While in New York last week, I finally made it to The High Line. The High Line is a unique city park that opened in 2009. I’ve been meaning to go there ever since, but now I’m glad I waited: the second stage is open, so we were able to get the full eff…
Continue readingTrashy's World: Movember continues!
Check it out – already growing back quite nicely! If you haven’t already, please consider giving a few shekels to my Movember campaign! Please support my growing efforts and the 25,500 men who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this yea…
Continue readingThe Happy Wanderer: Wow I Was Right!
I stated just a few post’s ago that the Conservative would reduce their budget targets. Now This time around Jim Flaherty thinks he has a good case. Saying the economy isn’t good and the budget is going to suffer. True, but why didn’t you kno…
Continue readingPushed to the Left and Loving It: Benjamin Netanyahu is Just a Politician. Get Over It.
Headlines today reflect comments made by President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in a private conversation at the G-20.Sarkozy called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a liar”, while Obama expressed frustration with hav…
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: If I go missing after this Friday, this is the reason why
Elders Scroll V: Skyrim, is due to be released. Some video of the scenery and characters that was released by Bethesda, the maker of the game, has me drooling: If Harper is going to send this country to Hell in a handbasket, as I believe he will, at l…
Continue readingSlap Upside The Head: Québec Commits $7M To Fight Homophobic Bullying
How about I share some encouraging news for a change? The Québec government has officially launched their Lutte contre l’homophobie, a five-year program to combat homophobic bullying and discrimination. The program, which was announced in 2008 but came into effect last month, has seven million dollars allocated toward over 60 anti-homophobia measures, including support for independent […]
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: We all can’t be wrong #nlpoli
There’s no small amount of humour in Kathy Dunderdale trying to claim that people who oppose the Muskrat Falls scheme are poorly informed. At last count, anyone with significant experience in energy policy in the province over the past 40 years is fo…
Continue readingThe Skwib: Squirrelly
It is the Season of the Doom. The days darken. Temperatures drop. And the Black Rodents of London are out for blood. Or nuts, at the very least. I remember reading once that the term “squirrelly” was coined during the pioneer days, and it was used to describe homesteaders who had been forced to live […]
Continue readingJim Flaherty’s broken deficit promises
Jim Flaherty delivered his fiscal update – reneging on the plans they put forward to pay off the deficit a year early as
was outlined in the election platform, not that it was a surprise. He also
promised to only increase EI premiums …
Trashy's World: An argument against vaccinations…
You be the judge: Vaccines Assault The Blood & Violate Biblical Law The Bible tells us in Leviticus 17:11-12 that: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood… No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you …
Continue readingMind of Dan: A picture is worth a thousand words… a graph more so
Click to embiggen Going Down the Up Escalator: Created by dana1981 at Skeptical Science (here and here). Temperature data are noisy, it isn’t hard to find a few years where this noise drowns out the slow and steady warming signal. This is expected. Bottom line: this graph makes it abundantly
Continue readingFacing Autism in New Brunswick: Language Level and Cognitive Function Recognized As Affecting Autism Disorder Severity
In Diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorders Lack Reliability Pysch Central senior news editor Rick Naubert Ph.D., (article reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psych D) reports on a new study by Catherine Lord, Ph.D. and colleagues that examined the relati…
Continue readingAnti-Racist Canada: The ARC Collective: Shakeup in Blood & Honour Calgary
When we posted our Halloween video, we didn't anticipate the discussion that would result, but it ended up being very interesting: Jonathan Besler said… FYI:[Kyle’s girlfriend] has broken up with Kyle and is starting a new life.Read more »
Continue readingFive of Five: What the Mayor Said
Story Here.
Continue readingNEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around. Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and
Continue readingNEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around. Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and
Continue readingNEW MEDIA AND POLITICS CANADA: Today’s War On Everything News
I’m going to run out of titles for these daily wraps for my radio program in a hurry. I’m hoping the links and videos are of use and get sent around.
Here’s a video of an Irishman getting it right about Wall Street, that the good people at Crooks and Liars posted today. It’s dead on in so many ways and extremely funny, but the language is definitely NSFW.
So to begin by following up on the Iran acquiring the technology to create a nuclear weapon and why the west should now go to war with Iran story, well, things remain unclear. The leaks that were making the rounds this week suggested that the IAEA was absolutely going to confirm that this was in fact the case and since they have considerably more credibility than the US and NATO on such issues, this was going to bolster the case for an attack on Iran. It turns out however, that this is not the case. The IAEA report in fact says that they are “unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities,” according to the report by the UN watch-dog.
Iran has been accused of “…being slow to respond to IAEA requests for further information “concerning the construction of ten new uranium enrichment facilities,” the sites for five of which have been decided and only one of which has begun construction.” That’s far different from being ready to arm a long range missile with a nuclear warhead – in fact it’s not the same thing at all.
There is apparently only “…circumstantial evidence, provided by Western intelligence sources, that Iran has engaged in research and development activities which are “strong indicators of possible weapon development.” No direct evidence, however, is provided of an active weaponization program; the report’s concerns mostly arise from the absence of evidence disproving weaponization.
Did you get that? What evidence the IAEA claims to have comes from the same Western intelligence sources that have been beating the drums for war for some time now while baselessly claiming that the Iranians are a threat. And their concerns are about the absence of evidence disproving weaponization! That’s an insane reason to impose sanctions, let alone wage war. But it does this sound like the same kind of rhetoric that was heard before the illegal war on Iraq. It’s not out of the question that Iran could be pursuing such weapons, but it would likely be to ensure that they don’t find themselves the victims of attacks from the outside. They represent no threat to the west or to the world unless they also possess a desire to be incinerated.
There’s no war on poverty taking place in the US, but they are arguing about how to define it. The latest estimate says 16% of Americans lived in poverty in 2010. There’s only one word necessary to describe that, shameful.
There has been a war on the poor and it’s what the Occupy Wall Street Movement is about. It’s been going on for decades now …but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Over at Alternet you can find a Francis Fox Piven piece that a great job chronicling the numbers and the moral force behind tackling this ongoing assault on the poor.Some numbers to consider: Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children.
In the US, there’s also the war on the elderly and their pension plans. CNN’s reprehensible Candy Crowley …badgered the Director of the AARP, David Certner about whether seniors are going to be willing to “put skin in the game” when it comes to getting our budget deficits under control. That’s right – don’t tax millionaires and billionaires. Go after the pension plans that seniors paid into their entire working lives and deprive them of a decent retirement and dignity. Seems the wealthy won’t be happy until the elderly are living on cat food.
The war on the environment is being championed by those at Fox News, and this week they are pretending to have uncovered a “scandal,” …claims that IPCC reports “have often been written by graduate students with little or no experience in their field of study. Well, they left out some rather important and pertinent facts. Turns out that there were over 450 lead authors for the 2007 assessment report, plus 800 contributing authors and more than 2,500 reviewers. Fox identified only one graduate student who worked on the 2007 report. So they spoke about 1 out 1250 authors. I know, I know, it’s shocking that Fox News would engage in this kind of deceit.
Thanks to the changing climate, mountain pine beetles have been waging war on hundreds of thousands of whitebark pines and winning, making this rugged pine a likely victim of extinction in the very near future.
And by the by, the latest research on current climactic conditions finds clear evidence that the global warming we’re witnessing is unprecedented in the past 20,000 years. And remember, climate change come with all kinds of costs, some of the cash. So far in 2011 the costs of extreme weather in the US is upwards of $52 billion dollars! Go to the link and do the math – it’s extraordinary. Seems that prevention would be a money saving idea whose time has long since come.
Going to end this post on a happy note… actually, three of them: There were elections tonight in the US and voters in Mississippi went out and voted down the ghastly personhood amendment which would have defined a fertilized agg as a person. In Ohio voters defeated the anti-labor law Senate Bill 5 which would have stripped workers of their right to collectively bargain. And in Maine the voters defeated a voter suppression law keeping the state’s longstanding practice of same-day voter registration on election day.
David Climenhaga's Alberta Diary: Expect fixed election dates? Get ready to fall on your butt, Charlie Brown!
Premier Alison Redford gets her Tory football ready. But the guy in the stripy short can’t be a real Albertan – the cloud bubble gives him away. Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: the real Ms. Redford and fixed election d…
Continue readingRed Tory v.3.0.3: OCW Vancouver/Victoria Update
The few remaining hardcore activists in Vancouver and Victoria continue to discredit whatever legitimate grievances initial supporters of the copycat OCW movement in Canada may have purported to represent at the outset of the protests several weeks ago. Tonight, protesters … Continue reading →
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