WIP

Well, that's a pretty dismal comment on your intellectual abilities then! Because you're responding to MG's critique of of the general lack of will to hold new tech and its creators to account when the usual unexpected secondary consequences arise. No doubt the modern religion of secular humanism (which most fundamentalist Christians also belong to whether they know it or not) believes that any attempts to restrain the application of new technologies is an attack on our expected brighter, better world just beyond the horizon. As our machines and our avaricious systems of economics have painted us into a corner early in the 21st century, every so called 'skeptic' and 'rationalist' starts droning on about their hope and even faith in some as yet undiscovered invention saving the day for the human race. It's a faith not much different than climbing up on your roof and waiting for the Rapture! Exactly how fast or how quickly do you believe the process of evolution by natural selection occurs? Because...on the subject of climate change, a number of biologists have pointed out that the reason why our present day tinkering with the dials of atmospheric gases has already set off an extinction event on a grand scale, is because the rate of change is much greater (10 times the PETM) than past warming events....which did allow many species of land animals enough time to make adaptations and migrate away from the intensely hot equatorial zone. Not only do all the human barriers in place today make it difficult to migrate, but only the smallest creatures like insects...which are often the ones wreaking havoc as they move north, the ones who are most likely to make the adaptations to survive in a hotter world. As for us....we're screwed if we keep following present trends. In every other major and minor extinction event in Earth's history, the dominant orders of animals and dominant species are the ones most seriously impacted! Because they have spent too long, too comfortably adapted to having a relatively easy time acquiring food and having offspring. When a large, dominant species (and humans are unprecedented based on the percentage of total land, water & resources that we use for our own needs) experiences a population crash...which we can expect if the global system of industrial agriculture begins to fail on a grand scale because of climate change, groundwater depletion, soil erosion etc., then a collapse in numbers of the total human population will have a cascading effect that will drive our numbers down very low...even lower than the estimated numbers of a permanently sustainable population. When other species go through that kind of collapse, it is often the end and they go completely extinct, because surviving members of the species are too weak, too sick from pandemics, and too isolated to restart a healthy growing population. It seems that in our time, we have kept doubling down on what we can take from the biosphere, rather than thinking through what we need for sustainability; and as our food production and economic activity has become globalized so that no region of the planet can escape a major disaster, the future calamity will be global and more likely to end our species in a few generations. So much for new tech making a better and brighter future!

Just an aside, medical research in Canada and the US is increasingly becoming the province of big pharma; since governments are cutting back on research funding and allowing the "private sector" to step in and build the new university wings and equip the labs and make the hiring decisions for staffing the new, improved departments. So, every new state and public university in North America has new business and economic departments staffed by neoliberal drones who brainwash the next generation of economists and MBA's with their crap! (no wonder every so called expert from right to left is just twiddling with the dials of market capitalism!) When it comes to Big Ag, whadoyaknow, Monsanto has generously provided the money to fund the bulk of the research on safety and potential harms of GMO seeds! In climate research, we have that monstrosity built by the Koch Bros. in Huntsville Alabama for UAL- Huntsville and staffed with the handful of AGW-denying climatologists...or if they don't believe it...those who are willing to go along and just pick up the cheques....sort of like Huntsville's long history of collecting money from the military contractors...especially the multibillion dollar "Star Wars" sinkhole created by Ronnie Rayguns! And in medicine, it's Big Pharma...all over the place! Because with public dollars receding, multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies are more than willing to leap in and support the research that arrives at the conclusions they desire...because if a pharmaceutical company is allowed (as in a recent scandal of a dangerous pain relief drug) to sponsor 13 tests of their product, and just pick the best one and bury the rest (even holding researchers to confidentiality agreements to guarantee their silence), then how much confidence can the public place on any new drug that's approved for public consumption? Not much more than zero in my estimation!

So, if the choice is death or plastics, you choose plastics. I'm left wondering why there was such a drive to make all plastics biodegradable 40 years ago, and almost nothing is said about it today, as we watch the Pacific and Indian oceans fill up with plastic residues. During the late 60's/early 70's, there seemed to be a brief window of time when western culture and economics were subject to scrutiny. Consumer activism has vanished from MSM today, and there is less concern on biohazards and growing toxic wastes now that we're inundated with it.

Back to the Pope again, I can't say I'm surprised that new polling data coming from the US shows the Pope's popularity in decline since his encyclicals condemning greed and taking action on climate change. This news blurb notes that some liberals may be falling away because he's not likely to make institutional changes, like ordaining women priests. But, what's being missed in this poll analysis is that Pope would be making radical changes by sanctioning married, gay and women priests after centuries of an all male (supposedly straight) celibate priesthood. Whereas it is not being radical in the longer history of the Catholic Church to criticize greed and materialism. Many Americans may be offended because they created their own version of Christianity in the 20th century that turned the traditional creed upside down. By attacking neoliberal economic policies and exhorting Catholics to focus on the needs of the poor...especially large numbers of people in the third world who are being marginalized by the globalization trend, Pope Francis is telling his followers to focus on this part of traditional Catholic doctrine, instead of keeping their attention on sexual issues. This is a message that is winning back large numbers of Catholics in Latin America who have been leaving since JPII started the trend of condemning leftwing priests and supporting US-backed regimes, but by taking shots at America's true religion, he's likely to lose followers and influence in the US.

I'm reminded of one technology in particular - the creation of plastics, may be one of the major contributors to dieoffs of plankton, fish and marine mammals in the oceans. All of the plastics created never completely break down to natural organic compounds, and will remain in the oceans for thousands of years...and yet we keep adding to them, throwing out more and more disposable plastic garbage. Back in WWII, when many of these compounds were created, nobody thought of doing any sort of risk assessment for unintended impacts....and that's the primary failing of nearly all new tech that gets added every year.

About 10 years ago, a behavioural psychologist - Paul Piff, created a test with a rigged monopoly game that a group of random volunteers would engage in, that arbitrarily rewarded some players and not others. The findings mirror the results from sociology studies of the past 50 years, where the successful players have inflated egos and feel superior and believe they deserve greater rewards, and are more likely to cheat and excuse their cheating. In the rigged monopoly game, the subjects who kept winning (but didn't know it was fixed) began talking louder (some were even verbally abusive and insulting) and interrupting losing players....even taking more chips from a snack bowl that they were told to share while playing. The losing players (no surprise) became quieter, more discouraged, and filled with self-doubts. What should the rigged monopoly game tell us about the kind of society we live in today? Well one thing it tells us is that those who are "born on third base" feel entitled to the privileges they've been given merely by accident of birth, while those who are not as successful in our kind of society, are likely to be stuck at the bottom, especially if they come from a dysfunctional background and turned to alcohol or drug abuse early on. So, I'm not even going to bother arguing about returning to progressive taxation and other liberal methods to make capitalism fairer. I'll just say that the regime we are in right now is psychotic and incompatible with long term human survival on this world! Most of the incentives for devouring resources and fouling ecosystems and ever-increasing rates is because material demands keep increasing in societies with greater inequality. This system that we are told rewards achievement is actually the greatest threat to the survival of coming generations. If our species has permanently lost its ability to share and cooperate with others, it will be swept from this earth like so many other once-dominant life forms that proceeded us.

I didn't get to my main issue with so called "protection of intellectual property" laws yesterday. What's most offensive about this new regime is that the life of patent and copyright protection keeps getting extended. Eventually Disney will no longer have to keep going back to extend the copyrights on movies made by Walt 80 years ago, it will keep providing free money to Disney...or whoever the corporation sells those copyrights to in the future. I remember reading that when copyright protection on books first began, it was only for 20 years. Mark Twain apparently, was the first to demand extending copyright life till as long as the author was still alive....apparently his later works didn't sell as well as his classics, and he was bad with money and would have ended up destitute if he couldn't squeeze a little more money out of them. Then they were extended for the heirs of the author's estate, and now we are at a point where you won't find much on Gutenberg Press or other online sources of free online books that are less than 100 years old. Remember Mulroo decided to double patents on new medicines from 7 to 14 years...these will also be extended much further. Supposedly that was to provide needed incentives for drug companies to create better medicines for us....even though they take most of their primary research free of charge from government-sponsored agencies like the NIH in the US. It seems that Big Pharma has instead, enriched itself greatly at everyone's expense, as they create new drugs to treat everything from pain to depression that are mere variations of existing generic drugs. It's all one big racket that creates monopolies and provides little returns for the people who actually think up new ideas.

I believe the terrorism label is valid in the cases where attacks are deliberately targeting civilians in the hopes of creating fear, panic, internal divisions and extreme over-reactions.....9/11 anyone! On the world stage... as I see it, the greatest perpetrator and purveyor of terrorism in the world today is not ISIS or Al Qaeda; it's the United States of America! Because America (incl. our dickless go-along leaders) uses its vast military forces as a threat to nations that refuse to follow US military and trade&commerce policies. It was a mystery to me and many others for years why US military spending kept increasing year after year after the Cold War ended, and puts the American Empire right where every other world empire in history has ended up previously: on the verge of bankruptcy! But the American Empire...like previous great and lesser empires cannot end its addiction to waging wars and military spending, because those military bases, command centers, carrier fleets that spread out around the world, are America's leverage to maintain its' grasp on controlling international banking and trade. Notice how, in recent years, the US military operations are allowing or deliberately using torture and other tactics that were condemned in previous times. Worth noting that terrorist shock tactics often occur when a marginalized enemy feels there is no alternative other than resorting to "asymmetric warfare." In a world where revolution and mass uprising is made virtually impossible because of new high tech weapons and 'counter-insurgency' tactics, the remaining holdouts are likely more inclined to go for shock value like the ISIS phenomena. Well, let's go with the evidence...which you're not going to find a lot of coming from Hollywood regardless of who's side their on! The plain facts of history of the European Conquest are that native populations of the Americas were largely annihilated through both accidental (disease spread) and deliberate ethnic cleansing as America's leaders right from the outset, decided they had to push westward....and push out the people who were living there. Which is why surviving east coast tribes like the Seminoles and Cherokees are mostly found half way across the country in Oklahoma today! Portraying the cowboys as heroes is the typical travesty that happens when the victors of wars provide the only historical accounts that are taught to children and succeeding generations, while true historical accounts have to be sought out from academia. And when it comes to lone gunman-lone wolf types of mass shootings being labeled terrorist attacks, it's being noted today since this latest lone wolf mass killing in a movie theater in Lafayette Louisiana, that the vast majority of terrorist attacks in America are being committed by right wing racist white men! This is the real face of terrorism in America:

See! Everybody can agree on something.

Sure it is! "Radical Islam" is Islam that doesn't follow American or Western ways of doing business! So, the Saudi's and Gulf Sheiks are good Muslims, while the Muslims in Yemen and Bahrain, fighting against foreign oppression, are the 'bad Muslims.' I've noticed that as much as everybody claims to be unbiased and basing their arguments on evidence, that if you actually step back and reassess your ideas and presumptions and change your mind on a few of them...LOOK OUT! Nobody is allowed to change their minds on anything, anywhere these days, or they are attacked for being a turncoat or lying about their original beliefs. On this whole War On Terror..Muslim extremism meme that took off after 9/11, I was pretty much following the standard line until I really started noticing some of the inconsistencies in the arguments by the coalition of atheist/Christian fundamentalist anti-Islam advocates. I think it started back when it became clear that the US Gov had left a sectarian mess in Iraq back in 05 that they would never be able to fix. The biggest flaw in the story about how much Islam and Muslim adherents are incompatible with allowing any other religions was they had no plausible explanation for how or why one million Christians were living in the boundaries of modern day Iraq for the last...close to 2000 years! Same goes for Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and others; it's only during the last 10 years that persecution of Christians and other religious minorities has become genocidal and forcing them to leave the lands they had been living in since the time of the first apostles moving east to make Christian converts. Recently, I read that some of the very last Christians in eastern Syria are being forced to leave because of the threat of ISIS. According to our atheist and Christian...and Jewish anti-Muslim talkers, groups like ISIS...which allow no variance from their version of Islam, are the doctrinally correct expression of their religion. So, why now? Why have all of these minorities been able to live in the middle east for so long and never faced the ethnic cleansing that erased similar minorities in Europe?

I have at least two American cousins who lost most of their equity in the real estate collapse in the US...one in Florida, the other in New Mexico. They thought they were in a situation where they could both retire comfortably before age 60 and in good health....and they both (three if I include my Florida cousin's wife) ended up having to go back to work full time again because so much of their wealth had been plowed into paying off their mortgages early. Well, at least they didn't end up like so many unfortunates...underwater on fraudulent 'escalator' mortgages and going bankrupt. But, my takeaway is that all of the phony disingenuous promises about the strength of the US real estate markets was being made by the banks and their hired propagandists all across the TV dial....so why should we believe that Canadian real estate markets can only go in one direction - UP? Especially with so many people speculating in real estate because of low returns on almost every other investment that average people can get in on. The myth of what's called "Pareto Efficiency" has been taken down by a number of economists and a few psychologists who've noted that the myth is based on a presumption that buyers and sellers are making rational choices....and that doesn't describe the real world....especially what marketers using new media and psychological evaluation, have done in the last 60 years to create an army of compulsive consumers who can't even provide rational answers for their major buying decisions! I'm immediately thinking of the LIBOR Scandal...that major media tried to bury as quickly as possible a few years ago. The major banking institutions controlling the exchange rates were shaving percentages to make billions in extra profits for themselves, and the new phenomena of programmed trading, where major institutions can move so fast they can actually jump on trades made by third parties before the trade is completed. Anyone who believes that high finance and markets are fair...let alone a 'democracy' is delusional. It's a game where big money wins most of the hands played, and the small fries are lucky to make any gains. What bothers me now with all the talk of entering the Information Era, is that the whole motivation behind TPP, TISA and TTIP appears to be focused on enforcing *and extending patent and copyrights on new products and ideas. And the original creators and inventors are not the ones who are collecting the big money from the existing system. It's the companies that buy up patents looking for profit opportunities later....or in some cases, stuffing those new ideas if they might cut into the profits from an existing product the company owns.

It's the bullshit position from the right that reduces all social issues to matters of personal morality....or tries to! Nevermind Obama quietly giving the go-ahead yesterday for Shell's new drilling leases in the Arctic (*notice that crap like this and getting fasttrack through Congress always happens under the cover of big news events), the real issue is whether you've got all of your low energy lightbulbs and keep the tires on your car inflated to the proper pressure! I think Al Gore and other green capitalists who started looking at looming environmental disaster for business opportunities, are a big part of the blame on this one! Most of the leading environmental spokesmen and organizations shifted the discussion from government and corporate responsibility to matters of personal consumer choice.

Unless you still got school-age children at home to limit most vacations to July and August, I don't know why Canadians would leave in the summer months.....the only time of the year you're usually guaranteed good weather to do stuff outdoors.

Did you notice back in the day, that "Big Balls" was the only song that AC/DC turned down the volume a bit so everyone could hear the lyrics! After all the protest songs and utopian themes of the 60's, by mid-70's it was plainly obvious that rock music in total, had joined the corporate machine and wasn't interested in anything besides having a good time and making more money. And then along came the fake pr-friendly activism of the 80's (U2, Sting&The Police)....the end.

Sounds interesting, I'll have to take a look at. It seems to me that there used to be a lot more topics based on new books and studies a few years back. Now, most have stopped reading and prefer poo-flinging. Off-hand, the 'traditional left' (unions) have no choice about basing their struggle around factories, because the only venue for socialism allowed in 20th century capitalist societies was negotiating better working conditions in manufacturing. Laws made union organizing of service sectors like retail and food services near impossible. Worth noting that factories themselves were an invention created to replace skilled tradesmen and women with drones making simple, repetitive movements over and over again for as little wages as possible. So, even at it's best....like auto production up till the 70's, the production line was still a soul-killing monster that at least provided the plant workers with good wages...but that era ended with globalization...back to the 19th century again. My favorite book close to this subject is "Techno-Fix" by Michael Huesemann, an engineer to unmasks the false hopes and dishonest claims of techno-optimists from liberal to libertarian. Most new technologies have come to us with high costs that have never been properly assessed for long term damages, let alone answer the question of how modern tech-dependent populations are going to cope with the eventual exhaustion of non-renewable resources needed to build them and their products.

I'm for zoning laws because I wouldn't want an oil refinery built next door because my city has no zoning bylaw policies.....like Houston! When did improving energy efficiency become a bad thing? There is still a lot more that can be done to reduce energy consumption. And when the only motivator for efficiency is high energy prices, that means....well that means we get what we've ended up with right now after burning through half of the planet's stored petroleum reserves and 90% of the cheap oil and gas. If by 'diversity' you mean the requirements major home builders used to have to build public housing units, I still see that as a positive, because it's one of the key factors why we don't have the volatile racial situation that exists in most American cities. It doesn't fix everything, but when people of different origins and backgrounds have to live together and send their kids to the same schools, the conflicts are much lower.

Makes sense, as long as you mean Big Jim is a guy with a big gut that hangs over his junk!

And you're talking total numbers not percentages, which would show higher than average black foreclosures.

This is another weather topic where unexpected effects of increased global average temps and CO2 increases have made the situation worse than it already was. There are always forest fires, the difference now...as explained on the most recent episode of RadioEcoshock is that the fires are bigger and burning hotter than was being studied in previous decades. The trend was first noticed in massive Siberian forest fires over 10 years ago, and now the trend is happening big time in our northern boreal forests. The worst aspect of the "superfires" is that nothing is left after they've burned out a section of forest....no tall trees, no pine cones, nothing is left to rebuild the forest after the fire has burned through as occurred back in the days when we had normal weather: New Age of Superfires. Up till now, it's been taken as a given that trees and forests are automatic carbon sinks. But in an age where trees can burn and leave debris and soils still emitting carbon into the atmosphere, the forests themselves are becoming a positive forcing effect for increased carbonization of our atmosphere!

well, thanks for confirming that the categorizing of who is/who is not a terrorist is plainly racist process based on how white/ or middle-eastern the shooter looks! It was noted after the South Carolina shootings that the suspect was described on CNN and all over MSM as "a disturbed youth." That designation never applies to someone who's darker...has a beard...let alone a turban etc.. I report that came in on my Twitter feed today from Rabble (like it or not) shows that Canada...just like the US primary terrorist threat is white rightwing nutcases, not Arabs working for ISIS etc..

The standard argument for making it impossible to regulate food additives, fracking fluids, shipping oil by rail etc..

Correction: it was big government that created and established the internet. The corporations swooped in...like they always do...to take advantage of it once the hard work of developing it was established.

Right, because he has had the power to address the economic fallout but failed...example: no help for homeowners bankrupted by dishonest...even fraudulent mortgages, while bailing out the banks who were holding billions in overvalued loans through Q.E. A large percentage of those who went underwater on mortgages...many losing their homes...have been black. But, the banks were allowed to foreclose and even drive down the value of entire neighbourhoods making removal through gentrification possible. Where was Obama?

this isn't exactly new. It seems to me that Dean Obeidallah was one of the organizers and headliners of the "Axis of Evil" comedy tour that ran about 10 years ago.

Wow! If I was an advocate for capitalism, Walmart would have been the last example I would have offered up as a corporate citizen. Let's unpack that "some of the surplus" statement. Aside that..in the US...an estimated 40% of Walmart's stores have been built almost free of charge through grants and tax deferments from local and state governments; as well as providing underpaid employees forms and assistance to apply for government benefits while working for Walmart; providing free consultation and logistics for American suppliers to outsource their production to foreign locations to reduce production costs; and especially aside from the fact that the six heirs of Sam Walton's fortune own more wealth than the poorest half of the American population....take a guess at how much of a surplus I would be willing to give them! The Mondragon Corporation of worker-owned cooperatives that began in Spain in 1941 and still has over 74,000 workers (in spite of Spain's disastrous austerity) certainly provides a good model for worker-owned and directed business models. There are many other cooperative ventures, but it should be pointed out that our government and banking systems vary from uninterested to openly hostile to workers trying to establish new coops. In spite of that fact, the coop movement is growing even in the US, and seen as a way out of economic malaise where banks and large corporations show little willingness to invest profits and prefer to just drive up their stock values. The problem for the cooperatives movement is that they are applying a Marxist solution of sharing "surplus value from labour" in a capitalist business world where cheap imports drive down the value of local production.