Rio + 20 was, according to U.N. Gen-Sec Ban Moon, too important to fail yet that’s exactly what it did and that’s all it did – fail. Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, calls it, “the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war.“ “The Earth’s living systems are
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The Disaffected Lib: When I’ll Vote Liberal
Who should lead the Liberal Party? Who cares? To me, and I suspect a great many other Canadians, the Liberal Party is and will remain irrelevant until it speaks to us about things that matter. I have resolved never to support the LPC again until it commits to meaningful policies
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Bad Schadenfreude, Bad!
When writing about environmental calamity descending on the United States one must resist the urge to resort to “they had it coming.” Yes, America has been a huge and to date insurmountable obstacle to any meaningful global consensus on fighting climate change. Yes, that’s especially true for the American south
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Stiglitz – Pushing Back the Oligarchs
Nobel laureate economist, Joe Stiglitz, has a warning for America – and for Cajnada too – we cannot hope for our societies to survive the cancer of inequality. Stiglitz had some noteworthy comments during a recent AlterNet interview, excerpted here: what drives capitalism is the profit motive. You can profit not
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: For What?
Ex-con, ex-financier, ex-Canadian Conrad Black is at it again, telling Canadians what’s wrong with them and their country. This time he used a podium opportunity to exhort Canada to “seize more global influence” in a world rocked by global instability and broad decline of the affluent states. Black said this
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Industrialized Poverty
The House(s) That Brian Built If there was any people NAFTA was supposed to help, surely it was the Mexicans. It was supposed to be their admission ticket to industrialization and the great Middle Class, their path out of poverty. As McClatchey Newspapers reports, Mexican workers have found those fancy
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Taking Stock on the Rain Coast
It’s grey and wet outdoors. It’s been grey and wet since, what, October? Just kidding, we’ve had a few nice days. Everybody’s sure of it even though nobody can agree just when we got them or how many there were. Must’ve been a few. Must’ve been. I just popped over to the
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: BC Court Strikes Down Ban on Assisted Suicide
It’s about time. A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has upheld a terminally ill woman’s right to physician-assisted suicide. Justice Lynn Smith held the ban to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. The woman, who has late-stage ALS, was represented by veteran lawyer Joe Arvey. “I describe the evidence and the legal
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The Liberals Don’t Need Another Trudeau. They Need Another Pierre.
Many Liberals, displaying the stubborn arrogance that moved their party from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6 in just three election cycles, are fawning all over Justin Trudeau as a party leadership frontrunner. I’m sure he’s a fine fellow, one of many fine fellows within the Liberal ranks, but
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The Buffalo’s Revenge
America’s historic bread basket, the Great Plains, is just about finished. Like the Canadian prairie, the Great Plains was a massive expanse of grassland inhabited by migratory creatures and native tribes that moved with them. Then the white man showed up. First to go were the buffalo, next the Indians.
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: A Lot of You Have Been Waiting to See This
It’s a screen capture from a beheading scene during the first season of Game of Thrones. Go ahead, take a close look. Who does that look like? Whose head is that on a stake? Full marks if you guessed George w. hisself. According to dlisted.com, the production company just ordered
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: From "Citizens United" to Corporate Electoral Blackmail
Hey, it’s just corporations exercising their newfound political voices. According to Politico, U.S. defence contractors are planning to throw a wrench into November’s presidential and congressional elections by issuing hundreds of thousands of layoff notices just before voting day. The message is brutal and blunt – re-elect Obama and kiss
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Is China Grooming Africa for Half a Billion Surplus Chinese?
The theory, published in Asia Times, is that Chinese authorities have figured out their homeland can support a population of 700-million, max. With current numbers at 1.2-billion, China has to jettison hundreds of millions of people. “While a cottage industry of “China-in-Africa” experts has emerged over the past five years,
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Rounding the Square Pegs
Rounding square pegs. That, in a nutshell, is the message being delivered by the Royal Society and 104 other national science academies, to delegates of the Rio+20 Earth Summit if mankind is to get through the 21st century. Rounding square pegs means two things – reducing overpopulation and over-consumption. Overpopulation
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Now Will You Stop Killing Whales, You Bastards?
The Japanese supposedly go whaling for “scientific research” purposes. Hard to tell what they’re looking for. Maybe they’re exploring new ways to kill whales or the process by which they die when you explode stuff inside them. But they were probably killing them for the same purpose they slaughter dolphins
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: IMF Chief – Inequality, the Environmnent, Social Upheaval are Linked
The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, warns we can either accept a realistic approach to sustainable growth or face declining incomes, environmental calamity and social upheaval. “…she said the rich should restrain their demands for higher incomes while there are still 200 million people worldwide looking for
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: China’s Toxic Farmland Time Bomb
China has a bagful of environmental challenges. You name it, they got it. Polluted waterways, contaminated air, greenhouse gas emissions that confound attempts to measure them – the lot. When it comes to China’s land situation, we commonly focus on desertification – the exhaustion and degradation of arable farmland and
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: For Liberals, the Way Forward is the Way Back
If the Liberals are ever coming back, and that’s a lot more iffy than many of them want to admit, it will be under a leader determined to reverse the party’s corrosive slide to the right. That would mean a leader willing to take up the cause of malignant inequality
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Why Did Lincoln Insist on Keeping These Morons in the Union?
North Carolina recently caused snickers when its state assembly legislated against sea level rise. Their ordinance stipulated that future sea level rise must be calculated on historic results, not on today’s accelerated rates. Now it’s Virginia’s turn. Earlier this year the state of Virginia paid $50,000 for a study on
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Pentagon Post-Mortem on Iraq & Afghan Wars – We F__ked Up
Afghan Army Soldiers One way of knowing for sure that America has lost a war is when the Pentagon begins navel-gazing. That’s exactly what the US military is doing now – an autopsy of its dismal performance in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where did America go wrong and when? In both
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