Drunks In Space

The Mackenzie brothers would qualify as Canadian Astronauts.

Aviation Week & Space Technology reported on its Web site that a special panel studying astronaut health found that on two occasions, astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so drunk they posed a safety risk.

The independent panel also found "heavy use of alcohol" before launch — within the standard 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule, the magazine reported.

SEE:

Mars Or Bust

Canada Celebrates Star Wars

Star Wars The Next Installment

Space Litter

Science or Tourism

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
space, litter, debris, NASA, Atlantis, satelittes, UFO, grabage, junk, spacewar, L5, Lagrange, Lagrange5, sci-fi, space-colonization, space, space-colony, space-station, Budget, Moon, Tourism, Space, Science,

$63.90 Per Hour

On average, B.C. and Alberta saw productivity gains worth $122,698 per net worker gained from migration. Provinces who lost population due to migration, however, saw average productivity gains of $82,955 per worker.

Based on these productivity estimates it means that workers in B.C. and Alberta should have earned wages of $63.90 an hour. In fact in the Trades most earned less than half that. Leaving the surplus value for the bosses. In Ontario the wages were closer to unionized manufacturing rates at $43.50 per hour.

In fact average wages even in booming Alberta are 1/3 of what each worker creates in surplus value, profit, for the bosses.

Alberta continues to lead all provinces in average weekly earnings despite a drop in May, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

Earnings for payroll workers, including overtime, hit $818, down from $825 in April but up 2.3 per cent over May, 2006.

Earnings are up 4.3 per cent so far this year, second only to the 5.1 per cent in Prince Edward Island, which has the country's lowest weekly rate at $635.

Ontario has the second highest earnings at $798, up from $796 in April, followed by B.C. at $750, down from $755 the previous month.

Average earnings for hourly paid employees edged up 14 cents in May to $19.04.

Which is why the bosses demand concession bargaining as they are in the case of Molsons Edmonton strike, since the CAW and the Molson bosses are negotiating in Toronto. They are overlooking the Alberta boom and the fact that Molsons corporate productivity and value has increased since its merger with Coors.


SEE:

Pay 'Em What They Want

Labour Boom = Falling Rate Of Profit

Productivity Myth

Canadian Workers Poorer Today Than Yesterday

Variable Capital

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Strike, strike, Molson, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Beer, CAW, Calgary
paramedics, Strike, Stelmach, anti-strike laws,
workers, variable costs, labour, labor, Marx, variable capital, labour theory of value, social-factory, proletariat, capital, capitalism, profit, productivity,

Cavet Emptor Illegitimate Goverment

There is no government like no government.

For an prime example of American Republican Libertarian forms of limited government one needs only look to Alberta.

Last weekend a fire destroyed 94 housing units, the majority were part of a new condo complex, the others were single family dwellings built too close to the complex, with little or no fire protection for their siding and outside walls. The result was mass destruction.And folks left homeless. In a boom economy with rental housing and other ownership options priced beyond most folks means.

The problem is an obsolete building code written in 1960 and based on the notion of preventing fires from spreading from building to building from inside out instead of from the outside in, Wolsey said.

"There has to be a better look at how we deal with building codes as to how we protect our society," he said.

"Is this preventable? I believe it is. With minor amendments to building codes and minimal costs, we can prevent this kind of a devastation from occurring in our communities."

The governments response was little, minor, small, none at all.

The Alberta government's own public safety division recommended changing building codes more than two years ago to prevent fires like Saturday's $20-million inferno in south Edmonton.

But the government chose not to act.

Instead, it forwarded the recommendation to the National Research Council for further study via a provincial committee - although it is under no obligation to wait for an NRC recommendation before making code revisions.

In fact, a year later, the department - then under the leadership of Rob Renner - rejected an official request by the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association to address the insufficient separation between homes, saying there was no evidence to support it.

Government exists to protect citizens, except after the neo-con revolution that defined government as existing above, apart, separate from the people. The earliest forms of self government, have been about building codes and fire prevention. Whether at the municipal, state/provincial or federal level. In Alberta this responsibility has once again been abdicated by the ruling Tories.

Building codes blamed for massive fire
Condo blaze sparks call for tighter fire codes
$25-million fire calls building codes into question
Insurance industry backs tougher building codes
Heed fire's warning: improve building code
Fire chiefs say Alberta should be leader in Canada on building codes

Since the Ralph Revolution of the nineties the neo-con/neo-liberal republican lite agenda of the Fraser Institute and the right wing political business lobby the NCC have dominated conservative politics in Alberta and Canada.

Tougher code carries a price

The Tories created a myth, first they attempted under Lougheed to both expand oilsands development and diversification of the economy. The former succeeded the latter failed. Under Don Getty the diversification expanded, but it ended up a failure because it was simply the government doling out corporate welfare to businesses and lobbyists that had the best selling points, rather than realistic business plans.

Though some plans and businesses were by their nature something the state should have done as public services, such as hazardous waste disposal, due to the costs and long term responsibilities involved, as well as the continuing need for state funded research and development required for technological and industrial advances.

And as usual the left wing moonbats like Neil Waugh of the Edmonton Sun trash our glorious republican government for their obvious contradictions.

More study is needed before deciding whether to update building codes to prevent repeats of a $25-million condo development inferno, Alberta's municipal affairs minister said yesterday.

Although he said he personally favours a "proactive" approach, Municipal Affairs Minister Ray Danyluk also said the numbers aren't all in. He said the province approached the National Research Council 18 months ago and asked it to study the issue. Its next major amendment of national standards, however, isn't until 2010.

Ray's job in Ed Stelmach's Country Club Cabinet is housing and municipal affairs. Both are hot topics after Wolsey warmed up to his usual theme following the MacEwan Fireball. Edmonton houses are fire prone. Thanks to the controversial vinyl siding that's slapped on them without any fire retardant board beneath.

Wolsey talked about a "simple fix." And when asked whether the MacEwan blaze and other similar fires involving Boom-berta houses are preventable, he answered: "I believe it is."

He talked about "minor amendments" to the building code. Which is Ray's responsibility.

And if the houses around the condo blaze had something as simple as exterior grade drywall under the plastic siding "we probably wouldn't have lost any of those homes."

So here's the question I put to Ray in the flower garden.

"Are get-rich-quick developers cutting corners and building shoddy houses that could put Albertans' lives in peril?"

Which, of course, is the Monday-morning-coming-down question for many folks.

No emergency meeting with Battlin' Randy Wolsey, no read-the-riot-act session with the Edmonton Region Homebuilders Association, no task force of surly bureaucrats to prepare a report, make recommendations and get to the bottom of what's going down out on Pleasant Acres Drive and Woodside Wynd.

Instead Danyluk froze up like a rusty Lada at 40 below.

The best he could offer was that the National Research Council is apparently working on something, but it won't be ready for three years.

Once again showing this government has no use for its citizens and is in the pocket of establishment special interests.

Caveat Emptor, citizen beware you have nobody to blame for getting screwed but yourself, the government refuses to protect you or to govern for the public good. Just as they have failed renters in this province now they fail homeowners, in favour of developers.

This then is limited government in a nutshell.

See:

Pay 'Em What They Want

He Can't Manage

Drumheller Bell Weather

Stelmach Tanks

Alberta Deja Vu

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Alberta, minimal government, Edmonton, libertarian housing, rental, condominium, apartment, Income Trusts, rent controls, homelessness, housing-costs, housing-boom, Alberta, ED Stelmach,
Premier, Alberta Cabinet,PC, Party of Calgary, politics, leadership, Conservatives

Pay 'Em What They Want

'Disaster' if paramedics walk off the job

If it's a disaster then pay the workers what they want. They have not had a contract for a year, which saved Calgary money.

It's a boom economy, let's see some of the Alberta Advantage spread around. Instead of course Stelmach will try to appease Calgary by lowering the boom on these workers with illegal no strike legislation.

Alberta government blocks a paramedic strike

The paramedics are NOT deemed an essential service, until today. It isn't going to help Stelmach's falling poll numbers in Calgary.


SEE:

Molsons Strike

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
class-war, class-warfare, CUPE, working class, proletariat, workers, labour, labor, unions, syndicalism,
paramedics, Strike, Stelmach, anti-strike laws, Alberta, Canada, Calgary,

Alberta Cabinet, Harry Strom, Ed Stelmach,
Social Credit,Socreds, PC, Calgary, Party of Calgary, politics, leadership, Conservatives, Edmonton, History, Politics, Economics,leadership, politics, PC,

Serpent Geology

It was. Hundreds of millions of years ago.

Western North America may have once been joined to Australia, a hypothesis that a local mining exploration company is banking on to help it find riches in the Yukon.

The theory is that if Australia and the Yukon were once joined, the two areas would share some geological DNA. So what is happening mineral-wise in Australia may also be happening in the Yukon.

And what's happening in Australia is the Olympic Dam mine, a multi-mineral ore body that includes the world's largest uranium deposit and fourth-largest remaining copper deposit, as well as significant amounts of gold and silver.

Due to plate tectonics the plates under the continents slip and slid over and under and along each other.

Thus producing widely separated rock formations common in many mountain regions, like ophitic rocks and serpentines. And so living in areas where the earth is alive and active, rather than dormant, humans associated the ever present geological striations of the earth with serpents the oldest diety/fetish we have.

To early humans the earth was alive, rock art representations of serpents, as well as the idea of painting with ophitic stone pigments on ophitic stone, showed a reverence for the sacred space that was stone walls, stone outcrops, the serpent image carved out of the serpent forces around us. Which gives new meaning to Snakes On A Plain.

In geologic terms, a plate is a large, rigid slab of solid rock. The word tectonics comes from the Greek root "to build." Putting these two words together, we get the term plate tectonics, which refers to how the Earth's surface is built of plates. The theory of plate tectonics states that the Earth's outermost layer is fragmented into a dozen or more large and small plates that are moving relative to one another as they ride atop hotter, more mobile material. Before the advent of plate tectonics, however, some people already believed that the present-day continents were the fragmented pieces of preexisting larger landmasses ("supercontinents"). The diagrams below show the break-up of the supercontinent Pangaea (meaning "all lands" in Greek), which figured prominently in the theory of continental drift -- the forerunner to the theory of plate
tectonics.

According to the continental drift theory, the supercontinent Pangaea began to break up about 225-200 million years ago, eventually fragmenting into the continents as we know them today.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Yukon, Australia, diamonds, Serpentine, Ophitic rocks, python, ophites, ophidian, gnostics, serpent worship, totems, primitive peoples, religion, rituals, magick, rites, cave paintings,archeology, archeologist, San, 70,000yearsago,
Simon WinchesterEarthquake,
Krakatoa, Volacanos, A Crack In the Edge of the World, Africa,
Japan, Earth-In-Upheaval, East, Timor, Earth-Sciences, tectonic plates, San Fransisco,

Contracting Out Is A Crime

Once again the attempt by the Liberals to Reinvent government, the mantra of the neo-con revolution of the nineties, ends up costing Canadians millions. Whether it was the P3 Boondoggle with the Firearms registry, the RCMP pension fund fraud or this case where the Department of National Defense was bilked for millions. It all has to do with contracting out and outsourcing IT functions of the State.

Ex-federal employee guilty of huge fraud

A former defence bureaucrat, who led a jet-set lifestyle, pleaded guilty today to two charges in a phoney contract billing scheme that bilked $146-million out of the federal government before it was stopped.

Paul Champagne, who had been an $80,000-a-year contract manager with the department, pleaded guilty to one count of fraud and one count of breach of trust in an Ottawa courtroom.

He was fired from his job in 2003 after billing irregularities were revealed involving a contract with U.S. computer giant Hewlett-Packard.

After a lengthy RCMP investigation, Champagne, 49, was charged with seven fraud-related crimes. After he pleaded guilty today to two charges, the Crown dropped the remaining five counts.

He will be sentenced in January.

In the late 1990s, the Defence Department issued a series of contracts to Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Inc., eventually paying $159 million for computer maintenance services. The government later discovered it got little or nothing for its money.

The Public Works Department red-flagged the contracts over the four years prior to Champagne's dismissal, but did nothing. A scathing report in 2003 found that managers at the federal government's tendering department failed to appreciate the significance of at least three audits that warned something was terribly wrong with the computer contracts.

After the scandal became public, Hewlett-Packard said it was told by the department to pay a group of subcontractors and their work was deemed secret.

In May 2004, the computer giant repaid $145 million to the federal government, and said its employees did nothing wrong.

Two Ottawa businessmen, Peter Mellon and Ignatius Manso, were also charged, but the Crown said Monday only one case remains to be resolved. A spokesman for the RCMP couldn't say what the status of the cases might be.

Over 10 years, starting in 1993, five contracts worth a total of $250 million were signed with the Compaq Computer Corp., Digital Equipment and Hewlett-Packard, which eventually bought Compaq.

Audits conducted by Public Works in 1999 and 2000 raised concerns about three of the contracts, but in 2001 a further review found unauthorized billing and "evidence of contractual funding appropriated for other purposes."

After Champagne was fired, National Defence did its own internal review of contracts and discovered problems with two dozen other projects. Today, the Defence Department did not respond to requests for comment about what safeguards have been put in place to prevent a repeat of the fiasco.

At the time of his arrest Champagne was a multimillionaire, who insisted his wealth and homes in exclusive districts of Ottawa, Florida and the Turks and Caicos were the results of shrewd investment in high-tech stocks during the tech boom of the late 1990s.

SEE:

Defense Lobbyist Now Minister

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
P3, privatization, public-private-partnerships, Canada, London, UK, Rotor, Tipple, Harper, Government, scandal, Ottawa, MacDonald Commission, Canada, Liberals, free trade, Trudeau, Emerson, Conservatives, Harper, Government, investment, politics, trade

Tags
Politics
Canada
government
P3's
contracting out'
privatization
DND
computers
technology
fraud
Crime
RCMP

Dinos and World Systems Theory

In the World Systems Theory of political economy, the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstien claims that capitalism evolved coincidentally with the decline of feudalism, it did not suddenly replace that political economic system but rather evolved out of it. It was not the only political economic system evolving at the time but the one that became dominate.

This can be proven with a simple example, a robber baron newspaper owner who sells his national citizenship in order to buy a lordship from Baronial Britain. Here we have someone who is a capitalist aspiring to the titles and honorifics of the old feudal order.

Now we find the same thing happened with proto-dinosaurs and their later dinosaur relatives. The dinos did not wipe out their earlier relatives but co existed with them. Much like the remnants of feudalism, Lords, Queens and Kings, autarchies, exist today under capitalism.,

UC Berkeley scientists, digging deep into a remote New Mexico hillside, have discovered a trove of fossil bones that they say is evidence that dinosaurs and their early relatives lived side by side for tens of millions of years before the relatives slowly died off and left the dinosaurs to dominate the ancient world.

Until now many scientists had thought that dinosaur "precursors" -- perhaps their ancestors -- disappeared suddenly long before the dinosaurs themselves rose to prominence, but the bones dug up by Berkeley paleontologists show evidence of a different story.

The discovery of a wide variety of creatures all mingled together in layer upon layer of rocks dating from Earth's late Triassic period between 235 million and 200 million years ago, they say, shows that the strange relatives of the dinosaurs remained on the scene while the dinosaurs evolved into truly dominant creatures during the Jurassic period, between 120 million and 200 million years ago.

Until now, many scientists have argued that the early close relatives of dinosaurs must have disappeared abruptly in an early "mass extinction" about 215 million years ago that has never been clearly explained. Others have thought that the true dinosaurs, whether carnivores or plant eaters, simply outcompeted their relatives for dominance in the ancient environment and quickly drove them to extinction.

And after all economists call themselves scientists. Of course like its prehistoric ancestor Capitalism itself is a dinosaur. And those who believe that Capitalism is, was, and will always be eternal are to political economy what creationists are to paleontology.



See:

Paleontologist Versus Paleo Conservatives

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Marx For Beginners

Saving Capitalism From Itself

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Conrad Black, Lord Black, Barbara Amiel, crime, fraud, Canada, Chicago, Hollinger
racketeering, Radler, newspapers, paleobotanist, paleontology, fossils,
dinosaurs, Alley-Oop, Flinstornes, Hanna-Barbera, christians, evolution, prehistory, prehistoric, Darwin, Creationism, Creationists, Drumheller, Tyrell, Museum, Creation-Museums, Dino, Canada, US, Kentucky

Damn Commie Canadians

Quick someone tell the flat earth society and the climate change deniers at the Blogging Tories.

Canadians prove humans are causing climate change

Like Medicare this will prove once again to the Republican and conservative American rightwhing whiners that their northern neighbours are truly evil and a socialist menace.



See:

Strange Bedfellows

Saving Capitalism From Itself

Echo Chamber

Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Fraser Institute, climate change, environment, global warming,
Kyoto, UN, IPCC,
John Birch Society, Creationism, nuclear power, flat earth, Lyndon LaRouche, right wing, conspiracy, conspiracy theory, climage change denial,

climate-change, Conservatives, Liberals, government, environment, oil, electricity, capitalism, sustainablity

@ edukashion

Anarchy and Education

Our theme for our July Carnival is
Anarchism and Education.

A.S. Neill, The Modern School, Ivan Illich, homeschooling in a statist society, homeschooling in the age of neo-conservative anti-public education, pedagogy of the oppressed, Pablo Fiere, Fransisco Fiere, Emma Goldman, the origins of American public education in Nativism and the KKK, classical education, dead white men, deconstruction, academia, autodidactic intellectuals, working class intellectuals, education and class, post secondary proletarians, William Morris, Godwin, Shelly, Byron, Keats, Mary Wollstencroft, Mary Wollsencraft Shelly, the narodniki, Bakunin, Kropotkins Appeal to the Young, the SI, France 1968, read a book.

The carnival will run July 27-August 5th.

'I never let my schooling interfere with my education'.
Mark Twain.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
carnival of anarchy, anarchy, anarchists, blogs, blogging, weblogs, bloggers, libertarian, libertarian s ocialism, left libertarians, education, individualism, pedagogy,

Sea Serpent

Here is an interesting Sea Serpent that actually has been documented in scientific journals. And it is Canadian.

Cadboro Bay in British Columbia claims Caddy, or Cadborosaurus willsi, a serpent-like creature that to this day remains the only monster ever described in a scientific journal.

The existence of the species has been suggested by the original specimen-based description in a refereed scientific journal in which the type juvenile specimen is represented by 3 different close-up quality photographs (in the B. C. Provincial Archives in Victoria), in which at least three new-born relatively tiny precocial "baby" specimens have been independently held by at least three pairs of human captors during the past 40 years, and by more than 100 documented sightings, photographs, sonar images, and sketches of live animals made independently at predicted times and places, subsequent to the original description in 1995 and continuing to the present

In the Amphipacifica Journal of Systematic Biology Drs. Paul H. LeBlond and Edward L. Bousfield review the large aquatic reptile known as "Caddy" from the Pacific coast of North America. Bousfield and LeBlond believe the historical records about this creature contain sufficient evidence of "specimens in hand" to conclude "the animal is real and merits formal taxonomic description," and propose it be named and diagnosed with vertebrate class Reptilia as Cadborosaurus willsi, new genus, new species.

Many people have spotted a large marine cryptid from coastal areas of the northeast Pacific Ocean and sporadically these sightings have been reported by the news media. Bousfield and LeBlond describe it as "a large serpentine animal (adult body length 15-20 meters), clearly unlike any whale, pinniped, fish, or other existing vertebrate animal that makes only brief appearances at the sea surface, presenting distinctive head, a long neck, and trunk region that often forms into number of vertical humps or loops. Its swimming speed is astonishing to those who try to approach it, invariably unsuccessfully."

And while the article the first link is from;Sea monsters: Not real, but good for business describes many fresh lake sea monster sightings, it basically claims they are all made up. Of course as per usual I believe many of them may be sightings of the rare and endangered ancient dinosaur fish the sturgeon.


See:

Die Vurm

Snakes Alive

Nessies Relative

Nessie?

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Monsters, Lake monsters, Loch Ness, Ness, Nessie, sea serpent, Scotland, myths, legends,cryptozoology,
frilled, shark, dinosaur, fossil fish, living dinosaur, prehistoric shark, Japan, video, rare, animals, biology, marine biology, fish, living fossil
fish, animals, biology, science, UK, trout, fish-fight, fishing,
python, ophites, ophidian, gnostics, serpent worship, India, Christianity, Abrahamic, Judeaism, Islam, totems, primitive peoples, religion, rituals, magick, rites, cave paintings,archeology, archeologist, San, 70,000yearsago