An alternative news source to the mainstream media. Important stories relating to current geopolitical events and charting future trends. Real news, ---no bullshit. (Est. 2007)
Your privacy is under attack! The only search engine that does not record your IP address.
"Victory will never be found by taking the line of least resistance."
Winston Churchill
If people no longer expect objectivity from their political and legal systems, then all justice will be reduced to a power struggle between conflicting and irreconcilable perspectives, a struggle in which the most dominant and pervasive bias will replace fair and impartial process as the character of justice. But if objectivity in law and politics is everywhere supplanted by conflict between subjective interests, then the side of economic privilege and established authority will always retain dominance. A society in which people no longer expect representatives of its major institutions even to attempt to render objectivity in their professional demeanours is a society whose major institutions are in a crisis of ethical legitimacy. In such a society, there is wide spread cynicism regarding the possibility of fair political process because it seems impossible that impartial, unbiased dispositions could exist to enact such processes.
" Li gives a sobering response: “Psychological warfare, legal warfare, and public opinion warfare are all important tools for modern warfighting. Doing battle on microblogs is also within the ‘three warfares’ category.” "
" The Chinese Communist Party is known to carry out an intensive and intricate policy of Internet surveillance and censorship; as well as deleting posts, the regime also hires an untold number of online commentators, called the “50 cent party,” (for the amount they’re putatively paid per post) whose job it is to steer public opinion. "
Communist Party members seem to be suffering a mental illness. Why do communist party members insist on trying to impose totalitarianism on the globe? So much effort to load every comment board with communist propaganda all because they are so determined to try and control public opinion, all so they can impose a system of dictatorship that will only lead to more human suffering.
Message to communist party thugs, nothing good will come of being an extremist, nothing good will come of trying to eliminate your "opposition". If you were enlightened you would understand that the members of the community that disagree with you are not your enemy. Constitutionally protected human rights and democratic governance are social innovations that create tremendous value for society. When you abandon totalitarianism you allow intellectuals to contribute to the betterment of us all.
If people like Hitler, Stalin and Mao had not embraced such madness, think of how much better we would all be better off today. What is the point of all this? What do these madmen hope to accomplish? Where do we want to be as a world? I'm willing to bet most of us, down at the peasant level, want to love one another. How can that be accomplished if the communist party policy is to put so many resources into stamping out dissent? Why resist constitutionally protected human rights for all citizens? If you want to serve the people then you must end the violence against the people, and this can only be accomplished if they have human rights protected by the constitution? This is not a "Western idea", its just an idea. An idea can not be assigned an identity. To deny an idea based upon the "identity" of the creator is the definition of insanity.
If you want to serve the people, you must become a better human being.
End political repression now. Tear down this wall.
The cost of lost human potential is the price of political repression.
I don't like this brave new world any more than you do, but the reality is if America would disarm its Signals Intelligence it would not make a dam difference for your privacy since China would still be running its own versions of "PRISM". This capability is a lot like nuclear weapons, if one party unilaterally disarms it only creates incentive for conflict to occur.
If Edward Snowden really wanted to protect us from an architecture of oppression why would he defect to Communist China? This looks like a carefully orchestrated phy-op.
Why defect to a completely controlled police state so you can lecture the world on police states?
Of course the privacy issues raised by Snowden are fair comment in a democratic society, but this entire scenario looks completely staged.
Signals intelligence, with proper checks and balances, is a tool that could be used for good or evil.
These are strange times, the world needs good people, so do all you can to make it good.
While America badly needs reform, Americans still have a lot of freedom that people in China don't have. It just doesn't seem to promote the cause of freedom for Snowden to become a propaganda instrument of the Chinese regime. The Snowden case looks like a highly successful and well thought out/carefully planned "public opinion warfare" operation.
Chen Guangcheng says China Pressured NYU to Kick Him Out
"Energy security would start by establishing the principle that we only export once domestic needs are met."
If all the key pieces of Canada’s energy future – the climate crisis, a prosperous economy, labour issues, east-west connectivity, energy efficiency, technological innovation, federal-provincial relations – were jigsaw pieces on our collective family table, it would be worthwhile to find the picture on the box the pieces came in.
The cover of the box, a glorious sustainable energy roadmap, would depict where we want to be, with: a meaningful carbon reduction plan; phasing out coal across the land; bringing in energy conservation and efficiency standards; producing far more energy from renewable sources; applying cleantech solutions broadly; paying attention to energy security; and shifting from a strategy of rapid export of unprocessed product to managed production at a steady rate of upgraded and refined product, with value-added creating far more employment in oil production while energy efficiency targets create jobs everywhere in overhauling our built infrastructure.
In the case of the current energy debate, the dialogue is so devoid of content that one cannot dignify the noise by calling it debate. Back to that Canadian family table with all the jigsaw pieces we need to fit together, sadly, the family cat got on the table knocking most of the pieces to the floor, while toddlers argue over the three remaining pieces shouting “Mine!”
A grown-up discussion starts with acknowledging that Canada needs an energy strategy. Federal and provincial jurisdictions respected, we need to think like a country. Rather than pit one region against another, we should start the conversation by setting out some over-arching goals.
Energy touches everything. A discussion about an energy strategy is not fundamentally about the oil sands. The oil sands are part of the conversation, but, back to our puzzle metaphor, those toddlers are fighting over the oil sands pieces of the puzzle. Nothing gets solved that way.
National goals should include:
1. Energy security
2. Energy pricing
3. An effective greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction plan for the needed transition to a post-carbon economy
4. Full employment goals
5. The promotion of innovation and competitiveness in Canada
6. Social justice; ending energy poverty
7. Energy strategies for a resourceful and resilient Canada
Taken separately, we could be fighting over these individual elements without resolution. Taken together in a grown-up conversation, they all fit together.
Starting with energy security. Right now, if there were a disruption of supply from OPEC nations, most Canadians would have no home heating oil, no gas, and eastern refineries would be in crisis. While debating how best to export as quickly as possible, as much as possible, raw, virtually unprocessed bitumen, more than half of Canada is dependent on imports of foreign oil from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, and Norway. As Gordon Laxer of the Parkland Institute identified, Canada has no energy security. Unlike the US, we have no Strategic Petroleum Reserves. If there was a blockade of foreign oil or economic embargo, those in Eastern Canada would have to wait for tankers to bring them bitumen for processing through the Panama Canal and up the eastern seaboard. As bizarre as that sounds, it was the solution offered by a Suncor executive when asked in Natural Resources Committee about the vulnerability of Eastern Canada to embargos.
The irony is that the dividing line of foreign oil to the east and Alberta oil for the west was the result of deliberate government policy – aimed at helping the Alberta oil and gas sector. Back in 1961, the National Oil Policy decreed that eastern Canadians (east of the Ottawa River) would only receive imported oil while those in the West had to purchase Alberta product. By deliberate policy, Eastern Canadians became dependent on foreign oil, while Alberta oil was consumed by those in western provinces and exported to the US. Now it is time to think like a country.
We also need to improve our east-west electricity grid to allow renewable-rich provinces to export to provinces with less.
The current proposal to link us east-west also makes no sense. Former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna has proposed shipping unprocessed bitumen to Saint John, NB, to put it in tankers and export it from there.
Energy security would start by establishing the principle that we only export once domestic needs are met.
That brings us to the importance of maximizing employment opportunities. It makes much more sense for Canada to upgrade the bitumen, before trying to make it sufficiently fluid to flow in pipelines. Bitumen is not crude oil. And it isn’t even oil at all. It is thick and solid, described as being the consistency of peanut butter. (Before mining, bitumen is 10 percent of the volume of soils, then described as being the consistency of molasses. Oil-like analogies seem to run to food.)
To make it flow, a naphtha-like fossil fuel substance, called a diluent, is added. All the controversial pipelines now under debate (Keystone XL, Enbridge’s Line 9 and Northern Gateway), are intended to carry a 70-30 mixture of bitumen and diluents – brilliantly described as “dilbit.” According to Enbridge’s evidence in the NEB hearings, its twinned pipeline will carry imported diluents from Kitimat to Alberta to be mixed with the bitumen. And the diluents will be purchased from the Middle East, and put in tankers to Canada. So much for being a domestic source of oil.
Back to energy security, jobs and minimizing environmental risks, if the bitumen was upgraded to synthetic crude in Alberta we wouldn’t be talking about moving the most hazardous of all spillable fossil fuels. Check out the US government reports on the findings about the Enbridge spill in the Kalamazoo River to understand how much more damaging dilbit is in the natural environment than any other pre-crude, as well as how much more challenging and expensive it is to clean up a spill. The summer 2010 Kalamazoo spill is still not completely cleaned up.
Prior to the 2008 recession, several upgraders were planned for northern Alberta. Once the recession ended, the multinationals with under-capacity refineries for unconventional oil looked south to the refineries already built and sitting on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The Alberta upgraders were cancelled and replaced with a pipeline proposal to move dilbit to US refineries. No wonder the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union, representing most of the energy patch workforce, is against the Keystone XL pipeline. It’s taking jobs previously slated for Alberta.
One reason the upgraders were cancelled is that what the late Peter Lougheed used to call “the traffic jam.” The hyper-inflationary bubble over northern Alberta is created by the push for constantly expanding production targets. Labour and capital are both scarce and pricey. (This is the explanation for Stephen Harper’s remarkable transformation regarding China. From his holier than thou treatment of the People’s Republic of China over the Beijing Olympics to the compliant, “Where do I sign?” greeting to President Hu in Vladivostok last September, when he penned the Canada-China Investment Treaty. There just isn’t enough capital from profit-oriented private sector oil multinationals to keep building new, and potentially unprofitable, oil sands mines without China).
We could with a bit of the planned approach, once advocated by Peter Lougheed, produce a steady amount of oil, upgraded and refined in Canada. Without the “traffic jam,” the industry could afford to build the ancillary infrastructure of upgrading and refining. We could do so within a plan for dramatically reduced GHG from Canada, by shutting down all coal-fired power plants, following the lead of another former premier, Dalton McGuinty. The carbon reduction plan would have the benefit of diversifying our energy sector with the commercialization of renewable energy – from wind, sun, geo-thermal, tidal. We also need to improve our east-west electricity grid to allow renewable-rich provinces to export to provinces with less.
It would create jobs in all parts of Canada through the retrofitting of buildings – commercial, institutional, residential – from energy wasters to energy misers, as well as through investments in modern, convenient mass transit.
The cleantech sector has the potential of becoming a $60 billion contributor to the Canadian economy within only seven years, according to a study by the Pembina Institute. Our myopic focus on the oil sands, as if it were the only part of Canadian economy that mattered, is blinding us to other and better opportunities. As the World Energy Outlook, reproduced by the International Energy Agency, pointed out, the world is coming to the realization that we must keep at least two-thirds of all known reserves of fossil fuels in the ground if we are to avoid such catastrophic levels of climate change that we put our very survival as organized societies and successful economies at risk.
A major new report from the UK, “Unburnable Carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets,” engaged the talents and expertise of Sir Nicholas Stern through a collaborative research project involving Carbon Tracker and the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The result is a new concept – the “carbon bubble.” The essence of their work is this – a great deal of the stated value of stock exchanges around the world is in unburnable fossil fuels. The level of capital expenditure in developing those reserves over the next decade would amount to $6.74 trillion in wasted capital – developing reserves that simply cannot be burned.
This new realization of the “carbon bubble” means that fossil fuel investments could very rapidly become stranded investments leading to financial ruin.
No harm can ever come from diversifying an economy. And that diversification and embrace of clean tech will help address our growing productivity gap with the US through innovation and R&D.
Sustainable energy is attainable. Stopping the waste of energy, noting that more than one half of all the energy Canada uses is lost as waste, is essential. There is no excuse for not getting it done.
^This is a major problem, lawmakers spend so much time begging for money they have no time to actually lead the country. And what happens with all that money, it gets spent buying political ads that do nothing to enhance the quality of political discourse, buying political staff and spin doctors who contribute nothing to society but counter productive ideological talking points, and further the legislative agenda of a class of people who have demonstrated that their business interests are not aligned with the national interest of our society. The problem is not democracy, the problem is that money in politics has blocked democracy from being able to efficiently function. Money in politics is a threat to national security.
" We must be heroes.
Corporate greed has infected every aspect of our lives.
Corporations are taking over our elections.
Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s dumbfounding Citizens United ruling, corporations are buying off politicians left and right. I really don’t know how we can expect democracy to survive if we allow dollars to trump votes.
Corporations are taking over the media.
Mainstream newspapers, radio stations and television networks are giving up on investigating corporate wrongdoing and, too often, devolving to be little more than plasterers of pro-corporate propaganda. The infamous billionaire Koch Brothers — who have spent hundreds of millions meddling with elections and who don’t believe in climate science — are now trying to buy venerable papers like the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.
Corporations are taking over national sovereignty.
Not content merely with record profits in the United States, corporations like Apple, Pfizer and Citgroup are offshoring profits to avoid their fair share of taxes while simultaneously backing absurd multinational “trade” pacts that pit countries against each other in a race to the bottom for food and product safety, labor standards, and environmental protections.
And we need to fight back with all the strength and passion we can summon. This isn’t just about safeguarding consumers from unsafe products or corporate rip-offs. This isn’t just about advancing progressive ideals like fairness, justice and the American Dream.
This is about standing up — together — to save our country, our fellow citizens spanning the globe, our planet itself from the contagion of corporate power. "
Alberta Tory MP Brent Rathgeber quits caucus
``I would submit that if the House does not jealously protect the rights of the members to bring forward matters of concern to their constituents ... the role of the private member, and Parliament and ultimately democracy have all equally been compromised.''
