The Indian government has signed into law a scheme to make subsidized food available to two out of three Indians. From The Sydney Morning Herald: Every eligible person will be entitled to five kilograms of rice for three Rupees (5.4 cents), five kilograms of wheat for two Rupees (3.6 cents),
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The Disaffected Lib: The Heat Turns Up on The Land Down Under
To most Canadians, Australia is synonymous with “hot.” Well it’s going to get hotter a lot more often for the Aussies. A University of Melbourne study predicts that Australia’s devastating heat waves will increase about five times and they’re blaming global warming for causing much of it. Sophie Lewis and
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Can We Trust the RCMP to Investigate Duffy-Wright-Harper?
RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson sent a curious e-mail to his senior officers in March of this year. In an email dated March 22 from Paulson to more than 50 chief superintendents, assistant commissioners and deputy commissioners, the commissioner said that meetings or lunches with parliamentarians “can have unintended and/or negative
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: One Lie Too Many for Sideshow Steve?
If the Mike Duffy scandal has shown us anything, it’s how easily – and successfully – Stephen Harper and his minions lie. They’ve almost brought it to the level of an art form. Perhaps it can be put down to hubris that follows years of watching one scandal after another
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Forget Peak Oil, Peak Water is the Greater Threat to Mankind
It’s a problem so widespread, so obvious, so immediate and so perilous to so very many people in every corner of the world that it speaks to the paralysis of our political leadership that they have all but ignored it. It is what’s now being called “Peak Water.“ Anyone who
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: If You Don’t Secure Your Firearms, Don’t Complain When the Police Take them
Harper’s Redneck Society, High River Branch, is incensed that RCMP officers entered their abandoned homes and recovered unsecured firearms left in plain view. Sideshow Steve wasted no time in bitching about it, even exceeding his authority to recommend direct that the weapons be returned to their owners without delay. Now
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: China’s Green Goo
29 thousand square kilometres of coastal green goo is a lot, even for China. That is the size of the algae bloom now blanketing China’s Yellow Sea coastline. Here’s a Chinese beachgoer wading through the stuff. Pictures on Thursday showed beachgoers swimming and playing in the green tide in the
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: It’s the Greatest Threat Ever to Confront Canada. Why Can’t Our Leaders Rise to the Challenge?
Rulers are a dime a dozen. Leaders are a rare commodity. In difficult times nations need leaders, not rulers. The greater the difficulties that confront a state, the greater the risks if you can’t tell one from the other. We are embarking on difficult times and, in this case, that
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Why Rulers Can’t Govern – See: Morsi, Mohamed
WWPD? What Would Pharaoh Do? Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, is out, deposed by his country’s generals for failing to address the Egyptian people’s unrest. It turns out Morsi’s downfall might have been the result of his spending too much time trying to rule and far too little
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: F-35 Falls Behind Schedule, Again
Testing can become costly and time-consuming when you’re building an aircraft before you know if it will actually work as advertised. It defeats the whole notion of schedules and target dates when you’re working in the dark. Lockheed’s overdue, over-priced and under-performing F-35 stealth light bomber is the poster child
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Egyptian Government Falls to Coup
The New York Times reports that Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi has been ousted by the country’s military. Egypt’s military moved forcefully to seize power from President Mohamed Morsi on Wednesday, deploying tanks and troops in Cairo and other cities, restricting his travel and convening an emergency meeting of top civilian
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Climate Change 2.0
The denialist community is having a field day sowing doubt over global warming as it was once understood while ignoring that the narrative they cling to has been overtaken by major events. Research showing a link between the frequency of El Nino – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and global warming
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: A Decade of Global Weirding
The first decade of this millennium was marked by unprecedented climate extremes. That according to a report from the World Meteorological Organization. The World Meteorological Organization says the planet “experienced unprecedented high-impact climate extremes” in the ten years from 2001 to 2010, the warmest decade since the start of modern
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Technology, the Grand Blur, Is Ever Harder to Escape
I’m surrounded by technology and I’ll bet you are too. In an arc around me are a wireless printer, a desktop computer, a flat screen monitor, a speaker system, a wireless mouse and keyboard, a high performance modem, a cordless phone, a high output wireless router, a tablet and a
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: El Nino – Global Warming Link Found
The El Nino – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has, for the first time, been linked to global warming. A team of researchers examining tree ring evidence from the past seven hundred years finds that ENSO events have increased in frequency since the onset of global warming. Spawning droughts, floods, and other
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Remember all the talk about western forces being out of Afghanistan in 2014? Well, that deal is off now. NATO has quietly decided it will keep advisers in Afghanistan until 2020 or until we totally take leave of our senses. The problem is the Afghan army – the one we’ve
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: PRISM’s Conduit Into Your Life
The Washington Post has published a series of U.S. National Security Agency slides showing the conduits through which data flows into the American government’s computer banks. The first column, PRISM Providers, identifies companies actively in the PRISM loop – Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, even Apple. Fortunately none of us
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: They Sell It But They Supposedly Have Nothing to Do With It.
When you buy Athabasca DilBit you’re buying two fuels – a form of synthetic oil and a type of coal. Alberta bitumen contains heavy oil and it contains petroleum coke also known as petcoke. When buyers refine the bitumen into synthetic oil, they’re left with a lot of petcoke, anywhere
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The Enbridge Tantrum, Oliver’s Deceit
When it comes to the merits of the Northern Gateway pipeline, lawyers for the bitumen traffickers almost go apoplectic complaining about the lack of existing pipeline capacity. They come across like little children throwing tantrums. Question: if it’s capacity they’re worried about, why are they squandering 50% or more of
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Harper Explores Geo-Engineering to Arrest Global Warming
The Harper cabinet has been meeting to explore options for geo-engineering our way out of climate change.On June 5, 2012, then–Environment Canada deputy minister Paul Boothe convened a meeting to discuss geoengineering, according to documents posted online by Mike de Souza, a Postmedia national political reporter. Geoengineering, which has been
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