This is an interesting dilemma; given that biofuels reduce our reliance on traditional fuel but at the same time spurs hunger worldwide by inflating the cost of food, what will we decide is more important to address? (Perhaps the answer is both.)
It reminds me of a Walrus feature about how our obsession with outlawing trans fats means that we're killing elephants in other parts of the world...or something like that. Wookiee'll know. (update 01.05.08 - here is the Walrus article I referred to; we are killing wild elephants in Borneo.)
Anyway, the part of the article that I need to comment on is this:
"Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association, said: "World agriculture can both feed and fuel the globe.""
Obviously this guy is motivated by his job to say this, so I have to ask; when did we have enough agriculture to "feed and fuel the globe"? For as long as I can remember there have been pleas for help to feed impoverished people around the world. Hasn't Hartwig ever seen those television ads showing the emaciated families covered in flies? This is not a new problem and to say that today, with less grain, corn, or soybeans available than a few years ago that there is plenty to go around? It's just not credible, and I can't let it pass.
On a Venezuelan TV channel, the 11 a.m. time slot used to belong to The Simpsons. But they have decided that the show is inappropriate for children. So what will they replace it with? Baywatch Hawaii. Of course.
"The regulatory agency didn't say which elements of the program were deemed offensive, but said showing the animated cartoon series at that hour could violate national regulations prohibiting "messages that go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents.""
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that given the choice between a show that focusses primarily on social commentary and another about running on beaches in bathing suits, that it's the latter that would "go against the whole education of boys, girls and adolescents." Besides, The Simpsons makes a mockery of America, how can we not promote that around the globe?
I've been out of touch lately; been travelling for work, prepping for interviews, getting slammed with workload volume at the office, catching yet another feverish cold, etc. I'm trying to get back into the swing of things and the news bored me today: more of the same drama from China/Tibet, Iran, Mugabe, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
So, enjoy a video of serenity instead! (I was having issues with this earlier, so if the embedded vid doesn't work, the link is in the next paragraph.)
Somewhere in NYC, a paper plane soars beautifully against a backdrop of city and Brooklyn Bridge before landing gently on the street.
I read this very short story a few days ago then moved on and forgot about it. But I recalled it instantly early this morning when a friend called to tell me something. That we knew him.
The Endeavour shuttle launched last night in gorgeous fashion. Canada sent up a two-armed robot (pictured below) and Japan sent the first part of their massive Kibo lab. But what I really like here is that when the Canadians named their robot, they winked at the difference between our and American spelling (centre/center, theatre/theater). "Canada's $200 million-plus Dextre is designed to eventually take over some of the more routine outdoor maintenance chores from spacewalking astronauts. Dextre, short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter, will join the space station's Canadian-built robot arm, already in orbit for seven years."
Dextre, pronounced Dexter, from the word Dexterous.
I'm guessing this has something to do with the Olympics and how suddenly Canada = First Nations.
"B.C.'s Aboriginal Relations Minister Mike De Jong is reacting enthusiastically to a pitch from a Vancouver Island First Nation to rename the Strait of Georgia...the Salish Sea to honour aboriginal settlement of the area."
Personally, I am completely against this name change and I will do my part and voice my objection to Mike De Jong. Maybe you feel differently, but whichever way you want this to go you'd best let Mike know, because a lot of other people will.
Email: Mike.deJong.MLA@leg.bc.ca
Abbotsford-Mount Lehman Constituency Office 103-32660 George Ferguson Way Abbotsford, BC V2T 4V6 Phone: (604) 870-5486 Fax: (604) 870-5444
Victoria Office Room 310 Parliament Buildings Victoria, BC V8V 1X4 Phone: 250-953-4844 Fax: 250-953-4856
Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation Ministry Office PO Box 9051 STN PROV GOVT Victoria, B.C. V8W 9B1
And there you have it. The amendment to Bill C-10 that is covered below was lobbied for by the hateful, divisive religious group Canada Family Action Coalition. "The Canada Family Action Coalition is an evangelical group that seeks to have what it calls "Judeo-Christian moral principles" restored in Canada." And the president of the group is, of course, one of those guys who condemns films without watching them. But I believe this allows me to rest my case when it comes to; the Conservatives trying to be more American, the suspicion that religious doctrine may be used to vet art, and that censorship of non-conservative views is the goal...not "public interest"...whatever that is to Harper.
Original post------
The Conservatives have, in the style of America, hid an amendment inside the large Bill C-10 that was already passed in the House of Commons. This amendment would give the federal Heritage Department the power to deny funding for films and TV shows it considers offensive even if federal agencies such as Telefilm and the Canadian Television Fund have invested in the production. Representatives from the Heritage and Justice departments would determine which productions are unsuitable and therefore ineligible for tax cuts.
David Cronenberg, the Canadian director behind the critically acclaimed Eastern Promises, said the proposed plan doesn't belong in Canada.
"It sounds like something they do in Beijing," he told CBC News. "You have a panel of people working behind closed doors who are not monitored and they form their own layer of censorship."
Cronenberg says Canadians have a reputation for making edgy dark movies that go places other filmmakers wouldn't venture.
This new panel could quash that kind of creativity, he said.
Stephen Waddell, national executive director of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, the actors union, said it seems the government wants to set up a form of "morality police."
"The government is overstepping its bounds and interfering in an arms-length process," Waddell said in a statement released Thursday. "Withholding public funding for film and television productions it deems offensive is a dangerous direction for this government that smacks of censorship."
Waddell said he wonders whether the standards to be applied would be representative of a modern Canadian society or what he calls a "fundamentalist perspective" borrowed from the United States.
Every little step this Harper government takes towards emulating their hero, Prez Bush, makes me increasingly nervous because the Liberals can't get their act together to be a credible opposition so this whole damn country might end up as America-lite if we're not careful. The response from the government was this:
Annette Gibbons, associate director general at Heritage Canada, said the changes are only slight alterations to current guidelines.
"It's our responsibility to ensure that public funds are not invested in certain types of material, such as hate propaganda, excessively violent material, or pornography," she said.
And who said that this government department is at all an authority on these issues? By what measure are they making their decisions? Which religious yardstick can we expect them to apply? How are they even defining the parameters of those categories? How slight can the alterations be if they require an amendment to a Bill and the Income Tax Act?
Does this inching towards censorship make anyone else nervous? I thought that in Canada we were educated enough to interpret and assign value to what we see and hear without the government deciding in advance for us.
The anti-climate change/anti-Kyoto folks' argument always centres around their skepticism that humans are responsible for the environmental issues that are coming to a head. eg. "The lobby group was formed several years ago to protest Canada's legally binding commitments in the international Kyoto agreement on climate change and cast doubt about research linking human activity to global warming."
These arguments persist and are eaten up by the tragically uniformed despite the following:
"The overwhelming majority of scientists that study climate change agree that human activity is responsible for changing the climate. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of the largest bodies of international scientists ever assembled to study a scientific issue, comprised of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries. The IPCC has concluded that most of the warming observed during the past 50 years is attributable to human activities. Its findings have been publicly endorsed by the national academies of science of all G-8 countries, as well as those of China, India and Brazil. The Royal Society of Canada – together with the national academies of fifteen other nations – also issued a joint statement on climate change that stated, in part: "The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the consensus of the international scientific community on climate change science. We recognize IPCC as the world's most reliable source of information on climate change."
I think we can agree that humans have contributed something to the issue (think Greenhouse Effect) even if we can't all agree that we are primarily responsible (think Earth's natural cycles of hot & cold).
BUT,
I posit,
Does it matter who or what caused/is causing the problem?
AND, even if there was no evidence of climate change, would we not still want to commit to reducing our pollution output levels? Does it matter if every single country in the world is committing to action?
The range of historical tragedies, from genocide to colonialism to the restriction of human rights, were/are supposed to teach us to think as a global unified species and that positive action, no matter how small, makes a difference and starts to avalanche into more and better action. It is also a tenet we attempt to teach the young though we refuse to model the behaviour.
It seems to me that all the bickering going on about who is at fault for melting ice caps or the childish attitude of we-won't-do-anything-unless-China etc.-does-too is completely irrelevant to just doing something about the wellness of Earth and its inhabitants.
Spending so much time and energy closely examining the relationship between Industry and Climate restricts our view of the Big Picture: the planet is under siege, species are rapidly becoming extinct, air/water/land pollution is out of control, and the health of living things is under attack.
I decided to take a quick search about and found a video that takes a similar but radically different approach to the argument. In his awesome video How It All Ends, science dude Greg Craven demonstrates that deciding to act or not on Climate Change is completely disconnected from whether or not you believe in the phenomenon. I've embedded the video below, and although it's educational, it is entertaining...a low budget Bill Nye The Science Guy if you will. In all seriousness it's a compelling argument about risk and I'm glad I saw it so I hope you will also watch it. And think hard on it too. Thank you.
After that last post, I took a walk to the nearby Olive Garden (blah) to pick up some dinner...and realized that a lunar eclipse was occurring!
Tonight, it's a serious moon theme. I trudged through snow in the freezing Edmonton night to find a good vantage point and snap some pictures. I ended up having to sit on my heels knee-deep in snow to prop the camera on a post and take about 50 pictures. Then I called Wookiee and chatted for 20 minutes about eclipses, Somalia, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, etc. It wasn't until after we hung up and I turned to walk back to the hotel that I realized that my wet-from-snow dress pants had been frozen into solid sheets. Fraking Edmonton.
Anyway, this is the best picture I could manage sans tripod or DSLR.
Wookiee tells me that the two bright objects above and to the left of the moon are Saturn and the bright star Regulus. Awesome.
Yep, I'm in Edmonton again. Monday and Tuesday I was in a strange little meeting room at the back of a Best Western parking lot in North Vancouver. Today and tomorrow I'm in several large meeting rooms at the Delta Edmonton South Hotel and Conference Centre. Basically, I'm in the midst of a Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder marathon. And that's all I've got to say about that.
I walked up the street to grab a drink and pastry before the conference began this morning. I didn't put up my 'Do Not Disturb' door knob hanger and when I returned to the hotel I decided to grab something else from my room. When I entered the room there was nobody in it nor had it been cleaned or touched in any way. But there was a single green rubber glove inside the door. Curious.
On Monday I mentioned to Wookiee that I wondered what was going on with Castro - hadn't heard much of anything from that camp since his bro took over. This morning the Globe & Mail that was slid under my door had this front page:Ask and you shall receive!
When I got back to my room this afternoon, the cleaning staff had rearranged all my washroom things and laid them out on a towel. Also curious. More intriguing is the evidence, in depressed circles, that my in room glasses had been washed (read: rinsed) in the sink and left to dry on that towel. Ew. Those glasses might be dirtier now than when I left them. What if the last guest left them here just rinsed and now I'm using them? Gad!
The last time I was in town I stayed at the Fairmont. *gazing wistfully towards the Macdonald* No reused anything in that place!
Maybe I should just number these and post as I find. So let's call this one Hypocrisy Shout Out #2...
As you may have already heard, there is a damaged American spy satellite heading towards Earth. It is believed that it will impact in early March and the thinking heads down South have been deciding what to do about it; let it crash land? shoot it out of the sky?
"President George W. Bush, acting on advice of security officials, has decided to try to shoot down the satellite before it enters Earth's atmosphere."
Sounds reasonable. But reading on...
"Last year, China drew criticism from a host of countries, including the U.S., after it used a missile to shoot down an old weather satellite about 865 kilometres above the Earth. The move was widely viewed as one that could lead to the increasing militarization of space."
Ah. There's the hypocrisy. I knew we'd find it if we persevered through the entire article. America can do whatever the frak they want, even if they deride it in the first place. Is it to protect their secret imaging sensor on board? That's what the White House says, but what does the military say?
"Joint Chiefs of Staff vice-chairman Gen. James Cartwright denied that, saying classified technology is not an issue because the heating that would occur on re-entry would destroy any technology and "would not justify using a missile to shoot it down." "
And does anyone really believe that America is against the militarization of space? Isn't it more likely that they're against the militarization of space by anybody other than themselves? Seems like they're just jealous that they didn't already get to shoot missiles into space; "It will be the first time the U.S. has ever attempted to shoot a spacecraft down with a surface-to-air missile, Cartwright said."
Leatherback turtles are the most endangered of the world's turtles and in response to this article I am doing my part to raise awareness of their plight.
Leatherbacks are one of the many animals of the sea who travel all over the globe in search of food. Research has shown that the turtle, which can reach 2.75 metres in length and weigh over 900 kilograms, roam from the South China Sea to the Sea of Japan and the North Pacific. Leatherbacks are not only larger than all other sea turtles in the world, they are the biggest reptiles on the planet.
Scientists tracked one turtle by satellite on a 20,000 kilometre journey from Indonesia to America before the transmitter's battery ran out. Leatherbacks, and other turtles, face dangers such as ingesting debris (read: human garbage) and multinational fisheries as they struggle to survive but we do little to nothing to protect them at sea.
"It will be the responsibility of many countries to ensure the species survives in the Pacific Ocean for future generations," Benson said.
"It's an animal that doesn't recognize international boundaries. You can protect the nesting beaches, but if you can't protect the animal in the water, you haven't done anything."
This is an interesting dilemma; given that biofuels reduce our reliance on traditional fuel but at the same time spurs hunger worldwide by inflating the cost of food, what will we decide is more important to address? (Perhaps the answer is both.)
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