Area 51 Activity

New Bomber Program to Begin 'Black' So that explains the increased activity at Area 51 in Roswell, and consequently more alien sightings.

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Conservative Philanthropy

The media noticed the contradiciton this week of King Stephens wife and his Exchequer lobbying for literacy while cutting funding for literacy programs. Of course one is voluntary, the other is state sponsorship. Harper, wife reading from different pages

When asked about the cuts to adult literacy programs, Mrs. Harper refused comment. However, Treasury Board President John Baird, who announced the cuts, suggested that his government would rather spend more money teaching children how to read and write than try to help illiterate adults.

He actually said what???

"his government would rather spend more money teaching children how to read and write than try to help illiterate adults."

That means 42% of Canadians get left behind, because thats how many adults in Canada are functionally illiterate. Of course that is what the Tories are counting on to get them a majority government. They know from history that when people read they learn and when they learn they create revolutions. Books and reading are dangerous in the wrong hands.

Tch, tch the moral of this story is that Conservatives believe in volunteerism; philanthropy and charity not public social programs. Of course it is not the volunteerism of civil society they support, rather that the Church and the wealthy should take care of the poor, staying true to their Scruooge social vision

Ironically the intertwining between social welfare and the voluntary employment sector has become so integral to civil society it to got hit in the cuts. Of course the moral of this story is don't believe what neo-cons tell you but what they do.

Volunteerism takes funding hit
Surprise and disappointment. Those were the emotions expressed yesterday as people in Portage la Prairie’s volunteer community reacted to the Conservative government’s announcement it will cut $9.7 million from Canadian Volun-teerism Initiative over the next two years.
“I’m surprised. It’s probably one of the smallest parts of the budget. If the government doesn’t encourage volunteerism, it must be encouraging higher-paying jobs,” he said, adding without people donating their time, community organizations will require more staff or will be forced to increase workloads for existing employees.
He added choosing to diminish support for CVI means the government isn’t looking at the larger picture.
“What they don’t get is that the volunteer sub-sector is a vital part of the economy, not just in Canada, but across North America,” said Lapointe.
Mary Lynn Moffat works for Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, and became aware of the cuts to CVI at the Rotary meeting.
“Obviously, it’s not what you would expect. Volunteerism is so important in our community and the country .... We can’t survive without our volunteers.”


See:

Tory Cuts For All

You Tell 'em Danny Boy

Harper



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It's Global Warming Stupid

Damned if they do damned if they don't so the Tories do the next best thing.....nothing.....

Tories mum as environment report calls for push on global warming
The Conservative government was on the defensive yesterday and key ministers were out of town as the much-anticipated report from the Auditor-General's environment commissioner called for a "massive scale-up of efforts" to combat global warming.

The demand is out of sync with recent comments by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who questioned the accuracy of global-warming projections this week and has presented clean air as a more pressing environmental issue.

Although the report's release date has been known for weeks, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn and Northern Development Minister Jim Prentice were all in Alberta yesterday. Ms. Ambrose was unavailable for telephone interviews.

"To head out of town on the first horse back to Calgary while the commissioner’s report came down with a clear indictment of past wrongs is not encouraging," said NDP environment critic Nathan Cullen.


In denial...The Harper government is in denial about Climate Change, and in league with American global warming deniers.

In the past, Mr. Harper has questioned the science of climate change, calling it a “controversial hypothesis,” while his former environment critic Bob Mills went a few steps further calling the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to address climate change, “a great socialist plot.”

Sowing doubt about climate change in Stephen Harper's backyard

"The Kyoto Protocol is a political solution to a non-existent problem without scientific justification," says Ball, on the Friends of Science website.

As it does in the U.S., the lobby group is trying to create the appearance of a scientific controversy where none exists. It's a political debate they attempt to pass off as science. And it is having some resonance with the Harper government.

Friends of Science puts out radio ads calling for an end to the Kyoto accord because, they say, the science of climate change isn't proven.

That's not all. In April, says the website, "Researchers at the University of Calgary, in co-operation with the Friends of Science Society, released a video entitled: Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What you're not being told about the science of climate change.

Tim Ball gave his anti-global warming pitch in May to the Alberta government's standing policy committee on energy and sustainable resources. Ball approached the committee, committee chairman Doug Griffith's spokesman.

Stephen Harper and Environment Minister Rona Ambrose are making the issues even muddier by exploiting the public confusion sown by the anti-climate change forces. Many people mistakenly think global warming is connected to air pollution and smog, two separate issues and never intended to be linked.

So why do Harper and Ambrose talk about "pollution and greenhouse gases" in the same breath? It's politics. The Conservatives don't support Kyoto and so are trying to change the subject to air quality. To quote Ambrose: "We're looking at co-benefits -- actually taking action on things like clean air and pollutants (where) there's a co-benefit of reducing things like greenhouse gases."

Well, you can hear that exact same strategy in the Friends of Science radio ads.

"Sixty leading scientists want us to reconsider Kyoto. ... There has to be a better way to reduce pollution and clean up our air, water and soil," says the ad.

Kyoto, of course, never was about cleaner air, it's about rising temperatures. This is fudging of the first order. But it must be heartwarming to Harper's political supporters in the oilpatch. And maybe in Ontario, Harpers figures there are more votes for cleaning up smog.

ExxonMobil funds climate-change propaganda: British scientists

Britain's leading scientific academy has accused oil company ExxonMobil Corp. of misleading the public about global warming and of funding groups that undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

The Royal Society said Wednesday it has written to the U.S. energy giant asking it to halt support for groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change."

Yesterday while the Climate Change auditor issued her report climate scientists meeting at MIT issued their own warning, one that most business people can understand, its called Risk Assessment. And the risk is extinction if we don't do something more than less than nothing.

A Dangerous Energy Climate

"If we don't throw everything we have at energy efficiency right now, and start to do things we know how to do right now [in fossil-fuel alternatives], we don't have a chance" of halting drastic planetary changes, said Nathan Lewis, a chemist at Caltech whose research interests include new solar-power materials. Lewis spoke yesterday as part of a panel on energy at the Emerging Technologies Conference.

Caltech's Lewis said the question has become one of risk management. "If we don't cure cancer, the world will stay the same. If we don't cure AIDS, the world will stay the same. But if we don't solve this problem in the next 20 years, from a scientific viewpoint, the world is not ever going to be the same," he said. "How much are we willing to spend to avoid the risk of doing something that we don't like for the next 3,000 years or more?"The biggest policy need is for some regulation of carbon dioxide, Lewis said. Currently, there is little economic reason for companies to pursue non-carbon-emitting alternatives or to sequester the gas.


It's global warming stupid, not smog. Smog is a symptom, global warming is the problem.

Hot "Prehistoric" Conditions May Return by 2100, Study Says

Palm trees in Canada? No ice anywhere? The future could look like Earth's hottest ancient epoch, says a new study of carbon dioxide levels.

The study shows that the high carbon dioxide (CO2) levels found during the Eocene epoch match the CO2 levels predicted for the end of this century by many global warming models.

The Eocene occurred between 56 million and 49 million years ago. It featured the highest prolonged global temperatures of the past 65 million years.

See

Kyoto

Ambrose

industrial ecology

Social Ecology.

Green Capitalism

Environment

Green Plan

Oil


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Le fantôme de Bush au francophone

George Bush and the White House were not at the Francophonie summit in Romania, but their hand puppet was....PM opposes resolution at La Francophonie summit

Members of the Francophonie summit have agreed to a compromise on a contentious resolution after Prime Minister Stephen Harper blocked the original proposal.

The original wording of the resolution recognized Lebanon's suffering in this summer's 34-day conflict, but not Israel's.

Harper took a strong stance against the Egyptian-proposed resolution which most of the 72 members supported. He urged the organization to recognize the suffering of both nations.

Except that Israel is not cleaning up after the total destruction of its infrastructure and does not have cluster bombs scattered through out Tel Aviv.

UN: A million cluster bombs could be in s. Lebanon

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Fly By Night

Japan launches satellite to study the Sun I remember a joke about that...

"You know that the Americans and Russians have sent rockets to the Moon and Mars?" said Professor Muldoon. "Well, I'm designing a rocket to go all the way to the Sun."

"Surely the heat would be too strong," mused O'Connor. "And the rocket would melt?"

"No, no," assured Muldoon. "I'll be sending it at night!"

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Nanny State Neo-Cons

London Review of Books has an excellent critique of Fukuyamas newest book on the Neo-Cons. Which I have commented on before. But this jumped out at me in its aptness when we consider King Stephen's New Government of Canada and its agenda.

Neo-Con Futurology: Stephen Holmes on the incoherent thinking behind US foreign policy

Fukuyama himself stresses a completely different contradiction afflicting the neo-cons. The proposal to pull Mesopotamia into the modern world, he says, is based on a facile optimism reminiscent of 1960s liberalism and publicly rebutted by the original neo-cons. Progressive dreams are bound to be dashed on the hard realities of social habit. One of the fundamental goals of neo-conservatism, in its formative period, was to show that ‘efforts to seek social justice’ invariably leave societies ‘worse off than before’. They were especially ‘focused on the corroding effects of welfare on the character of the poor’. All distribution from the rich to the poor and from whites to blacks is inevitably counterproductive. Progressive attempts to reduce poverty and inequality, although well-intentioned, have ‘disrupted organic social relations’, such as residential segregation, triggering a violent backlash and failing to lift up the downtrodden. According to the neo-cons, it is wiser to concentrate on the symptoms, using police power and incarceration to discourage violent behaviour and protect civilised values.


And in a related argument from the Monthly Review....

The Contradiction Between Theory and Practice in Neoliberalism

Let’s be clear right away that neoliberal theory is one thing and neoliberal practice is another thing entirely. Most members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) —including the U.S. federal government—have seen state intervention and state public expenditures increase during the last thirty years. My area of scholarship is public policy and I study the nature of state interventions in many parts of the world. I can testify to the expansion of state intervention in most countries in the developed capitalist world. Even in the United States, President Reagan’s neoliberalism did not translate into a decline of the federal public sector. Instead, federal public expenditures increased under his mandate, from 21.6 to 23 percent of GNP, as a consequence of a spectacular growth in military expenditures from 4.9 to 6.1 percent of GNP (Congressional Budget Office National Accounts 2003). This growth in public expenditures was financed by an increase in the federal deficit (creating a burgeoning of the federal debt) and an increase in taxes. As the supposedly anti-tax president, Reagan in fact increased taxes for a greater number of people (in peace time) than any other president in U.S. history. And he increased taxes not once, but twice (in 1982 and 1983). In a demonstration of class power, he drastically reduced taxes for the 20 percent of the population with the highest incomes, while raising taxes for the majority of the population.

It is not accurate, therefore, to say that Reagan reduced the role of the state in the United States by reducing the size of the public sector and lowering taxes. What Reagan (and Carter before him) did was dramatically change the nature of state intervention, such that it benefited even more the upper classes and the economic groups (such as military-related corporations)

See:

Harper

Nanny State


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Harpers Silence Over Musharraf

I had commented here about Harpers absolute silence over Musharrafs insults towards Canadians. It seems some other folks noticed he was quick off the mark to blast Paul Martin but his silence over Musharrafs remarks was deafening.

Do ya think Harper has a thing for guys in uniform?




Maybe he regrets he can't wear one...cause he ain't Commander in Chief....

She is....

Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of Canada, inspected the Ceremonial Guard on June 28, 2006 on the grounds of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As well as being Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Forces, Her Excellency is Colonel of both regiments that form the Ceremonial Guard (the Governor General's Foot Guards from Ottawa and the Canadian Grenadier Guards from Montreal).

It must be frustrating to someone who supports REAL Women to know who wears the military pants in the family.


well heres a fix for that....


























See

Musharraf



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A Failure of Imagination

Another spying scandal for Capitol Hill
Hewlett-Packard ex-chairwoman Patricia Dunn got grilled about an unfolding scandal one lawmaker called "a plumbers' operation that would make Richard Nixon blush."

Why do they always say this?

"Never in my worst nightmare did I anticipate that the circumstances currently surrounding HP could ever occur," she said.

Technology Giant Hewlett-Packard Admits to Spying on Journalists, Board Members

When they know that their worst nightmare is to live in a security state, which they are.

Right-wing targets judge who ruled vs. Bush spying

If that doesn't smack of good old fashioned McCarthyism.

Of course the cynical might be forgiven for believing this is a distraction from the real crime of spying....House passes warrantless domestic spying measure

Before it heads home to face the voters, Congress is rushing to legalize warrantless, domestic wiretaps of the sort that this summer were ruled unconstitutional in federal court, with only the barest of nods to preserving civil liberties.


Remember when the worst thing about the Soviet Union was that it was a nation of spies, it had its people spy on each other for the state.

Well all that changed after 9/11 as they say.

Unfettered government electronic and data mining surveillance of its citizens is a genii that once released from its legal bottle becomes a grave menace to democratic society. So-called terrorism is such a loose and flexible concept that it can easily be applied to just about any activity.

Soviet bloc security agencies knew that the most effective way of monitoring `anti-state’ activities was by massive random checking. Stop one thousand citizens, or monitor their calls, and a small percentage of potential malefactors, real or imagined, and enemies will be turned up.

East Germany took this sinister practice to the extreme. Its security agency, the Stasi, monitored at least half of all phone and telex calls, employed an army of informers, ran routine spot checks of pedestrians, and even retained tens of thousands of samples of the body scents of `subjects of interest.’

Give any intelligence or security agency carte blanche to spy on citizens and it will eventually take this power to extremes. It’s only a small step from monitoring real subversive activities to spying on anyone who disagrees with current government policies. Their friends and relations will also fall under suspicion.

Eric Margolis | Foreign Correspondent : December 2005

When abuses of power take away basic freedoms, something has to give. I dare say the Communists were experts at domestic spying, cultural homogenization, closed borders, and propaganda. Let's think about what that means for our own countries. Let's make sure glasnost isn't ushered in as a "new" concept to us someday.New Freedoms in the USSR

Prairie Weather: Domestic spying admitted by Pentagon

Dvorak Uncensored » Domestic Spying Story Continues to get Better ...

Congress Turning the USA Into the USSR

digg - New York Times sues Pentagon over domestic spying



See:

Spying

CIA


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