from this was maize (corn), which is just one of the 55 commodities which make up the FAO Food Price Index ..." He may be right, probably is, certainly is. The problem that remains for me is that he has not demonstrated his points in terms of the questions asked. If diverting some portion of this crop to ethanol production has such an effect, how can the drought not?

I guess I have to add more salt to the news. But something in all of this leaves me uneasy. ... I don't trust bureaucrats - though I like some of them. 

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Spurious Clues:    Maybe it's the clues and maybe it's the hope engendered by them. Which is worse I wonder?   (Ah, that's interesting, 'spurious' refers primarily to illegitimate children - I thought it was places marked on maps which don't exist, or only exist sometimes.)

Anyway, what went before was setting (or trying to set) the stage for somehow finding a more balanced view of Idle No More, Teresa Spence et al. ... (Barack Obama too but I'll wait until the State of the Union coming up on Tuesday; then there will be three recent speeches to consider.)

Let's put Theresa Spence to bed up front:   The thing about guys like Ezra Levant is obvious right? They use cherry-picked and approximately true statements in a fugue of inuendo and exaggerated conclusions. Bullshit, but it works. The same happens on the other side: I sat in a lecture hall at UofT about a year ago and listened to Ron Plain tell the "Why do Natives hate snow?" joke (Because it's white and it's on their land).

There is a rich and misleading mythology in this zone: that Natives have a more profound relationship with nature; that there was a golden age represented in such as The Gods Must Be Crazy; that Residential Schools were unmitigated evil; ... the list goes on.

When I heard about Theresa Spence's hunger strike I thought there was a light showing at the end of the tunnel and went for it. When I saw that I could go up to Dundas Square on January 1st New Year's Day and somehow participate, I expected ten thousand and showed up on my useless old feet just to see 'em; and when the dance began in the middle of the intersection I thought, "Yehp! This is the real stuff!"

It wasn't. They soon moved - and I followed - onto the un-shoveled square itself. Other, more serious disillusionments arrived on schedule. 

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I have excerpted a few sentences from this news report from Montreal which sum up the situation for me:

       The protesters, many wearing the red square associated with the student movement, said they are opposed to plans for new mining projects in northern Quebec.
       Marie Lys, a 25-year-old from Montreal, said the demonstrations are in solidarity with the Idle No More movement.
       “We want to keep our resources and protect the environment and the resources that we have belong first and foremost to aboriginal people,” she said.

All good, but Idle No More doesn't want to stop mining development. Nor does Theresa Spence - witness her involvement in ending the blockade of the diamond miner's winter road. None of them quite manage to put the environment on the front burner; because the force is mostly for getting what the unions have already got (and are trying desperately to hang onto), viz a share of the increasingly nightmarish Canadian dream. Not that they don’t deserve it. And labour, the large ally of the left, on the street in numbers, 15,000 or so in Toronto recently, some say 30,000 (maybe it was 10,000, I was there), and ... well ... OK. No one wants to see anyone either not get the toys they want or lose the ones they've got. (I'm sorry kids, but the toybox really is closing.)

An alliance between any of these groups (and such individuals as Theresa Spence and Raymond Robinson) and the environmental movement is ... problematic.

Here's another nail in the coffin: First nations carving out an energy bridge to the B.C. coast.

Frustrating! Whatever ... They did set a good example of how to go about it. They opened a door. 

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A small & probably temporary victory - Belo Sun stock losing value:

News came through about the MPF evaluation of Belo Sun's Volta Grande project: from Amigos da Terra, Globo, Jornal Fatos Regionais (blog), and WD Notícias.

The source documents from Ministério Público Federal / Procuradoria da República no Pará are dated in January - I guess they were not released until they had been processed somehow:
     Recomendação Nº 001/2013/GAB1, January 14, and
     Recomendação Nº 002/2013/GAB1, January 21.

Both originating with Thaís Santi Cardoso da Silva & Meliza Alves Barbosa, Procuradoras da República; and both asking that SEMA (Secretaria Estadual de Meio Ambiente) not issue licences to Belo Sun until certain conditions are met.

The main SEMA website appears to be hacked so I can't provide links.

Bottom line:    Belo Sun drops 7% as doubts over $1 billion Amazon gold mine creep in, Frik Els, February 7 2013; with a note included that the stock is down 19% over a month. The Globe chart shows it coming back a bit; have to wait and see if SEMA picks up the ball. (?)

No pictures of Thaís Santi or Meliza Barbosa (yes, they are bureaucrats and yes, I am praising them) anywhere that I can find, but their emails are listed here so in a few days you can send them a Valentine's Day card (nevermind it is not celebrated in Brazil in February). 

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Cod is a noun referring to a kind of fish; a-and it is also a verb meaning to trick, fool, pull your leg (or push it if you are in Latin America).

I don't spend much time thinking of it anymore, but it turns up. John Crosbie recently posed for these pictures with an old friend of mine; they came to me in the mail, and turning over the ol' compost pile after looking at them I came upon this in the CBC Archives. The ads for cars and cell phones on the CBC piss me off so I put up a (hand-held) copy on YouTube: John Crosbie in Bay Bulls Canada Day 1992.   He says, "Why are you yelling at me? I didn't take the fish from the God damn water! So don't go abusing me!"    Why indeed ...

I wouldn't be so rude as to put this here except that I also watched a fairly recent interview of John Crosbie by Rex Murphy - and the way he still brags, after all this time, about being somehow courageous in confronting his electors that day chokes me. He was deeply culpable, along with most of the fishermen facing him. I think I can legitimately comment here because I did a few shifts in the Newfie inshore fishery - when there was one - and found my colleagues just as well attached to their toys as the OFL folks (not all of ‘em mind you, the guy I fished with being an exception).

It was not God who brought about the end of the cod. Surely by the 1990's Crosbie, as a Minister of the fecking Crown had someone on his staff who told him what James Hansen was saying in Washington in 1988? If not, why not? Lots of people knew, credible people, and said so, and he didn't listen - he was busy building Canada's dragger fleet. Another footnote from Gwynne Dyer: Mackerel wars in the North Atlantic. 

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Naomi Klein, changes over time:   (For reference: NaomiKlein.org.)

1999: World Trade Organization Conference in Seattle, November.
    : No Logo published December.
2000: Interview on TVO with Allan Gregg (25 minutes), January 30.
2001: 9/11.
2004: The Take w English subtitles (9 segments 10 minutes each).
    : Baghdad Year Zero, September 1st in Harper's.
2007: The Shock Doctrine published.
    : Disaster Capitalism, October in Harper's.
    : Charlie Rose Interview (30 minutes), December 28.
2008: panel w Hernando de Soto & Joseph Stiglitz, October 20th (1 hour).
2010: Shout Out at Massey Hall June 25.
    : G20 Toronto June 26–27.
2012: Powershift 2012 in Ottawa (30 minutes), October 27.
    : Interview with Bill Moyers, November 15 (30 minutes).

Waiting now (in anticipation) for her upcoming book - and hoping it is not more of the same blancmange we have just had from Al Gore!    Interesting remark from Halle Lasn about our Naomi in the Globe:

But then, he says with unmasked disdain, “all the lefty luminaries – [Slavoj] Zizek and Naomi Klein and all of those people suddenly sort of appeared there in Zuccotti Park and tried to be part of it.”

Not so in Naomi's case at least - I watched her learning how to use the People's Mic and was impressed - everyone was learning. Never heard of Slavoj Žižek - here he is in Wikipedia. 

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Can (Will?) Corporations help?

The curious case of Climate Week's disappearing EDF logo saying, "Campaigners No Dash for Gas claim victory, Climate Week denies it," and asking, "Can corporate sponsorship of green campaigns ever be squared?"

Short answer: No. (Also see: No Dash for Gas – the new, chimney-climbing face of climate direct action in which the sub-text is decreasing interest, raising the question - again - about whether the environmental movement can or will help either?)

The end run began last year: APP establishes deforestation moratorium in Jambi; greens remain skeptical. Now it's Leading paper firm pledges to halt Indonesian deforestation: "Asia Pulp and Paper will end the clearing of forest across its supply chain by preserving high-carbon stock rainforests." And here: The beginning of the end of deforestation in Indonesia?

Horsecock! Bollocks! The only way APP could do this is by closing shop and getting out of the business they are in, doh; unless they make paper like the tailors in The Emperor's New Clothes (very comparable to David Keith and his bogus CSS story).

Some of the beneficiaries are pictured there to the right - except that the world they are smiling about may turn out to be a living hell by the time they take it over. They're too young to understand that they're being cruelly tricked. 

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Remember when pictures of forest rape like that came from k-k-Canada? Nothing has really changed.

Here, check this out: Grande Cache, Alberta, home of the Milner coal generating plant recently coddled by our so-called 'Environment Minister' Peter Mansbridge ... and also home of the Canadian Death Race (symmetry is everywhere at all levels). Those are not all clouds in the upper right there (you may have to turn on 'Satellite' view), they are clearcuts. Oh sure, the 'forest industry' has largely abandoned Grande Cache these days, right. But they left their mark on it eh? And they are hard at it elsewhere.

Still, I am sure it seems to the 3,500 or so who live there that the frontier is largely undiminished. And getting these folks to vote against 'development' is a no-brainer non starter. Hell! Getting them out to vote at all! 

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A luncheon in Edmonton with the oil barons:

1) The luncheon chat: on the Enbridge website or YouTube, Wednesday January 30 (7 minutes) with some interesting slides.

 

2) The clock is ticking on proposed pipeline projects: Enbridge CEO. Al Monaco says other nations could beat Canadian producers in the race to supply growing Asian oil market. Uh Oh!

 

3) After a harsh lesson in crude economics, new pipelines now biggest issue for country, says Enbridge CEO. He says (off camera), “The opposers are now focused on pipelines, but they are trying to stop energy development generally.” Got that right.

 

The people in that top photograph are: Al Monaco, Patrick D. Daniel, J. Richard Bird, David T. Robottom, Bonnie D. DuPont, Stephen J.J. Letwin, & Stephen J. Wuori. Out of date, a changed team in place now but with the same mentality. 

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Real Climate: 2012 Updates to model-observation comparions, Gavin Schmidt, 7 February 2013.

Towards the end he asks, "How well did Hansen et al. (1988) do?" The answer, "... while this simulation was not perfect, it has shown skill in that it has out-performed any reasonable naive hypothesis that people put forward in 1988 (the most obvious being a forecast of no-change)."

Hansen's 1988 paper is available on-line" Global Climate Changes as Forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies Three-Dimensional Model, J. Hansen, I Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, S. Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, & G. Russell, August 20 1988. From the abstract (because you need this to understand the graph): "Scenario A assumes continued exponential trace gas growth, scenario B assumes a reduced linear growth of trace gases, and scenario C assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000."

Gavin Schmidt's bottom line: "The conclusion is the same as in each of the past few years; the models are on the low side of some changes, and on the high side of others, but despite short-term ups and downs, global warming continues much as predicted." 

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“Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” ... Who said that? ... Oh yeah, Wordsworth ... he also wrote, “up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,” a footnote for the environmental movement in that (if a bit out of context).

This went on waaay too long, sorry gentle reader. The devil made me do it.

Be well.  

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Down.

Don't know, can't say.

(So ... why're you lookin' over your shoulder then?)                      Up, Down.              Groundhog Day 

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Contents:   Imbecile Euphemisms, Dylan's Tempest, Attawapiskat, Gold:(Belo Sun, Senador José Porfírio, Stan Bharti, Bharti School of Engineering, Guyana Update), Damn Google!  Nomenclature, Recently:(Nicholas Stern, Activists you say?  Nigeria Shell verdict, Carbon Trading, Al Gore, Barack Obama), Closing Time, Beyond the Zero.

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This is lookin' more and more like a basketball game eh? Repeatedly hooped dribbled & dropped. And our Northrop warned us to avoid those imbecile euphemisms: optimistic & pessimistic. Didn't he?

It's like I said about doom a while ago - and I wanted to believe Theresa Spence & Raymond Robinson too, evident shortcomings in their vision notwithstanding. What to believe now that 44 days on 300 calories did not significantly reduce her bulk? Say what you like about Zambonis, Sunshine-and-a-quarter wages, diamond mines, whatever; I find it difficult to walk around pictures like the one there? Very nourishing that fish broth.

What were they up to in the tipi then? Dunno. Doing the necessary to get their share I guess. Share of what? A soon to be worthless stake in k-k-Canadian civilization?    Interesting ... Warrior Publications offers forthcoming insights, not naive: Idle No More starts to idle ... by someone who goes by the name of Zig Zag.

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"Time reveals the truth," (Seneca); veritatem dies aperit, but not unless you are A) looking for it, B) able to recognize it if you trip over it, and C) able to bear it. 

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People don't like to think; they have to be driven to it (one way and another).

Even our spiritual anchorman Bob ... f'rinstance: Early on, 1965, in Love Minus Zero, No Limit (the title of which hints at a Pynchon-ian tinge), he sings (with a sneer?), "... read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall."

He is more about expanding consciousness through ambiguous & equivocal 'possibilities' of meaning, expanding the zone of uncertainty and suspended judgement, literary; but with an anti-intellectual colour as expected from an American. Maybe this is some of what 'He' was getting at with "Judge not lest ye be judged," (or "Judge not, that ye be not judged," in Matthew 7:1).    Don't know, can't say.

And a close reading of Tempest turns up too much coded Christianity, for me anyway, though I don't hold it against him - you do what you must do (and you do it well). It does seem to be a conduit to some fairly straightforward anger (in Pay in Blood): "Come here I'll break your lousy head," and "You bastard! I'm supposed to respect you!"    (!)    Sing it Bob!

Misdirected anger? Could be, partly. No room for thought so no real decisions - you do what you are driven to do to survive, necessity. And when they have got you up there in the living-room cab of that ginormous (gynormous?) truck makin' sunshine money, well ... What're ya gonna do eh? Don't be talkin' to people like me for one thing.

[On the other hand, as is so eloquently suggested in Talking Heads/David Byrne's Once in a Lifetime ... water flowing underground. Memory processing and sorting as we sleep, the results blooming suddenly sometimes, unexpectedly like flowers. The days are already getting noticealy longer. Spring is coming. :-) ] 

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Attawapiskat:

When we were building the Terra Nova in Bull Arm it was tough to find a place to rent anywhere close to the yard, and it was too far to commute from St. John's. I wound up in a garage in Sunnyside for a year or so, not very different from the one pictured above, with 6 other guys, and no big house next door (and not cheap neither).

So ... A wheelbarrow to collect firewood and I would be satisfied.   :-) 

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Gold:    I don't understand how anyone can get to know anything about anything beyond the most superficial impression without being able to visualize the ground. None of the Internet tools foster this kind of approach of course - everything is fragmented and presented at meaningless scales. So I go about and try to collect enough of it together to make sense - but a week later I can't remember where Itaituba is, so maybe I'm wrong about this too, oh well.

Belo Sun is not just interested in Volta Grande:

You can noodle around on this map if you like. Google Maps don't provide Creporizinho or the Rodovia Transgarimpeira but I have cobbled them in more-or-less. There is a bit of background on those points of interest here. "Nos anos 80, milhares de quilos ao mês eram retirados dessa região do PA. Hoje o ouro diminuiu, mas ainda é o principal meio de sobrevivência." / 'In the 80's thousands of kilos per month were taken out of this part of Pará state. Today the flow of gold is reduced but it is still the principal livelihood.'

Oh, and there are three zones of interest for Belo Sun in Volta Grande: Ouro Verde, Grota Seca, and South Block. 

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Recent 'hearings' in Senador José Porfírio, 'information sessions' something like that:

ISA solicita declaração de inviabilidade de projeto de mineração na região do Xingu, copied the next day by Amigos da Terra; a replay from September 2012: Senador José Porfírio discute projeto de lavra de ouro em audiência pública.

A beautiful young woman (at the centre of the photograph) evidently caught the eye of ISA photographer Marcelo Salazar.

The ISA (Instituto Socioambiental) material is here: Análise do Licenciamento Ambiental do Projeto Volta Grande da Belo Sun Mineração. In point form: I. Inability to analyse feasibility in the context of environmental instability (from Belo Monte); II. Defects in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) a. Factually incorrect, b. Impacts on indigenous lands not properly considered; III. Defects in licencing authority (wrong bureaucrats involved).

This news is not well reported (or at least I can't find it) so I still don't know when The MPF (Ministério Público Federal) will make its mind up. 

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The Stan Bharti connection:    I noticed him on the board at Belo Sun and wondered who he is? ... And depite Google's latest revisions to the Image Search interface I was able to fossick about a bit and find him on the garbage heap.

He runs Forbes & Manhattan Inc. aka F&M, a private merchant bank headquartered in Toronto. Pierre Pettigrew calls it a 'junior', Stan calls it 'one of the largest in the world certainly in Canada', so, something in-between I guess.

He's a mining engineer, hale-fellow-well-met (I am sure the guy is a hero up at the Granite Club); sometimes talks (what amounts to) truthfully: on CNBC in September 2011 when gold was about $1,800 he was hoping for $2,500 (it just managed to break $1,900); in an interview with Jargal Dambadarjaa it comes out that Forbes & Manhattan has invested close to 4 billion $ in Brazil; and that gold is profitable at 2 grams per ton @ 400$/ounce (extraction cost $300/ounce) ... and so on, tidbits.

He is also into Peruvian gold with his sidekick Pierre Pettigrew in Sulliden Gold Corporation Ltd.; and coal too: Forbes & Manhattan (Coal) Inc. aka Forbes Coal in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa (east coast around Durban). 

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So what?    The most revealing is an epistle to the graduating students of his Bharti School of Engineering at Laurentian University in Barrie (the name - at least the name - purchased for ten million in 2011): 6 minute video. Aficionados of the politically correct may think I am being critical because of his use of sexual analogies. Not so, don't mind 'em at all - it is the casual way he recommends that the graduates project a constructed personality and kiss ass as necessary.

Is it any wonder that they mostly seem to do just that? 

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Guyana update:    There is a wee bit of news about the court case: Joan Chang, gold miner, versus Isseneru Village Council, Janette Bulkan, January 21; and, Miners win ruling over indigenous groups in Guyana, Jeremy Hance, January 29.

But in k-k-Canada the latest news from that zone has a different point of view: Guyana Goldfields' Aurora Gold project to cost US$205 million to build, January 11. An interesting tidbit - profitable at $527/ounce cost (?).

More Canadian players: Guyana Goldfields Inc. in Toronto going for the Aurora & Aranka projects on the Cuyuni River in central Guyana; and, Columbus Gold Corporation in Vancouver (approximately? or is that conveniently?) in the Paul Isnard project north of St. Laurent in French Guiana.

I imagine the some of the mis-spelling around Guyana Guiana French Guiana French Guyana etc. is intentional (see Omnibus below) and some of it is due to Canada's devolving educational system.

Here's a map.

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[Just to remember the acronyms: EIA Estudo de Impacto Ambiental; RIMA Relatório de Impacto Ambiental.] 

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Damn Google!    Changed their Image Search interface again !!!!!!! AND the Blogger interface again again !!!!!!! If it ain't broke don't fix it. Doh! 

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Nomenclature:    Omnibus is an adjective, like 'dirty', so you can have an 'omnibus bill' but not an 'Omnibus Bill' unless for some reason the government decided to name it thus officially (which they generally don't I think).

The key to understanding is comprising unrelated components. The intention is confusion & social paralysis through complexity.

Bill C-38 is officially “An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures.” It is also known as (also officially because this is the official 'short title') the “Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act”. It passed and became law in June 2012.

Inside it is a revised Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, aka CEAA.

THE ombibus bill many people are thinking of when they say it lately is Bill C-45, “A second Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures” aka “Jobs and Growth Act, 2012” passed etc. in December 2012.

Keep in mind that the bill numbers start again with each new session. Information can be found at LegisInfo run by the government & Open Parliament which bills itself thus: "This is not a government site. Not even sort of."

[If it had been me and not Jim Flaherty I would have arranged it to table those bills on February 29 not March. Shame to waste a perfectly good leap year.] 

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Across this table lately:

Nicholas Stern ramps up his mea culpa's:

1) Lord Stern: developing countries must make deeper emissions cuts, reported by Fiona Harvey Tuesday 4 December 2012 (and listed here before); and,

 

2) Nicholas Stern: 'I got it wrong on climate change – it's far, far worse' reported by Heather Stewart & Larry Elliott from Davos, Saturday 26 January 2013.

 

3) Some background if you want it at Wikipedia. Everything about him seems tentative (?) I don't know why.

 
 

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Activists you say?

1) Rebuilding optimism of will for effective climate activism, Trent Hawkins, 24 January 2013: "So where do we begin? It is the imperative of the climate movement leadership to rebuild optimism ..." (?) If the leadership could build anything wouldn't it be there already? Dunno.

 

2) Sierra Club's Michael Brune on Keystone XL and civil disobedience, David Roberts, Tuesday 29 January 2013; this applies to the US more-or-less.

 

3a) {642 words} Sierra Club Canada to review ban on civil disobedience, with B.C. pipelines in mind / U.S. club announces end of prohibition on peaceful law-breaking, Peter O'Neil, Vancouver Sun January 23, 2013, with a picture.

 

3b) {860 words} Sierra Club to review ban / Organization considers lifting its prohibition on civil disobedience, January 24.

 

4) A few days later I get an email (a copy of this blog post: CD or not CD, that is the question ... , John Bennett, Tuesday January 29 2013) asking me to take a survey. An important question on the survey (and the last of six) is to ask if I will continue to donate and if so, more? A quandary.

 

5) Board meeting January 31; outcome - "at the appropriate time." Here's the Media Release, February 1 2013. I think the real answer is in here: Supporter views on non-violent civil disobedience, January 31; viz. 'the money question' - the troops were soft on Question #6 - not really really soft but ... About 10,000 members in Canada so two in ten answered the survey - except that you didn't have to prove membership to vote.

 

6) Sierra Club BC - Milquetoasts! Their statement: We are doing all that we can. Bollocks! Not by half! Also reported by Stephen Hui in Georgia Straight, February 1.

 

7) Some references: Sierra Club US - Wikipedia, website; Canada - Wikipedia, website. Interesting that the National Board of Sierra Club Canada is about anonymous - can't find a list of their names anywhere and no bigger picture of them than that. (?)

 
 

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Nigeria Shell verdict:

1) Before: Shell verdict will determine whether other firms could be tried for oil spills, John Vidal, Tuesday 29 January 2013.

 

2) After: The CBC uses Dutch court rejects Nigerian farmers' claims against Shell from the Associated Press wire, but with a sub-headline "Subsidiary Shell Nigeria forced to pay village in landmark ruling."

 

3) An Engineering News website uses Dutch court says Shell partly responsible for Nigeria spills.

 

4) Bloomberg: Shell Not Liable for Most Nigeria Spill Claims, Dutch Court Says, Fred Pals, January 30 2013.

 

5) Dutch court rejects most of Shell spill case, Mike Corder, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press, Wednesday January 30.

 

6) A while ago I cobbled up this map showing Goi (approximately). That judge has got clean hands eh?

 
 

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Cap & Trade vs Carbon Tax (vs Fee & Dividend not even mentioned?):

1) Should we stop worrying about the environmental impact of flying?, Leo Hickman, Thursday 31 January 2013.

 

2) Private provision of public goods in a second-best world: Cap-and-trade schemes limit green consumerism, Grischa Perino, January 24, 2013. The title is subtly misleading - the argument is more that green consumerism has little effect.

 

3) Elsewhere in The Guardian, Luca Taschini, Simon Dietz & Naomi Hicks of the Grantham Research Institute at LSE ask Carbon tax v cap-and-trade: which is better?

 

4) What about Fee & Dividend Gawdammit?! Storms of My Grandchildren, Chapter 9 An Honest, Effective Path, James Hansen, 2009.

 

5) A Useful tool: CO₂ transportation emissions calculator.

 
 

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Al Gore:

1) The Future by Al Gore – review, John Gray, Thursday 31 January 2013. I can't afford to buy it; lineup at the library but I guess that has to be the way (damned union un-librarians!). Interesting ... the audio book has a lineup too?

 
 

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Obama Fiddles While Planet Burns:

1) Obama Immigration Reform Speech: 'The Time Is Now', Elise Foley, Tuesday January 29 2013. Last time it was Health Reform, now it's Immigration. "An economic and moral case," she writes. Bah! He is just avoiding the real issue, marking time.

 

2) Beyoncé chose to lip synch national anthem with US Marine Band at Obama’s inauguration, Associated Press, Tuesday January 22 2013. Apt. Perfectly symmetrical. Beyoncé? ... Never heard of her. I wonder how she does orgasms? Ah, she was at Super Bowl too. QED.

 
 

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I went to a day-long conference thing on Enbridge's Line 9 reversal a while ago. A lunch was provided which was delicious and cheerfully served up. So I went looking for the providers of this lunch - turned out to be an amorphous group called Food Not Bombs but after a dozen emails I could not find anyone willing to accept a donation - cash mind you and no receipt required, spend it on Tequila was my recommendation but they didn't want it. (?)

About the same thing happened again trying to find out who did the lunch at the recent OCAP rally. (?)

Obviously I am doing something wrong. I wish I could figgure out what it is. 

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As I was thinking about John Bennett and Sierra Club Canada, and Elizabeth May of course who came up through that organization, this was on the front page of the website:

Long story about that banner ... another time, doesn't matter.    A short story then: Early on in this Toronto Odyssey I tried to get beside the Green Party - it seemed the natural vehicle, outlet, conduit - whatever. The candidate in my riding didn't wash, so I sniffed around next one over. Seemed to be made-in-heaven, Portuguese spoken and all (which I was longing for). As part of the indoctrination they joined me into an email group. The topic on the go was what to do about nutbars who show up and ... disrupt the flow? I was throwing in ee cummings "staggered banged with terror through a million billion trillion stars" etc., but after a while I noticed that everyone was writing and no one was reading. I withdrew more-or-less quietly. (Boo Hoo. :-) Anyway ... they still don't know how to deal with 'em; and it still seems to me that this would be a good thing for the movement to figgure out.

I did meet someone quoting Milton at the recent OFL rally: "They also serve who only stand and wait." All perfectly derivative; who cares?

"I just don't care what happens next; looks like freedom but it feels like death. It's something in between I guess. It's closing time."

I trust this is useful to some one some where some when. Be well. 

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Beyond the Zero:    I am slowly getting deeper into Pynchon's Against The Day; excerpts:
                     Lew Basnight becomes a detective (One, 5), and,
                     Lake Traverse marries Deuce Kindred (Two, 12).
Anarchists vs The Machine, all very topical.

The cover of the edition I have includes this image - well, not quite like any of these actually, but maybe closest to the last one on the right. Tullio Crali, an Italian futurist; entitled 'Nosedive on the city'; probably intended no irony when he painted it. No idea if Pynchon had anything to do with selecting it for the cover.

It seems like 300 pages or so is about it for many ... the author of this diagram in Wikipedia a few years ago didn't even get that far. The women come and go, talking of Michelangelo ... greatest living writer in English, whatever. I find it hard to remember what's s'pose t'be goin' on - must be the Alzheimer's.

A-and Beyond the Zero, the first chapter of Gravity's Rainbow, has been coming to mind for obvious reasons (the Vanishing Point mentioned last time etc.). That Against The Day cover image establishes a bit of a connection there; and with the conclusion of Gravity's Rainbow too for that matter. Hansel & Gretel ...

"Into the blue again, after the money's gone," and that won't be long now, longer if I could quit smoking. :-)

The importance of spatial continuity, Umwelt ... Could it be that obsessive/compulsive habits are vain attempts at compensation? The mental rats, unable to leave the ship and so trying to balance the cargo? Do you think?

 

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Down.