WIP

NBC and CNN are trying to curry favour with the same corporate interests that Fox gets payed by. They are courtiers of corporate and government power, rather than critics...so what else is new, except that the rightwing doesn't consider them to be slavish enough in their devotion to corporate power: FAIR: Lobbying for Dictators a 'Precarious,' 'Uneasy' Business...wherein the primary house organ newsapers - NY Times, Washington Post are unmasked by FAIR for their attempts to portray U.S.-backed Middle East despots in as flattering terms as possible. Also on FAIR: Newsweek Defends Drones Plays down civilian deaths, legal questions a review of Newsweek's misleading attempts to defend robot warfare against civilian targets in Afghanistan. But here's where FoxNews has them all beat: Leaked memos reveal how Fox News spun health care debate At Fox, there "reporters" get daily briefing memos telling them to use the same misleading terms that are handed out to Republican politicians! Fox News has been accused before of promoting Republican talking points. Now, the Daily Beast reveals internal memos from Fox News executives that "echoed a key GOP talking point" during year's health care debate. In October 2009, as the Democrats introduced a public insurance option, Fox's Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, issued a memo to staff about how to describe the plan. "Please use the term 'government-run health insurance,' or, when brevity is a concern, 'government option,' whenever possible," wrote Sammon, who also doubles as a conservative commentator when not overseeing news coverage.

Since betsy has resorted to quoting herself to keep talking about abortion...on a thread intended to discuss the philosophical problem of evil no less...I want to add in some recent stories in the news about the resurgence of blackmarket abortion drugs in the U.S.: Cytotec: Rebirth of The "Coat Hanger" Abortion?...A New Drug Sold Online Is Used For "DIY" Abortions At Home The title and subtitle pretty much explains it all. What this report is trying to study is a growing unknown in American society -- why there has been a surge in online sales of this drug, which is intended for treating ulcers, and has strong warning labels about the dangers of miscarriage for pregnant women. Also: The Edge of Shadow: Abortion Prohibition and the Black Market Medical News Today reports: Several recent studies suggest that U.S. women are increasingly seeking methods for self-induced abortions instead of visiting legal clinics that have become "embattled, increasingly costly and geographically inaccessible," The Nation reports. The article profiles a woman from Brownsville, Texas, to illustrate a common experience among women in the state’s Rio Grande Valley, where women, seeking to avoid social stigma and unable to afford medical care, travel to Mexico for cheap drugs to end their pregnancies. An ongoing Guttmacher Institute study shows that 79% of women who attempt self-induced abortions are from the U.S., with the women spread across 20 states. As with practically any good or service that consumers want but find to be criminalized or in low supply, the black market will supply demand. Dan Grossman of Ibis Reproductive Health, who has studied the topic of self-induced abortion, said, "I think our findings suggest that there are still significant barriers to abortion care in the United States," including the "high cost of abortion care — and in most states Medicaid cannot be used to cover abortion care." A bottle of misoprostol in a Mexican pharmacy can cost $87 to $167, while an uninsured woman in Texas can pay $450 to more than $900 for an abortion. According to Guttmacher, 75% of women who have an abortion say they cannot afford a child, and 42% of women who obtain the procedure have incomes below the federal poverty level. While abortion is legal in the US, the lack of reasonable availability, both financial and actual accessibility leads to a de facto ban as long as the pregnant woman can afford to bypass the ban. Society can make this the case as much as it wants to and people have the right to place a stigma on abortion all they want – it is a first amendment right, after all – however that stigma and the high price attached to abortion procedures and medicine will lead people to a black market to meet their needs. Now, it's not as if the rightwing theocrats haven't already considered this problem, even if they refuse to discuss it openly; you can bet that the absurd legislation being proposed in states across the U.S. lately to make women who suffer miscarriage the subject of criminal investigation, is motivated by the realization that abortion has already largely gone underground in the U.S.. This is already the situation further south in Catholic bastion - El Salvador, where NGO's have reported on several instances of women and girls being shackled to hospital beds to await forensic examination if they went in suffering internal bleeding, and were suspected of having a fetus aborted. The message should be simple to understand: when abortion is illegal it doesn't go away, it just goes to the blackmarket, just as it did 40 years ago before legalization. The difference is that now, with all of the information available on the internet, and the easy access to pharmaceutical drugs, blackmarket abortion will be easier to get than it was back then....although the dangers to women's health won't likely be much different. It's a good time for any sane, rational person who believes that the rights of personhood should begin at conception (if there are any!) to pick up a copy of Margaret Atwood's near future sci fi classic: The Handmaid's Tale. That book was written at a time when the Christian Reconstructionist Movement was still largely hiding in the shadows of fundamentalist churches, but it provides a good glimpse of what sort of government Christian theocrats would run if and when they have the chance to carry out everything on their wish list.

The steady rise in oil prices is going to make transportation alot more expensive in the coming years, so globalization, as dreamed by multinational corporations is going to start falling apart anyway. Our economies are going to return to localization out of necessity, and only products of high value will be worth transporting over large distances. Former CIBC economist Jeff Rubin outlined the problems that high oil prices are already presenting for Chinese exports of steel and farm produce to U.S. markets here: So how do we adapt? How do we grow in an economy of triple digit oil prices? We change the nature of our economy. In a world of triple-digit oil prices, distance costs money. The global economy, where we produce one thing at one end of the world, to be sold at the other end of the world, doesn't make any economic sense, because in too many cases, what will be penny-wise, will soon become pound-foolish. The wage "arb", what we save on wages, we will more than squander on bunker fuel. Take the steel industry, for example. Just before the recent recession, some very curious things were happening in the US market. When oil prices got to be over $100 barrel, all of the sudden, Chinese steel exports to the US fell at double-digit rates. And all of the sudden, US steel production was up. And all of the sudden, US Steel Corp., which was one of the biggest dogs in the market, all of the sudden its share price doubled. What was going on? I'll tell you what was going on. For the first time in 20 years, it was cheaper to make steel in the United States than to import it from China. Why? Consider what China has to do to send you steel. First, it has to ship iron ore from Brazil, across the Pacific Ocean, turn it into steel, which is itself a very energy-intensive process, then ship it back, across the Pacific Ocean, to you. At $20 barrel, that works. At $100 barrel, that doesn't work. It added on $60 to $70 dollars, to the cost of a ton of hot-rolled steel. How much labor time do you think there is in making steel these days? One and a half to two hours. The transit costs all of a sudden exceeded the labor costs. Who would dream that triple digit oil prices would breathe new life into our hollowed-out Rust Belt? But in a world where distance costs money, that is exactly what is going to happen. Take food. Last year, China exported $6 billion of food to America, everything from apples to frozen chicken wings, bringing a whole new meaning to having your Chinese food delivered. Steel doesn't have to be refrigerated. Hopefully, frozen chicken wings do. What do you think powers that refrigeration unit? Bunker fuel! The same thing that is powering the boat. The world of triple digit oil prices--it won't matter that farm labor is cheaper in China than in the United States, because the cost of bringing those frozen chicken wings to us will be too expensive. As noted above, that simpleminded supply and demand curve doesn't work when it comes to scarce commodities. By this logic, oil should be back down to $60 a barrel...but it's not, and it's not going to go back down to any significant degree except for reductions caused by economic recessions. In the 70's, the high oil prices of the OPEC Embargo led to a flurry of new oil developments in non-OPEC nations. But, that can't happen this time, because the only oil available is under several miles of ocean floor, and expensive to extract, or the crap they call oil...like tar sands and shale oils, that a desperate, oil-dependent world economy is trying to make use of. So don't expect your supply and demand curve to work any more for oil and commodity prices. Now high prices just lead to more high prices.

First, the Bloc is in Parliament because they were elected by the people to be there. So, if you try to ban them from the House, you do not believe in real democratic principles. The Green Party had some sort of informal alliance with the Liberals when Stephan Dion was the leader, and he was a strong advocate for carbon taxation. Since then, he got dumped in favour of Iggy, who has no strong principles, other than becoming Prime Minister. Many, if not most Greens are closer to the NDP on most issues than the Libs or the Cons, but the problem is how low the NDP ranks environment issues on their list of priorities. They promoted cap and trade in the last federal election, likely because of B.C. politics, where the NDP is against the carbon tax for no good reasons other than it's a B.C. Liberal policy, and has high negatives that make opposing it politically advantageous. That may work for political strategizing, but they lost the support and the confidence of most environment groups for their political maneuvering with this issue: Top environmental groups denounce BC's New Democratic Party It also needs to be noted that political parties should serve higher purposes than getting candidates elected. If carbon taxation is a hard sell (no thanks to oil industry propaganda here) then candidates with principles need to work harder to promote it; rather than trying to tell people what they want to hear. It's time for a lot of people to hear a wake up call on environment issues; and just trying to do what's politically expedient, will leave us in the same mess we're stuck in now. When election time comes, then we can do the business of choosing the lesser of two evils if it's going to be a close election in our local riding...which it won't be in mine anyway. In the meantime we should be trying to advance the causes and issues we believe in, rather than worrying about which mediocre leader gets elected.

Charnia is the genus name given to a frond-like Ediacaran lifeform with segmented ridges branching alternately to the right and left from a zig-zag medial suture. The genus Charnia was named after Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, England, where the first specimen was found. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charnia Next question!

You sure seem to have a blind spot when it comes to rightwing claims to victimhood; such as their claims that "The Family" is threatened by gay marriage. And that one is especially revolting, since they are claiming victimhood by the extension of rights to others. It's really no different than white Southerners who felt victimized by the forced removal of segregation laws a generation ago. NO! What is she a victim of....except her personal attributes of having great ambition combined with limited intelligence. Oh cry me a river! Even many conservatives threw in the towel when she made the shooting up of Congresswoman Gifford's public event all about her, and how upset she is to be made to feel partially responsible for the violent political rhetoric that has become the staple of rightwing politicians and talk show hosts.

Before you accuse anyone of lying, you better have something to back it up with! I know what bullshit Fox serves up because there are media watchdog groups that monitor their broadcasts...they watch Fox so I don't have to! So, don't go throwing shit around like calling me a liar, since I never said I was tuning in in the first place. I was a subscriber when they first got approved by the CRTC, but I would have to be an idiot to be paying extra to watch their crap now. And speaking of their crap, Mediamatters has a complete analysis of their latest propaganda story...which I believe you took - hook, line and sinker, when they produced a false claim of millions of dollars worth of cleanup costs -- Fox Uses Wildly Inflated Cleanup Estimate To Bash Wisconsin Protesters Fine if you want to get your ideas from a propaganda source, but don't call it factual information! Yeah right, all they got is Sheppard Smith offering a dissenting voice there now. Who do you think you're kidding?

Bargaining is asking, and what Scott Walker is doing is telling public service employees in Wisconsin that they don't have the right to even ask for better wages and working conditions. A lot of stupid, uninformed working people in non-union jobs don't seem to realize that THEY have also benefited by proxy from whatever gains have been made by unions over the years. In manufacturing for example, factories that wanted to keep their employees from joining a union, had to offer equal or sometimes better wages than the union shops were paying. Driving down the wages of public sector employees will have a cascading effect on wages and benefits that private sector workers will be able to achieve in Wisconsin!

I can't help noticing that the Fox News propaganda machine can't say the word 'union', without attaching 'thug' to it. And then there's Glenn Beck, running his stupid mouth about class warfare. Someone had a sign at one of the demonstrations last week which read "they don't call it class warfare until we decide to fight back!"....truer words were never spoken.

And it needs to be pointed out that creationists conflate evolutionary theory with abiogenesis, which is completely separate, since evolution begins with life already established. Creationist critics complain that the Miller/Urey Experiments only demonstrate that simple amino acids can be formed in these experiments designed to simulate a possible early earth environment...and not self-replicating molecules. But, just that fact is strike against their claims that increased complexity is impossible and a violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Then, they move on to claims that DNA is too complex to create through random organic chemistry. But, this is another example of false probabilities, since we don't know what the graduating steps are in between creating amino acids to DNA. A popular proposal for a mid-stage in life is that RNA, not DNA, was the first self-replicating molecule that simple organic life was based on: RNA World. It's likely that there are a number of possible ways to turn organic chemistry into life, and that makes finding the exact route next to impossible! One thing we can be confident about, is that the early Earth environment was suitable enough for creating life that it began very early after there was a solid surface. The earliest microfossils of primitive bacteria (stromatolites) found in the Western Australian Desert, are almost 3.5 billion years old; and paleontologists believe the earliest likely are more than 3.8 billion years old. A big question for creationists to explain, is why a creator would create the first one celled creatures, and then have to wait billions of years before creating multicellular complex life? It doesn't make any sense as some intelligently designed system.

A CEO, a tea party demonstrator, and a union protester, sat down at a table in a local diner. On the table was a box full of a dozen cookies. The CEO immediately reached in with both hands and took out 11 cookies. Then, he turned to the tea party demonstrator beside him and whispered:"you better keep your eye on this union guy, or he'll try to take half of your cookie."

And you consider making everyone blind, to be a fitting analogy to reducing income inequality? And yes, equality is a noble goal! The evidence can be seen when comparing societies with greater and lesser levels of relative equality.

Yeah, there's always water in the oceans! But, have you considered the amount of energy that is needed to desalinate sea water? Aside from a few oil-rich desert emirates, large scale desalinization is too expensive to be feasible. We've pretty much reached the limits of what we can produce with oil-based fertilizers. There are no equivalent technological fixes for agriculture similar to the invention of gadgets described here. And, the oil is running out...which is why there is no slack in the world supply of oil -- every little hiccup, like the troubles in Libya, causes a huge increase in prices and starts a new run of hoarding supplies. Also, fertilizers don't replenish trace minerals and nutrients that we need from our food. Non-organic, factory-farmed produce is becoming increasingly devoid of essential nutrients as the soil becomes depleted. Take a look at what has happened to world prices of wheat, soybeans, rice over the last year. It was skyrocketing grain prices that acted as the catalyst for the revolts in Arab countries, starting with Tunisia. Global warming is making the weather more volatile in recent years; and it's happening at a time when declining food production and increasing world population is leaving no slack in the global food production system. Let's start with the math. Corn doesn't grow like a weed. Modern corn farming involves heavy inputs of nitrogen fertilizer (made with natural gas), applications of herbicides and other chemicals (made mostly from oil), heavy machinery (which runs on diesel) and transportation (diesel again). Converting the corn into fuel requires still more energy. The ratio of how much energy is used to make ethanol versus how much it delivers is known as the energy balance, and calculating it is surprisingly complex. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory states that, "Today, 1 Btu of fossil energy consumed in producing and delivering corn ethanol results in 1.3 Btu of usable energy in your fuel tank." Even that modest payback may be overstated. Skeptics cite the research of Cornell University professor David Pimentel, who estimates that it takes approximately 1.3 gal. of oil to produce a single gallon of ethanol. http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/alternative-fuel/biofuels/4237539 Every country should be doing like Europe has tried to do, by supporting their own agriculture. Globalization of food production has created this system of giant monocultures that need heavy amounts of fertilizers and pesticides, along with the energy wasted shipping food products around the world. Another issue to consider, since you seem to be advocating plowing the entire amount of arable land on the planet, is that we are heading into a major extinction cycle, equivalent to the five great extinctions of the past which wiped out on average 75% of the animal species living on Earth at the time. Plowing up the Serengeti would be just one more insane thing to do, like the destruction of the rainforests in Borneo and the Amazon. We don't know how much biodiversity can be lost before the human species that now consumes most of the world's resources becomes another casualty of the Sixth Extinction....but unfortunately, the next generations are going to find out!

I am so inclined to presume corruption in government, that I usually expect every administration to be looking for ways to cheat to their advantage. What draws my attention to these growing Conservative scandals is that back when Harper was running for election in 2006, he was calling it a referendum on corruption of the Chretien-Martin governments. Should I expect Michael Ignatieff to call the next federal election campaign....whenever it comes...a referendum on the corruption within the Harper Government?

Which is not a fitting analogy. I wasn't asking why Israel didn't look for opposition movements in Egypt to support; I am asking why they decided that Mubarak was essential for Israeli security, and tried to lobby the U.S. to play a more active role in supporting Mubarak's regime even after it started becoming apparent that he had lost support within the Egyptian Military?

It seems here that fear and loathing of something foreign is a unifying force that binds fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist new atheists!

Thanks, and the troubled times we have been heading in to for the last ten years, seem to have resulted in an increase in zealotry. In Bob Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians" he points out that times of fear and uncertainty cause an increase in fundamentalisms and authoritarian political movements. Some people are authoritarians by nature...just waiting for someone to lead them by the nose; but many people who would normally be rational and open-minded, take the 'leap of faith' into ideologies that provide simple answers to difficult problems when times get tough. So, it will be enough of a struggle just to keep reason and liberalism alive, without entertaining notions of banishing ignorance and irrationality.

I don't know how far 2 million dollars goes, but I do know that the pro-oil lobbyists have a number of forums that provide publicity for them free of charge: Sun newspapers, National Post, Corus Radio Network, CanWest Global etc. I support the Green Party as a matter of principal to get as much attention as possible on environment issues. When it comes time for an election, my riding is a safe NDP-held seat in Parliament. If Dave Christopherson was in any real jeopardy of losing Hamilton Centre, that's when I'd have to vote NDP and lobby on their behalf. I guess we'll have to wait and see on Monday! I don't know what's in the ads, but I suspect that if there is a change in tone, it's a simple matter of issue-oriented ads get ignored....especially when they are buried by news organizations that work in the interests of the oil companies.

I'll bet that the questions were prescreened before Randy agreed to appear on Letterman's show....lest we forget that he has refused to make a reappearance on Rachel Maddow's show after embarrassing himself during the last election, when he admitted that he didn't agree with applying Civil Rights statutes to privately operated businesses. When a rightwinger says 'we have to live within our means' that doublespeak means refusing to pay back the money taken from public service workers' pension funds, cutting spending programs for the poor, and closing schools and cutting municipal services. Tightening our belts never means cutting military spending or closing bases. And that's one clear difference between Rand and the old man, is that this tool toes the Republican Party line on military policy and military spending. Aside from that, this typical rightwing bafflegab about the rich paying most of the taxes avoids the fact that the top one percent are the only population demographic that has seen an increase in income and accumulated wealth over the last 30 years. And they are using their extra money to buy politicians who will write legislation to benefit them and the companies they own. And income taxes aren't the only taxes that most people have to pay. I haven't done my taxes yet, so I forget the exact numbers that I pay for CPP and EI each year, but I usually make my last payments sometime in October for the year. In the U.S. example, the Social Security deductions are capped at $100,000 annual income; anyone earning more than that, like billionaire hedge fund managers on Wall Street, pay exactly the same social security deductions as the guy earning $100,000. And let's not forget how much more sales taxes and user fees affect the average person more than the fat cat millionaires! I think this bullshit argument that Rand used here started with Rush Limbaugh...and Letterman should have had enough on the ball to tear into it....unless the whole thing was staged, like the Sarah Palin interviews!

And it's not used because it can't be used! One quarter of Russia's land mass is bleak northern boreal forest called the Siberian Traps...the remnants of a volcanic flood basalt plain produced 250 million years ago. It is never going to be suitable for agriculture regardless of climate change. The real terminator is topsoil depletion of modern agribusiness that ranges between 16 and 40 times the rate the topsoil can be replenished. Eventually, the productive land has to be taken out of service. Also, as mentioned previously, all around the world, groundwater is being used primarily for agriculture, but also for cities and industrial production beyond sustainable rates of recovery. A time of reckoning is coming one way or another. It's a matter of making necessary adjustments now, or just crashing into the wall applied by the limited resources of this planet, and seeing who, if anyone survives the coming years.

And North America is also near maximum capacity for food production. And it's important to stress that present levels of farm production are unsustainable; they are going to decline because of the over-use of groundwater for irrigation, and soil depletion 16 times the rate it can be revitalized. Here's one example today that shows just how precarious U.S. agricultural production is: California farms represent 8% of the US's agriculture value, and the Central Valley is where most of that growing takes place. However, as the state struggles with ongoing droughts, the groundwater supplies are dwindling at a frightening rate. According to satellite technology used by NASA, over a 6.5 year period the groundwater supplies in Central Valley leaked away by an amount equal to 63% of the capacity of Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir. With that much water disappearing, it is harder to replenish supplies when it finally does rain. Does this water debt mean a future food crisis? Now, let's add the increasingly volatile weather that has been damaging crop yields around the world, one of which has already been mentioned by GostHack, and tell me how confident you feel about food prices and availability! That would be great if there was extra capacity to make available....but there isn't: At the same time, cropland resources are under severe strain. FAO Food Balance Sheets show that more than 99.7 percent of human food (calories) comes from the terrestrial environment, while less than 0.3 percent comes from the oceans and other aquatic ecosystems. Of the total of 13 billion hectares of land area on Earth, cropland accounts for 11 percent, pastureland 27 percent, forested land 32 percent, and urban lands 9 percent. Most of the remaining 21 percent is unsuitable for crops, pasture, and/or forests because the soil is too infertile or shallow to support plant growth, or the climate and region are too cold, dry, steep, stony, or wet. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/554 In a world that is bumping up to the limits of food production and staring at an inevitable longterm decline, supply and demand is meaningless. What will happen is that scarce resources will skyrocket in price. It appears that Gosthack has already covered the ethanol fallacy: corn-based ethanol is oil-intensive and a total waste of time. And if North America gets hit with similar weather disasters that have befallen Russia, Australia, China, and West Africa...so much for the money-making opportunities! African farmers weren't put out of business by European protectionism. They were put out of business by large foreign corporations that have bought up vast tracts of land to produce food-for-export.

*yawn*

Could you explain why Israel voiced their support for Mubarak until he was forcibly removed? If the U.S. and Israel really cared about encouraging democracy, their foreign policy initiatives would demonstrate that fact. The opposite appears to be true, since both Israel and the U.S. prefer the reliable despot to the unpredictability of the democratic process.

I didn't have time to elaborate on the point that the Al Qaeda training bases and chemical labs have been gone from Afghanistan since the start of the War almost 10 years ago. The Bush Admin. deliberately left routes open for Bin Laden and his inner circle to escape to Pakistan...but that is a whole nother question....the reason why holding up stories about Taleban beheadings is nothing more than Neocon hypocrisy, is because indiscriminate aerial bombings that are killing hundreds of Afghan civilians in this so called - Surge Strategy, are not called terrorism. Afghan president warns Obama about civilian deaths If I was a Pashtun living in the village where nine boys who were out gathering firewood, were wiped out by American air forces who seem to be targeting everything that moves, I would consider that a more serious terrorist attack than Taleban guerillas invading and trying to take over my valley! At least the Taleban can be engaged by someone with a gun...but these drones and fighter planes that strafe and bomb these valleys, are forces that the locals cannot address.....or at least not until one of them finds an Al Qaeda recruiter and offers to strap on a bomb-belt and look for Americans to kill.....and then there will be those like you wondering 'what did we do to deserve these acts of barbarism!'

I don't care whether the Green Party is a viable political force or not; I am still going to support them because the three major parties consider the environment to be just one more political chit to play, rather than what it actually is: THE No.1 issue. Everything else: taxes, medicare, other gov. spending, social issues, fed/prov relations etc. are all inconsequential if the World continues on its present course to extinction. I wonder if the politicians of the Easter Island Civilization a few centuries ago, were spending all of their time debating which tribe got to build the most giant statues to the gods, while they were cutting down every tree on the island and giving a death sentence to their children and grandchildren! Now that we are living in a world where the human population has almost reached the limits of exploitation of the environment, we need some voice on the political stage to make the case for things that go beyond petty short term concerns that will have no longterm value if humans continue to follow our instincts rather than use our capacity for logic, and keep doing what every other animal tries to do: reproduce and use up all of the resources in its ecological niche. Next Mass Extinction an Eyeblink Away: Scientists Back to Elizabeth May...I can't take seriously a statement that the Green Party leader is ineffectual, since the oil industry that dominates our economy to an even greater degree each year, has also taken over the media and the political process as well. Most of the major newspapers and private broadcasters in Canada now are in the tank for the oil industry...as we can see by the increasing amount of disinformation about climate change being pumped out by the Sun newspapers, and the Post, all of which are perennial money-losers that need to be bankrolled by corporate benefactors. So, as long as the three major political parties are trying to curry favour with the producers of toxic tar sands, a party with a dissenting view is going to have limited resources, and a limited reach on traditional media....and a party that needs to hold true to its principles regardless of political strategizing.