Image via WikipediaImagine a World Without Cancer
http://2getwellnow.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/imagine-a-world-without-cancer-2
Stop the Tar Sands! How exactly?
http://suzukielders.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/stop-the-tar-sands-how-exactly-2
The evidence mounts daily that current oil sand operations are simply pushing the envelope too far and too close to allowable and acceptable limits in the natural and human ecosystem – too many emissions, too much danger to downstream human communities, too many ecological impacts, too great a drain on dwindling water resources. So what we should be doing is insisting, absolutely, that whatever they produce be churned out with full consideration to the ecosystem and the local communities, and with full reckoning of the costs thereof.
Let’s be honest – the oil people up in Fort McMurray are not munching tons of sand just to annoy a few of us down here. They are simply supplying a commodity which is in huge demand by society. They didn’t create the demand, they’re just good at providing what society wants, i.e. cheap fossil fuel to burn in gridlocked Escalades standing on the Santa Monica freeway.
Stop the tar sands? Not likely. The current value of the plant alone exceeds $90 billion. Billions of dollars accrue to tax revenues from the oil sands every year, and 60% go into federal coffers. The Alberta coffers currently take in almost $2 billion annually from royalties. This money is the source of many federal and provincial programs and services in infrastructure, health and education. One in every 15 Albertans works for the energy industry, Take a stroll around Calgary and check out the fine recreational facilities and art museums funded by Big Oil. You had better go tell those folks you want to shut them down, fellow Elder, because I sure ain’t.
The long-term solution to this quandary is not to storm the bastion or the tailings ponds or whatever. It’s much duller, more difficult and highly contentious (sort of Elder-ish). In other words, it’s a matter of economics and politics. Fossil fuels are simply too cheap to discourage the present profligate consumption and the associated high rate of oil production from sources such as the oil sands. Moreover, production from the oil sands is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. The full costs of the negative consequences of production, especially the ones difficult to quantify (e.g. higher cancer rates in local people) are never costed into the production equation. So two approaches immediately present themselves: make oil energy costs totally realistic though elimination of subsidies, and level the playing field through the imposition of carbon taxes. B.C. has already demonstrated that the latter are not necessarily politically unacceptable.
The objective, fellow Elders, is not to stop the tar sands, it’s to make them redundant.
Talking About the Philly Blogger Tax/License
http://seanoandjefe.blogspot.com/2010/08/talking-about-philly-blogger-tax.html
Day 13: Kusadasi, Turkey
http://drwooisin.blogspot.com/2010/06/day-13-kusadasi-turkey.html
The long version
http://infinitymoremonkeys.blogspot.com/2010/08/long-version.html
Photoshop Sketch Tutorial
http://fishbooking.blogspot.com/2010/08/photoshop-sketch-tutorial.html
Walk in the Rain
http://themommymachine.blogspot.com/2010/08/walk-in-rain.html
Finding Data – The Water Intensity of Food
http://zeroresource.com/2010/05/27/finding-data-the-water-intensity-of-food
Stone ( 1974 )
Farm Share Friday
Thriller!!
Yorkshire
Brainstorming Ideas **
Water Footprint HT Erik's Blog
Review: Washington Rules
http://www.fpif.org/articles
Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War is Bacevich’s fourth book on the subject of American exercise of power. This time, he takes up the question of the political calculations that have produced the basic tenets of American foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War, examining how and why they came to exist and to survive all challenges to their supremacy.
Bacevich describes two components that define U.S. foreign policy. The first is what he dubs the “American credo,” which calls on “the United States — and the United States alone — to lead save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world.” Second is what he calls the “sacred trinity,” which requires that the United States “maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projections, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.”
These rules, Bacevich argues, are no longer vital to the existence of the United States, and have led to actions that threaten to break the army and bankrupt the treasury. Rather, they are kept in place by individuals who derive personal benefit from their continuance. Bacevich does not hesitate to blame a Washington class that “clings to its credo and trinity not out of necessity, but out of parochial self-interest laced with inertia.”
Our Bloody Valentine
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/david-michael-green/31003/our-bloody-valentine
When an empire has to label its military gang-rape of 25 million other people by the title "shock and awe", it's a safe bet that the folks who need convincing are the ones doing the giving, not the receiving.
Given this recurring motif, we probably ought to crank out some new Madison Avenue slogan to memorialize the occasion, as we (ostensibly) hit the Mesopotamian exit ramp. Prolly "Mission Accomplished" would not be a good choice, and not just because it wasn't. "Never Again" pops to mind, but then that one is already taken. Plus, it's a downer. And, given the general wisdom of the American electorate, it's hopelessly Pollyannaish. How likely does it seem that this country has now given up its penchant for invading third world countries with fourth-rate militaries and wasting a whole boat load of inconvenient brown people who don't even speak 'Murican? Not very, brother. Not very.
No, something else is needed. Something to divert our attention from the reality of this war. Something with a nice fall theme, perhaps. How about, "Are you ready for some football?!?!"
Obama to escalate slaughter in Yemen
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_61010.shtml
With the opening of a new front in Yemen for the CIA’s drone “targeted killing” program, the Obama administration is steadily escalating the role played by both the covert agency and secretive US military Special Operations forces as a global Murder Incorporated.
“The White House, in an effort to turn up the heat against Al Qaida’s branch in Yemen, is considering adding the CIA’s armed Predator drones to the fight,” reported the Associated Press on Thursday, citing senior Washington officials.
“The US military’s Special Operation Forces and the CIA have been positioning surveillance equipment, drones and personnel in Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia” in preparation for the stepped-up killing spree, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The Washington Post quoted intelligence officials as saying that the CIA now views Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as a “more urgent” threat than the Qaeda organization in Pakistan.
Yemen, like Afghanistan and Iraq before it, is being targeted not to eradicate terrorism—the killing of civilians with cruise missiles and drone attacks will only produce more recruits for terrorist attacks—but because of its strategic location, bordering Saudi Arabia, the number-one oil exporter, and the vital Bab al-Mandab strait, through which three million barrels of oil pass daily.
“They’re not feeling the same kind of heat—not yet, anyway—as their friends in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” one official told Reuters Wednesday. “Everyone involved on our side understands that has to change.”
The “kind of heat” inflicted upon the population of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas is well known. According to Pakistani officials quoted in the country’s media, at least 700 civilians were killed by drone attacks in 2009. According to an estimate by a Washington think tank sympathetic to the Obama administration, at least a third of those killed in drone attacks in Pakistan are civilians. This year, drone flights have increased ten-fold, with missile strikes increasing from one a week to at least one a day.
Even Pakistan’s devastating floods have not brought an end to these robotic assassinations. The latest reported attack came Monday in North Waziristan, leaving 20 dead, including four women and three children.
Now, in the name of combating terrorism, Washington is proposing to inflict this same kind of state terror on a desperately poor country that is already torn by regional, religious, ethnic and tribal conflicts. A secessionist movement in the south of Yemen, which had been a separate country until uniting with the north in 1990, has simmered for the last 16 years.
Supporters of the assassinated dissident Shi’a cleric Hussain Badr al-Din al-Huthi have battled the predominantly Sunni government for the past six years in the northern Sa’ada and Amran provinces.
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