To help ignorant New Brunswickers get out from under their rocks to bask in the shimmering green glow of the nuclear sunrise, Graham’s liberals have arranged for an indoctrination (sorry information) session, under the auspices of Natural Resource Minister Donald Arseneault.  The honourable Arse. has thoughtfully brought mining industry representatives and their scientists to enlighten doom criers about the totally not disastrous reality of mining for radioactive material.  Skeptics are assured that these scientists are not at all like the vapid cheerleaders that President George Bush enlisted to fight the war on reason.

My hope is that they will at last unveil the new treatment for Uranium Tailings.  Rumor has it that the industry has found a way to dispose of the millions of tons of radon emitting powdered ore left behind after uranium extraction (which contains 85% of the toxic nastiness).  In the past this flour like substance has been left to blow with the wind, contaminating soil, plant, animal and water without impunity.  Now, however, millions of flitting fairies have been equipped with miniature dust devils and hired to collect the harmful waste and convert it into magic dust for use in Disney theme parks.   Oh the splendid miracle that is the free market. 

We should count ourselves fortunate here in N.B. since in Ottawa and Wakefield they have to put up with the likes of Jim Harding, the former director of research in the School of Human Justice at the University of Regina, who is trying to raise awareness of his new book Canada’s Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System.

If you plan on attending one of the two information sessions and would like to get a sense of the hippie horseshit that Sean Graham’s Monkeys (sorry Ministers) will be inoculating you against then you can visit the Community Coalition Against Mining Uranium. 

This weekend past we received a call from friends of ours who live in a little spot at the mouth of the Saint John river called Dominion Park.  Their house had flooded, they told us.  Wanting to be good friends we drove down, but I don’t think either of us was prepared for what we saw.  Their backyard was under three feet of water when we arrived at eleven that morning.  Throughout the day the water level continued to rise.  The same three feet was sloshing about in their basement.  We spent hours wading in that ice cold water, trying to recover whatever we could.  As is often the case with such things there are layers to the despair.  The defeat of watching a brand new washing machine grow increasingly waterlogged is different in kind from the loss you experience when you fish inter-generational heirlooms, soggy and smeared, out of the oily water.

Our friends have lived in this house for thirteen years.  You can imagine how much can accumulate in that time.  Not all of it was lost, but enough damage was done for this to rank as one of the great tragedies of their lives.

Driving throught the Kingston Peninsula you get a sense of how many others are being effected by this disassterous event.  Before the water had crested we saw homes where the river was seeping in through the first floor windows.  I have read some Canadians remarks in online forums, saying that because these people chose to live on the flood plain they should deal with the consequences and not expect any help from the government.  I am sorry for the person whose heart is so empty that he can look on the suffering of his neighbors with such callous indifference.  Although the Canadian government doesn’t seem to share this ignorant view, the difference is one of degree not kind.  In order to receive government compensation a person will have to come up with a one thousand dollar deductible.  Maybe if Stephen Harper had actually been on the ground of the emergency, not flying above it, he might have seen that many of the people who have been worst hit by the flood, are those who can least afford it.     

A friend of mine sent me these posts from a golf magazine’s online forum.

Many of your readers are politically conservative and do not appreciate Golf Digest pandering to Al Gore and his climate hysteria.  The climate change movement is simply an international socialist conspiracy with the goal of empowering government to control every aspect of Americans’ lives.  It is simply a trick designed to get government tentacles into as much of the private sector as possible. 

Thank You golfan4.  This is a golf magazine and website.  Please leave Algore’s money making, socialist scam out of golf.  No doubt Golf Digest is under pressure from the rest of the left leaning media to address this subject.  Please don’t submit to the pressure.  Just keep talking about GOLF.

It is kind of hard for me to process that there are people out there that still need convincing about the imanent perils of climate change.  Needless to say, it defies comprehension that there are assholes like these two, or like R. Joe Barton, who can keep a straight face as they deny.  Sadly this kind of inbred ignorance isn’t limited to some simple southerners.  A Canadian author, Lawrence Soloman, who has written The Deniers, a book which makes the claim that there are actually respected scientists out there who refuse to be bullied into all this global warming nonsense.  Shame on you Mr. Soloman.  Shame.

Anyone who has been reading this blog for awhile has probably figured out that I am vehemently anti Harper and his cronies.  The flabby jock John Baird is a particular nemesis of mine.  That being said, our home grown industry puppets have nothing on Bush and co.  It doesn’t take a lot of looking before one starts to become convinced that there is a concerted effort being made by politicians who have been bought by big business, to confuse the discussion with false accusations and problematize real solutions.  Take Senetor Jim Inhofe for example.  The fact that Fox News backs him is reason enough to think he’s a royal asshat. I believe one day we will look back on these obstructions as criminal acts.

I listened to an American woman vent earlier tonight about the state of her nation.  ”Lot’s of things are going really bad”, she said.  “Everything seems really bad”.  She was scared that at 56 she was going to have to retrain for the third time to adapt to a changing job market.  She had no faith in any of the candidates who were running for office, and yet she saw no alternative but to be led by one of them.  It occurred to me while we were speaking just how far we’ve come from my grandparents generation where the word career was not obsolete.  We shared a wish to return to a life in which you could hand a business between generations.  A return to a system that sees people as… people, not as eligible workforce, or skilled labour (pick your euphemism for market resource).

So this is what I think.  I think the majority of people would actually be happier if we returned to a simpler, more localized way of life.  I am not being Utopian here, nor am I necesitating any specific ideological outlook.  In my experience, moost people feel like fantastic future the fifties projected, hasn’t worked out like it was planned.  More and more I sense in people a real desire to live in a meaningful world again.  Why should we let these disingenuous liars manipulate the decision making process so that we’re all left sucking the mop in a big way.

The latest issue of McLean’s Magazine  commits a section to articles that illustrate how poorly Canadians are doing at improving their environmental impact.  Here are a few facts they cite: 

Canada has the highest energy consumption of all G8 nations. 

We emitted 747 Million tonnes of greenhouse gasses in 2005. 

We rank 28th out of 30 on indicators like energy and water among the countries belonging to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. 

 We consume 1,500 cubic meters of water per person per year, more than any other industrialized nation. 

The list is considerably longer than this, but suffice it to say that we are not doing very well.

And small wonder.  How can we expect to make any significant progress toward environmental sustainability when our Federal Environment Minister, John Baird, won’t even conduct a federal review of the new Irving Oil Refinery.  According to an announcement he made in 2007, Baird declined to allow an independent panel to review the environmental impact of the new refinery.  Such an independent survey is supposed to be guaranteed by the Canadian Environmental AssessmentAct.  Baird has shown masterfully that Canadian politicians can be in the pocket of big oil just as deep as any American can.  Irving asked in the proposal for the refinery that no federal assessment be performed.  Baird has said that there is no need for both federal and provincial agencies to assess the plant.  While I haven’t been in the province for a long time, I have been here long enough to know that Graham’s Liberal’s can’t be trusted to take Irving to task.  Luckily there are those who will.  The Conservation Council of New Brunswick and the Friends of the Earth have enlisted Ecojustice (Sierra Legal Defence Fund) to file a lawsuit against Baird. 

It seems to me that the only reason this sort of treasonous behavior is tolerated is because there is a general atmosphere, not only in New Brunswick, of fear, that standing up to a powerful corporate entity like Irving Oil will mean job loss.  The terror of economic depression leads people not only to tolerate the detestable abuses of industry, but to actively defend them.  I am naive enough to think that there is another way.  We are capable of providing for ourselves without desecrating the air, water, soil and spirit of our province.  To hear the voices of some Maritimers who are not afraid to speak out check out the message board IrvingSucks.

Stephen harper met with with G.Wyuh. Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon at what is termed the Security and Prosperity Partnership Summit.  Maybe what they should be trying to negotiate is how the countries are going to disentangle themselves from one another, and re-localize their economies so that the people they were “elected” to represent are empowered to sustain themselves.

There is not a single registered event for Earth Day planned for the city of Saint John.  Now, you’re probably thinking “Why did’nt you organize something yourself?”  You would be right.  Somehow between preparing my end of term exams and papers, looking after my 11month old daughter, holding down a full time job, and trying to see my wife now and then, I let organizing for Earth Day slip.  I guess I thought that this sort of major world wide event would make it onto the radar of public officals whose job it is to organize large public events.  My mistake!  Luckily I can let them know what I think of their job performance in an upcomming election. 

As for Earth Day, I’ll just have to do better myself next year.

I read recently about the U.S. backed coup that ousted Chilean President Salvador Alande.  Alande was the first popularly elected socialist leader in the hemisphere.  One of the first things he did was to nationalize the country’s mines.  For years mines like the Chuquicamata copper mine (the largest open pit mine of its day) were the primary source of wealth for Chile.  Under previous governments the lucrative mining industry was monopolized by foreign interests (American) and the country got a meager compensation which fluctuated with the global market price.  Workers who went out on strike to secure higher wages and better working conditions were thrown in jail, fired from the mine (making it next to impossible to earn a living), and occasionally murdered. 

These were the conditions that Alande opposed.  For his audacity the U.S. sponsored a coup to oust him from power and return Chile to the inhumane, but financially profitable practice they had grown accustomed to.  The man they chose to facilitate all this was General Augusto Pinochet.  During Pinochet’s 17 year rule more than 3,000 dissidents were assasinated or went missing, and over 30,000 report being tortured. 

This got me thinking about all the coups the U.S. has attempted over the years.  Below is a list that I pulled from KryssTal.com.  As stated on their page, this list contains only successful coups. 

Last week my wife got into… a heated discussion about plastic with her mother.  While still awaiting my daughter’s arrival my wife and I made the decision to exclude plastics as much as possible from our lives, specifically where my daughter is concerned.  We had both read why not to use plastic water bottles or plastic bags (500 billion to a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year).  Primarily to do with waste (bottled water creates 1.5 million tons of plastic waste a year, and burns 47 million gallons of oil to produce) there was also some mention of plastic having gender bending properties.  We learned enough then (about a year ago now) that we decided to try and rid ourselves of plastic altogether.  Easier said than done.

Plastic is pretty much everywhere.  It is as insidious as it is ubiquitous.  Once our initial fervor wore down, my wife and I grudgingly accepted that plastic would play a role in our lives.  So it is perhaps understandable that my mother in law saw no problem buying a fisher price walker for my daughter.  She had seen us compromise, returning to the fold of the cult of plastic.  For her generation plastic was a miracle material, which had made the consumer dreams of millions come true.  Except, there is a problem.  A number of them actually.  Plastic is a derivative of oil (something which is immediately problematic for me), and can be very toxic.  Ever throw plastic in a fire?  Hint: the thick, black, acrid smoke is not a good thing.  The chemicals that make that smoke so nauseating are not only released during combustion.  Overtime those toxins leech out of plastic, a process that is sped up by heating it.  Think of the warped tupperware container you pull out of the microwave after nuking it too long.  Think of the transfer of chemicals into your food.  Those same chemicals are in the clear hard plastic sports bottle you take to the gym contaminating your water.  Thanks to landfills and litter, the chemicals in plastic are also leaching out into the groundwater, spreading throughout the environment.  It’s not the worst of our problems, but it still sucks hard.

The risks involved?  Toxins contained in plastic have been shown to interfere with more than 200 genes.  They affect breast and prostate tissue and are linked to the development of cancers.  They are linked to neurological disorders like down-syndrome, and have been shown to interfere with the reception of insulin leading to diabetes.  As I suggested earlier, there are also indications that these toxins could have serious effects on hormones, both in our species and others. 

Children are far more susceptible to the toxic chemicals that leach out of plastic than adults are.  Their tiny, developing systems react to minor doses with frightening effects.  As anyone who has ever seen a child should know, they pretty much have everything in their mouths all the time, meaning the chance that they are exposed to a dose is higher.  So it was not without due consideration that my wife looked at the fisher price walker with a bad taste in her mouth.

Yesterday, a few days after the incident, Health Canada has released its report that BPA is not really great for human consumption.  Retailers have pulled plastic baby bottles from the shelves.  Karma has excellent timing. 

Although I’m glad to see that the government is stepping up and doing something about the problem, I can’t help noticing that their doing it in a typically timid beaurocratic fashion.  If they have evidence that would lead them to classify BPA, whcih is the largest commercially produced plastic in North America, then why not ban it outright?  Why? because it is the largest commercially produced plastic.  And that means cancelling it would hurt the profit margins of big business interests.  So we will continue to be exposed through canned foods (many of which are lined with BPA), through paper milk cartons (also lined with BPA), and a myriad other consumer products (ubiquitos and insidous).

It occurs to me that a lot of this stems from the pace of our society.   By which I mean that, if we slowed down and allowed really adequate time for testing before unleashing products onto the public, then we might avoid this catastrophic learning curve.  It is not coincidence that cancer and heart disease, and all sorts of bad shit have multiplied since the advent of our technologically driven emachine age.  Maybe I sound like a neo-luddite here.  Who knows, maybe I am a luddite trying to smash the machine out of fear and loathing.  But it doesn’t feel to me like the end of the world to slow down a little.  In fact, you might say it feels like the beginning.  

“I realize that something that was growing inside of me for some time… has matured: and it is the hate of civilization, the absurd image of people moving like locos to the rhythm of that tremendous noise that seems to me like the hateful antithesis of peace.” – Ernesto “Che” Guevara.     

Coal extracted from mines in Colombia has been dubbed “Colombian
 blood coal” because of assassinations of union leaders and violent
 displacements of communities at the countryâ?Ts coal mines. Colombia
 is the most dangerous place in the world for people active in trade
 unions; 2,510 trade union leaders have been murdered in the last ten
 years.

 NB Powerâ?Ts Belledune plant burns coal produced in the Colombian
 Cerrejón mine. Approximately 16% of the power in our province is
 generated from Cerrejón coal.

 On March 22, Adolfo González Montes, a worker at Cerrejón and union
 leader with SINTRACARBON (the National Union of Coal Mine Workers),
 was tortured and killed at his home. He is survived by his wife and
 four small children. Other union leaders and their family members live
 in fear as unknown people prowl around their homes and they receive
 threatening phone calls.

 In many cases where the perpetrator has been identified, government-supported paramilitary organizations, the armed forces or the police have been found responsible. The Colombian government’s
failure to act on such crimes allows the perpetrators to kill trade unionists with impunity. Despite knowledge of Colombiaâ?Ts deplorable human rights track record and opposition from the Canadian labour movement, Canada is in the process of forging a free trade agreement with Colombia.

 In 2006, SINTRACARBON took the brave and noble move to support the
 communities affected by their employer. The union included the
 communitiesâ?T demands for collective compensation in their bargaining
 proposals with the company. The union investigated the Cerrejón
 mineâ?Ts effects on communities in November 2006. Jairo Quiroz with
 the union described what he saw: “Their fundamental rights have been
 violated. These communities lack the most minimal conditions necessary
 for a decent life. They seem to belong to the living dead.”

 José Julio Pérez, formerly a farmer in Tabaco, Colombia, visited
 New Brunswick in March 2006. Today, Tabaco and its homes, farms,
 church and school do not exist. All that lived in Tabaco was destroyed
 for the Cerrejón mine in August 2001. During the bloody displacement,
 some of Pérezâ?Ts neighbours sustained serious and enduring injuries
 after being attacked by police.

 Since the development of Cerrejón in 1982, indigenous Wayuu and
 Afro-Colombian communities in La Guajira have been forcibly displaced
 from their lands. Traditional agriculture-based livelihoods have been
 destroyed with the loss of land and industrial contamination. More
 communities face similar fates with planned expansion of the worldâ?Ts
 largest open-pit coal mine.

 Coal extracted from Cerrejón is exclusively exported to meet the
 energy demands of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Massachusetts while
 many people displaced by Cerrejón have no electricity.

 While Cerrejónâ?Ts owners, Xstrata, BHP Billiton and AngloAmerican
 were welcomed by the Colombian State, local indigenous and
 Afro-Colombian communities located on top of coal reserves did not
 have a say in the development or destruction of their communities.
 Atrocities against them were justified, including imposed poverty,
 brutal intimidation, beatings and the prospect of being killed.

 Debbie Kelly, an RCMP forensics officer active with her labour union
 in Halifax is selling hand-woven bags made by La Guajira women as an
 urgent fundraiser for the affected communities. After visiting the
 communities around the Cerrejón coal mine in 2006, she wrote: “Some
 only eat every three days and for the smiling little children, it is
 hard to take. Even though their little body is racked in open sores
 from contaminated water, they donâ?Tt cry.”

 As SINTRACARBON mourns the loss of their brother Adolfo González
 Montes, they call on Colombian state agencies to immediately
 investigate and bring to justice those responsible for his murder.
 SINTRACARBON is also requesting protection for union and community
 leaders. Concerned citizens are asking NB Power and the New Brunswick
 government to pressure the Colombian government to ensure the rule of
 law and an end to the impunity for crimes against union leaders, human
 rights defenders and the civilian population. NB Power and the New
 Brunswick government are also being asked to establish a human rights
 policy in their purchasing contracts.
 The Fredericton Peace Coalition (www.frederictonpeace.org) and the
 Atlantic Regional Solidarity Network (www.arsn.ca) are currently
 organizing Colombian solidarity efforts. For more information,
 contact: info@frederictonpeace.org

Jesse Ventura has apparently been busy down in Mexico learning how to wage a revolution.  That’s the topic of his new book “Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me“.  I have not read the book, nor do I really know much about Ventura (Other than that he was a pro-wrestler turned state governor), so this is not necessarily an endorsement of either.  I’m mentioning “The Body” because I agree with what I’ve heard him say publicly.  America needs a revolution!

I try not to get to involved in US politics.  I am Canadian after all.  But, it is nearly impossible to avoid completely.  Especially during election season!  The big reason I ignore US politics is the alternating waves of nausea and indignation that wash over me after any prolonged exposure.  It’s a similar feeling to what you might experience if you were forced to sit in a bathtub full of nuclear waste while watching, powerless, as fat men ate cheese burgers in front of doe eyed starving orphans.  Needles to say, I don’t like it.  But, as mentioned above, it is impossible to avoid.  So, why does America need a revolution?

 The two party system of U.S. politics amounts to a elitist dictatorship.  I know that everyone wants to believe that Barack Obama will change things.  Maybe he will.  I may be overly cynical, but from what I can tell you don’t get to be commander in chief of America if your ideas are significantly different from the status quo.  Consider Ralph Nader.  His candidacy for president is hamstrung by the media’s domination of the electoral process.  Because he is hostile to big business, and big business owns the mainstream media, he is marginalized and silenced to the vast majority of Americans.

 What’s wrong with the status quo?  Well, that’s a good question… pretty much everything.  The U.S. is now nine trillion dollars in debt, and they are still fighting an old school Imperialist War of Occupation.  John McCain has said that their troops will stay for a hundred years if they have to.  Seriously John, if countries like America don’t stop flagrantly disregarding the sovereignty of other nations in order to access resources like oil, for the profit of the wealthy minority, mankind may not see a hundred years. 

Ventura said in an interview with Larry King that a justified war is one in which you are willing to send your own son.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to state categorically that none of the candidates have children who stand to spend time in Iraq.

The great irony of it all is that the American ethos is strongly individualistic.  The dream of America is of the self made man, which implies a cultural reverence of the individual.  Once Rip Van Winkle comes down off the mountain, however, he finds the world drastically different than it was when he went to sleep.  I’m inclined to say that the reality of contemporary America is closer to what Ventura says, “a nation of lemmings”.

If you are an American, that should make you mad.  Good, get mad.  There is a lot to be angry about.  Your country was forged on revolutionary principals.  The vocabulary of liberty and fraternity has become a hollow rhetorical device.  Freedom of the individual was never meant to enable a privileged class to dominate and exploit unhindered by social conscience.  Your founding fathers were flawed in many ways, but the future they envisioned was meant to be free from the tyranny that reins today in corporate America. 

                                                                      There are alternatives.                                           

Take back your culture.   

America Needs A Revolution!