I Was Misquoted

Can you misquote yourself? Apparently according to Craig Chandler.Of course a little bit of careful post blog editing helps too.

Here is his original post;

"Alberta is growing in a way that was never expected and many of the people coming here do not truly appreciate Alberta or even understand the history of this province or the relationship with the Alberta Progressive Conservative party. To those of you who have come to our great land from out of province, you need to remember that you came to our home and we vote conservative. You came here to enjoy our economy, our natural beauty and more. This is our home and ... If you wish to live here, you must adapt to our rules and our voting patterns or leave. Conservatism is our culture. Do not destroy what we have created."

And here is his revision.

Alberta is growing in a way that was never expected and many of the people coming here do not truly appreciate Alberta or even understand the history of this province or the relationship with small 'c' conservatism. To those of you who have come to our great land from out of province, you need to remember that you came here to our home and we vote conservative (meaning Social Credit, Alberta Alliance, Wildrose or the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party). You came here to enjoy our economy, our natural beauty and more. This is our home and if you wish to live here, you must adapt to our rules and our voting patterns, or leave. Conservatism is our culture. Do not destroy what we have created.

However since Chandler is a historical revisionist, like others of his ilk, who would have us believe Alberta has always been a conservative bastion. When exposed they revise their stories.

Like he did by saying Link Byfield endorsed him as a candidate for Egmont, implying he did so as a Director of the Wild Rose Party, when in fact it is a quote from the past prior to the creation of the Wild Rose Party.

And of course he accuses those who expose his bigotry of being Liberals.

"The reality is that I have now signed up more members to the Alberta PC Party in Calgary-Egmont than the Liberals had votes in the last election in this area. Calgarians will decide who gets elected, not a well-known Liberal journalist from Edmonton."

Whether they are or not since it's an assertion with no evidence just like his assertion that the majority of Albertans are conservatives.


SEE:

Chandler Redux

Outing Chandler

Vote Conservative...Or Else

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No Rush

The Harper Green Plan was to come into effect by 2050. No rush. By then we will also have Ice Breakers, but they will be redundant.

Most polar bears could die out by 2050

Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be killed off by 2050 — and the entire population gone from Alaska — because of thinning sea ice from global warming in the Arctic, government scientists forecast Friday.

Only in the northern Canadian Arctic islands and the west coast of Greenland are any of the world's 16,000 polar bears expected to survive through the end of the century, said the U.S. Geological Survey, which is the scientific arm of the Interior Department.

Florida airboats glide on thin Arctic ice

As climate change thins sea ice around the Arctic, making travel by snowmobile during the spring precarious even for practiced hunters, one solution may be to borrow technology from the swampy Everglades of Florida.

Arctic Kingdom Marine Expeditions is reporting success in using airboats to guide tours to the floe edge outside Pond Inlet this summer.

A study by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found that the Arctic ice is melting faster than expected and will decline by 40 percent by 2050.

The estimate is based on a study of national and international computer models keeping the period 1979-1999 as a base. An earlier report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had found that sea loss was greater in the summer in Arctic Sea located north of Alaska, Canada and Asia.

The IPCC report had placed the blame on greenhouse gases and had said that unless these emissions were controlled, the Arctic Sea would almost disappear by the turn of the century.

In a year when the Arctic ice cap has shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded, a new analysis from Seattle scientists says global warming will accelerate future melting much more than previously expected.

About 40 percent of the floating ice that normally blankets the top of the world during the summer will be gone by 2050, says James Overland, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. Earlier studies had predicted it would be nearly a century before that much ice vanished.

"This is a major change," Overland said. "This is actually moving the threshold up.

"If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said it wouldn't happen until 2070 or 2100," said Serreze, who was not involved in Overland's project.

Even a 40 percent loss of ice would be devastating to ice-dependent animals such as walruses and ringed seals, said Overland, who shared his data with federal officials considering an endangered-species listing for polar bears.

Gray whales will suffer if the ice-loving crustaceans they feed on disappear. But some commercially important fish species, like pollock and salmon, could thrive in warmer water — a possible boon for the Seattle-based fishing fleet that plies Alaska's Bering Sea. There are also hints, though, that the disappearance of ice would favor predators that undermine fisheries, Overland said.

Shipping will benefit if the Northwest Passage across the Canadian Arctic melts out each summer — as it did for the first time this year.

Of course that is why we are having the international race to declare sovereignty over the arctic because heck there is a silver lining to global warming after all.

Exploring for Oil in the Arctic's 'Great Frontier'

"We think it's a great frontier ...." Fox says. "The belief is that about 25 percent of the world's remaining reserves are in the Arctic. And I think it's a major play for us."

Even the climate seemed to be cooperating with that major play. Polar ice retreated this summer from the spot where Shell plans to explore for oil.

Shell would hardly need its reinforced hulls, or rented Russian icebreakers.

Global Warming May Cancel Next Ice Age

The effects of burning fossil fuels today will extend long beyond the next couple of hundred years, possibly delaying the onset of Earth's next ice age, more properly called a glacial period, says researcher Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

SEE:

Polar Bears Threaten Tories Arctic Sovereignty

Tories Ignore Arctic Climate Change

Petrocan's Arctic Sovereignty

US Declares War For The Arctic

Mackenzie Valley Pipeline

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Tory Transparency: GNEP

Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Nuclear Energy Partnership? The government is planning to sign a Nuclear Energy Partnership? Was this one of the Conservatives five priorities? It was not publicly discussed nor raised in the House. It was a side deal from John Howard's visit to Canada.

Ottawa near decision on nuclear plan: Bernier

"Australia and Canada, we are two major producers in the world and we have considerable interests in whatever the United States and the international community have in mind in terms of future uranium development and production and marketing," said Bernier. "So we will have a decision in the near future about our participation."

No pressure for Canada to state intentions on nuclear partnership

With barely a week to go before a key planning meeting in Vienna on the proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, the world's biggest uranium producer still hasn't said publicly whether it will attend the talks.

The Conservative government has been tight-lipped about the so-called GNEP, saying only that Canada is reviewing the matter.

The initiative is controversial because it proposes that uranium exporting countries bring back spent fuel for disposal on their home turf.

Harper, in his first public comment on the proposed partnership since May 2006, denied that Canada is feeling any pressure to join despite the involvement of key allies Australia and the United States. Australia announced its intention to join this week.

The Harper government's hesitation in declaring a clear position on GNEP isn't surprising, despite more than a year of internal government discussions and cross-border talks.

Internal government talking points from 2006, obtained by The Canadian Press, showed enthusiasm for the proposal, but that has never been expressed publicly.

Oh dear that certainly is counter intuitive to the Canadian ideal of Public Service and Public Policy.

Transparency? Accountability? Responsible government? I think not. Anymore than the Harpocrites negotiations around the SPP. But this more than just about jelly beans.


SEE:

Nuclear NIMBY


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Bin Laden Transcript

Bin Laden Inc. takes on the American Empire.(transcript)

This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system.

If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of “globalization” in order to protect democracy.

And Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; and the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa: all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system.

So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The infallible methodology is the methodology of Allah, the Most High, who created the heavens and earth and created the Creation and is the Most Kind and All-Informed and the Knower of the souls ofHis slaves and the methodology that best suits them.

It is asymmetrical Imperialism versus the new Imperium. The modern manichiest duality. Bin Laden Inc. is a Muslim engineering, security and banking corporation in competition for regional hegemony with USA Inc. and it's partner's Halliburton and Bechtel. Not to be confused with the family business back in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Binladin Group is not liable for the Sept. 11 attacks, attorneys for the multinational engineering firm maintain, because it made Osama bin Laden surrender his stake in the company 14 years ago. Responding in federal court to lawsuits over the attacks, the lawyers wrote that in 1993, the terrorist mastermind was forced out as a shareholder in two companies his family owns.

A judge had ordered Saudi Binladin Group in July to provide additional information about where the money for Osama bin Laden's 2 percent stake in the company went.

Osama bin Laden in lecturing America sounds like Ben Bernake, lecturing on the financial impacts of the housing crisis, and the coming recession. And well he should he is the scion of the largest telecommunications and engineering family in Saudi Arabia. He is a self made man. Not unlike Donald Trump.

His anti-capitalism in the transcript is a medievalist reaction, he is one of many new prophets claiming to be the Mahdi, and he is using the Wahhabist base that is the Saudi state religion.

The Sept. 11 Commission concluded that the Sudanese government took Osama bin Laden's assets when he left Sudan in 1996.

"He left Sudan with practically nothing," the commission concluded.

"When bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, he relied on the Taliban until he was able to reinvigorate his fundraising efforts by drawing on ties to wealthy Saudi individuals that he had established during the Afghan war in the 1980s."

Before Osama bin Laden, it might be argued, there was the Mahdi. Over 120 years ago, a messianic leader united the tribes of the Sudan in a bloody revolt against their Turkish-Egyptian masters. Proclaiming that Islam had been corrupted and defiled by "foreigners," this Islamic warrior declared a jihad against the "outsiders."

Although not alike in all significant respects--the Mahdi, for example, came from humble origins, whereas bin Laden is the scion of a Saudi billionaire--the desert warrior and the peripatetic leader of al Qaeda show some striking similarities. There is a shared connection with Sudan, from which bin Laden was expelled in 1996. Both men tangled militarily with the major power of their eras. Both believed themselves to be directed by Allah to lead a holy war, to eradicate the corrupting influence of the West from Muslim lands and, in the process, spread Islam.

The Islamic Traditions of Wahhabism and Salafiyya

And he knows how to use the media to get out his message, hence he has gained weight, changed his beard, is dressed well.

He is a businessman lecturing to his peers. He is not yet dead, nor captured the war on terror so far has been a failure, just like Iraq. This is what his spectacular appearance says.

In any case, it may be that the point of terror is not merely to disrupt spectacle by producing indigestible images, but to exceed it. Retort highlight the paradox of the vanguard Islamic revolutionaries, who deny themselves all that capitalist spectacle has to offer, and harden themselves against mundane sentiment and appetite, yet who still hold to the effectiveness of the image, and propagate images of their acts through websites.

His is not class war but global inter-Imperialist rivalry. America is in the way of his war against the current ruling classes in the Middle East. Always was.

Retort argue that the result of the spectacular defeat of 9-11 has been to push the state into actions that are as much governed by spectacle as by material considerations. Warfare has been elevated from an intermittent action to permanent imperial conflict. They claim that one frequently repeated charge of the anti-war movement "that the war was fought for oil" when taken too simply, ignores the "partially non-factual imperatives of capital accumulation." These include the effort to repair spectacle, and the drive to normalize war in the minds of citizens.

SEE:

Osama bin Laden Republican


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Osama bin Laden Republican

Osama promises that under Islamic rule, you'd be free of the Tax Man forever. "There are no taxes in Islam," he says in the much anticipated new tape, "only a limited Zakaat (alms) totaling 2.5 percent."

Wait a minute that still is a tax.




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Pay Back II

The Harpocrites throw some crumbs to Calgary.

Calgary home to new mental health commission

In true Orwellian style it turns out that Calgary's advantage is;

"Calgary is the only major regional health authority in the country without a specialized psychiatric hospital, and that's actually an advantage."

More P O R K.

But wait the Alberta Advantage is at play here too, the idea of further private public delivery (P3) of services. More Medicare reform through the back door.

"The Alberta Mental Health Board is a unique structure, across the country, in terms of the way they look at mental health policy without actually delivering services. I think we can learn a lot from that," Kirby said Friday.

And of course since the government doesn't deliver services it waits for the community or market to create those services after the fact. First it and closed existing hospital beds, leaving folks to fend for themselves.

It has also gone further down the road in moving away form institutional care to more community-based programs, Kirby said.

Sure which has lead to this; homelessness.

And after all since Alberta is booming it makes sense to set it up here since;

Work Is A Danger To Your Mental Health

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Felix

No wall to wall coverage on America's 24/7 cable news networks in the aftermath of last weeks fatal double Hurricanes. Because of course they did not hit the U.S.

What might have happened if the hurricanes had veered north into the United States instead of churning on similar paths west through the Caribbean?

Instead they look out to the Atlantic.

Invest 99L - Possible tropical depression off the US east coast

The Miskito Indians were the excuse used by the American created the Contra's in their war against the current President of Nicaragua. But they seem to have forgotten them now.

Felix's dead wash ashore
PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua–Bodies of Miskito Indians killed by Hurricane Felix floated in the Caribbean off Central America and washed up on beaches yesterday as the death toll from the storm rose to almost 100.

And then the numbers increased.

Hurricane death toll hits 130 on Nicaragua coast


Felix was as strong as Mitch which hit just nine years ago. Not a common hurricane but a force 5 massive damaging Hurricane not worthy of more than a mere mention between reports on missing people and Fred Thompson's announcement of running for President.

The disaster industry will so get underway reconstructing the devastated countries according to its neo-con agenda.

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been imposing shock therapy on countries in various states of shock for at least three decades, most notably after Latin America’s military coups and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet many observers say that today’s disaster capitalism really hit its stride with Hurricane Mitch. For a week in October 1998, Mitch parked itself over Central America, swallowing villages whole and killing more than 9,000. Already impoverished countries were desperate for reconstruction aid -- and it came, but with strings attached. In the two months after Mitch struck, with the country still knee-deep in rubble, corpses and mud, the Honduran congress initiated what the Financial Times called “speed sell-offs after the storm.” It passed laws allowing the privatization of airports, seaports and highways and fast-tracked plans to privatize the state telephone company, the national electric company and parts of the water sector. It overturned land-reform laws and made it easier for foreigners to buy and sell property. It was much the same in neighboring countries: In the same two months, Guatemala announced plans to sell off its phone system, and Nicaragua did likewise, along with its electric company and its petroleum sector.

All of the privatization plans were pushed aggressively by the usual suspects. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had thrown their weight behind the [telecom] sale, making it a condition for release of roughly $47 million in aid annually over three years and linking it to about $4.4 billion in foreign-debt relief for Nicaragua.”

Now the bank is using the December 26 tsunami to push through its cookie-cutter policies. The most devastated countries have seen almost no debt relief, and most of the World Bank’s emergency aid has come in the form of loans, not grants. Rather than emphasizing the need to help the small fishing communities -- more than 80 percent of the wave’s victims -- the bank is pushing for expansion of the tourism sector and industrial fish farms. As for the damaged public infrastructure, like roads and schools, bank documents recognize that re-building them “may strain public finances” and suggest that governments consider privatization (yes, they have only one idea). “For certain investments,” notes the bank’s tsunami-response plan, “it may be appropriate to utilize private financing.”

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Brave New World

When I went to high school utopian and dystopian novels were considered must reading in social studies class. And this reminded me of Aldous Huxely's brilliant, and underappreciated, dystopian society of Brave New World.

Who is human? Do Chimeras have souls?

The English have decided that they will allow their scientists to combine human genes with animal genes to make embryos.

The embryos will not be a few human genes in an animal embryo, or a few animal genes in a human embryo, but a full blown merger of animal eggs and bird eggs to form a “chimera”, a mixed animal human being.

While the author, who opposes this on moral grounds, refers to H.G. Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau, and the more obscure Cordwainer Smith! Whom I also read while attending high school. Checking on his bio, I discover another influence on my theory of conspiratology.

Which seems appropriate given the conspiracies and conspiracy theories abounding around Chimera's.

Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal.

Writers ranging from ancient Greek and Hindu poets to novelist Michael Crichton have all envisioned the fictional possibility of creating human-animal hybrids. The notion of "chimeras" was particularly horrifying to H. G. Wells, author of "The Island of Dr. Moreau."

But over the past two years, the subject has quietly made its way into scientific journals. Unbeknownst to most Americans, today the creation of human-animal chimeras represents a valuable experimental tool that could revolutionize science and medicine.

However, the creation of these hybrid organisms also raises ethical questions: What rights should these organisms possess?

Great Britain has already begun to take up the question; an official government report released last month backed the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos).

One of the main forces driving research in this area is the widespread interest in human embryonic stem cells. In vitro experiments suggest that these cells can differentiate into any cell type in the body, but whether they would retain that potential if implanted in an actual human body is not yet clear.

Chimera embryos have right to life, say bishops

A recent article (subscription required) in the NY Times Science section discusses the role of interspecies chimeras in biomedical research. They point out the chimeric organisms are nothing new:

“Biologists have been generating chimeras for years, though until now of a generally bland variety. If you mix the embryonic cells of a black mouse and a white mouse, you get a patchwork mouse, in which the cells from the two donors contribute to the coat and to tissues throughout the body. Cells can also be added at a later stage to specific organs; people who carry pig heart valves are, at least technically, chimeric.”

Regardless of the minimal ethical controversy amongst biologists, new research using other animals (e.g., pigs) to harvest human organs derived from progenitor cells has the potential to "gross out" most Americans. In essence, it's analogous to watching a horror film with a mad scientist manipulating the natural order for some (often undefined) egomaniacal purpose.

The Stranger Within

New Scientist vol 180 issue 2421 - 15 November 2003, page 34

Human chimeras were once thought to be so rare as to be just a curiosity.
But there's a little bit of someone else in all of us, says Claire
Ainsworth, and sometimes much more...

EXPLAIN this. You are a doctor and one of your patients, a 52-year- old
woman, comes to see you, very upset. Tests have revealed something
unbelievable about two of her three grown-up sons. Although
she conceived them naturally with her husband, who is definitely
their father, the tests say she isn't their biological mother.
Somehow she has given birth to somebody else's children.

This isn't a trick question - it's a genuine case that Margot Kruskall, a
doctor at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston,
Massachusetts, was faced with five years ago. The patient, who we will
call Jane, needed a kidney transplant, and so her family underwent blood
tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. When the results
came back, Jane was hoping for good news.

Instead she received a hammer blow. The letter told her outright that
two of her three sons could not be hers. What was going on?

It took Kruskall and her team two years to crack the riddle. In the end
they discovered that Jane is a chimera, a mixture of two individuals -
non-identical twin sisters - who fused in the womb and grew into a single
body. Some parts of her are derived from one twin, others from the other.
It seems bizarre that this can happen at all, but Jane's is not an
isolated case. Around 30 similar instances of chimerism have been
reported, and there are probably many more out there who will never
discover their unusual origins.

SEE

Homunuclus

Chickens Have Teeth!!!

Dialectical Science-JBS Haldane

Bring on the Clones

GOTHIC CAPITALISM

Whose Family Values?

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