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New Media and Politics - The Promised Land!
Okay, that's a bit of a reach but tonight for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon blew up and the spill in the Gulf began I read the words I've been longing to hear from those in power. The Democratic leader of the Senate, Harry Reid: "This is an opportunity for us as a country to move away from fossil fuel, to do a better job of looking at renewable energies that are available to us all over this country." Hallelujah!
It's more than just the ongoing spill, we know that in our mad efforts to burn cheap fossil fuels more accidents of this nature will happen - read an interesting analysis of how and why at Discovery News which includes a look at how much longer we can continue down this path (hint: It ain't for long!). Global carbon emissions are predicted to increase by 43% by 2035. The emissions rise will be driven by a 49 per cent increase in the world’s energy consumption over the same period. Developing Asia will account for 35 per cent of the increase. That's not a sustainable path.
There's a report today that Arctic ice is shrinking faster now than in it did in 2007 and is on pace to break dubious records. This, from the above link, caught my eye: True multi-year ice - the thick, hard stuff that stops ships - now comprises 18 per cent of the Arctic ice pack. In 1981, when Prof. Barber first went north, that figure was 90 per cent.
Maybe a 1 in a 1,000 year events like that which recently hit Tennessee will make people sit up and take notice that something is out of kilter? Or the longest drought in Northwest Africa in 900 years? Nah!
Sadly we do not face our climate tipping points alone - we manage to imperil every living thing around us as well.
Tonight On Hooked On Sonics!
NXNE Managing Director Andy McLean calls in to Hooked on Sonics to talk about NXNE, how it started, where it's going, the lineup, and what this year's fest is gonna do to your sleep routine. Also, Omar Goodness will be giving away one NXNE wristband!
And stay tuned for the Sonics Selection, Track from Way Back, and 90's Classique segments!
Hooked on Sonics *now THURSDAYS* 6-8pm ET www.cjlo.com
News May 26th 2010
Read and produced by Lachlan Fletcher.
Stories written by Emily Brass, Matthew Phelps and Gareth Sloan.
New Media and Politics - Why Aren't Canadians Pissed Off?
The more I sift through the Canuck news on a daily basis the more frustrated I become. I don't understand why that frustration is not shared and why complacency is the order of the day. Near as I can tell both the Liberals and the NDP have been given the gift of Harper, an obfuscating idealogue whose policies do not reflect how most Canadians feel on... pick a topic!
They should be eager to go to the polls and run against the policies of the Conservatives, yet clearly they are not. Do they feel unable to articulate these differences and afraid run stictly on matters of policy and principle - as opposed to personality? If so, both Iggy and Layton should retire immediately then and let people with courage take their place.
Sadly, Canadians lost another soldier in Afghanistan on Monday - Trooper Lary Rudd. The 26-year-old Brantford, Ont., native was killed when an improvised explosive device went off underneath him on Monday. He was on patrol near the village of Salavat in Afghanistan’s Panjwai district, about 20 kilometres southwest of Kandahar City. Heartfelt condolences.
Our brave MP's who have not experienced an audit of their expenses in 20 years are doing everything possible to avoid one now. Sheila Fraser is quite right in suggesting that if they've nothing to hide there really should be no problems. As it's Canadian taxpayers money at stake here, there really should be an audit every five years or so - anything else just encourages corruption.
Of course we are dealing with a government that does everything in their power to fight transparency - in fact, it looks like they are gunning for another showdown with Parliment as there's new Tory policy that says only cabinet ministers and not their political staff can appear as witnesses before parliamentary committees. House leader Jay Hill pathetically blamed the opposition and decried the "tyranny of the opposition majority." Conservatives the world over are consistent - whenever they disagree with the rule of law and don't like what's happening, they claim victimhood. In a democracy that tyranny of the majority will get you every time!
Speaking of tyranny of the majority, someone should tell Cardinal, Marc Ouellet that Canadians have had the debate and favour choice by a 2 -1 margin. Maybe he'd like a debate on whether or not churches should retain their tax free status I'm against it, especially if they're going to get involved in politiics. Still, you won't catch me shoving my opinion down his throat. It'd be nice if he'd reciprocate, but I'm not holding my breath.
Bad news on infant mortality in Canada - we've dropped from 6th to 24th. The main causes cited by researchers were poverty, isolation, premature births and to some degree, the way the data are collected. Finally, good news about teenage birth and abortion rates across Canada, which have dropped by 36.9% as a result of progressive policies that include sex-ed and acceptance of adolescent sexuality.
New Media and Politics - BP's Folly
As a strategy, being arrogant jerks hasn't worked out very well for BP. Tony Hayward has quickly weasled his way into the top ten most hated people on the planet (conjecture) and he's made his company massively unpopular. There's talk of debarment and boycotts but there's something else going on. You can feel it in the news reports and the comments written at the news sites - people are disgusted by BP's behaviour since the spill.
ABC's Good Morning America sent Sam Champion and Phillipe Cousteau to dive right into the affected area in the Gulf. It's pretty disgusting and alarming and yet as much as I'm sure BP doesn't want you to see that video (posted below), I do believe that the images of an imperious Tony Hayward barking directions on a public beach are far more damaging to their reputation. Have a listen and the reasons become clear. There's more than hubris and arrogance here - this guy has a sense of entitlement beyond all understanding.
For all the discovery by Americans of how terrible BP's safety record has been in the past -In just the last few years, BP has paid $485 million in fines and settlements to the US government for environmental crimes, willful neglect of worker safety rules, and penalties for manipulating energy markets. - and the series of failures that led to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and oil gushing into the Gulf at estimated rates of somewhere between 25,000 and 95,000 barrels per day - it is their behaviour since that threatens their very existence the most. Blowouts and spills have happened before - Exxon screwed everyone in and around Prince William Sound and that didn't create anger on the level we're now witnessing. Their constant lying about the spill rate may be one reason - turns out BP may be charged by the barrel. But I think there's something else - it's the sociopathic manner in which they've conducted themselves since. As if only they mattered, not the delicate eco-systems and marine life upon which so many are dependent for their livelihoods.
Stephen Harper - Assalogue!
A question was posed here on the site some time ago was, Stephen Harper, ass or idealogue? The answer we (NM&P editorial staff) came up with, after much debate, was both! That required a new word and the word we felt most appropriate was assalogue (sancithole was a close 2nd).
Today, news from Parliment revealed itself to us and we dust that word off and scream it from the rooftops, ASSALOGUE!
The Globe & Mail is reporting that on the issue of the maternal health care initiative, Harper and his fellow sanctiholes ignored the advice of their own civil servants when they excluded funding from organizations that include providing abortion as part of their overall programs to assist women in the developing world. The numbers are staggering and damning from the standpoint of human decency. - The Globe and Mail reports:
Each year, some 500,000 women die during pregnancy or while giving birth, and 9 million children die before they reach the age of five, according to CIDA statistics compiled for the minister.
The document, approved by CIDA president Margaret Biggs, also highlights the fact that about 2.5 million teenagers have unsafe abortions each year and tend to be more seriously affected by complications.
The Harper government chose to target child and maternal health during the upcoming G8 meetings and then behave like the only constituency they answer to in Canada are the Christian right. Canadians favour choice by a margin of 2 -1. As PM of all of Canada it is Harper's duty to respect their wishes and views on such issues - when so many lives are at stake you'd think common decency would triumph over ideology. Maybe assalogue is the wrong word... how's coward sound?
News May 24 2010
Read by Emily Brass
Produced by Emily Brass and Nicholas Fiscina
Stories written by Chris Hanna, Sarah Deshaies, and Jose Espinoza
New Media and Politics - The BP Valdez x 5,6,10?
The title says it all. No one has a clue right now except that this is far worse than the Valdez but the extent is essentially unknown as are the far-reaching consequences.
The first story I saw today about the gusher in the Gulf was BP essentially claiming domonion over the waters they have polluted, telling the EPA that they don't want to use a less toxic dispersant and the EPA could go jump in a lake... of oil! Many do not know that the EPA was actually created by Richard M. Nixon and back before it got Bush-whacked, it had teeth.
McClatchy have been all over this story in ways the regular suspects in the MSM have not. Perhaps they seek to carve themselves out a niche as a reality based news site - that'd be nice. I highly recommend you go to their site and watch the video roundup of news from the Gulf. A couple of other stories from McClatchy are the serious concerns about the oil making it's way to Florida beaches and then on up the coast to North Carolina.
As for impacts being felt right now, Nola.com has a dispiriting article on the impossibility of removing the oil from the spill out from Louisiana's marshes. The picture painted is a grim one: Oil that has rolled into shoreline wetlands now coats the stalks and leaves of plants such as roseau cane -- the fabric that holds together an ecosystem that is essential to the region's fishing industry and a much-needed buffer against Gulf hurricanes. Soon, oil will smother those plants and choke off their supply of air and nutrients.
From NPR, a story about what might happen if a hurricane were to strike while all this is taking place - hurricane season begins June 1, remember, so we'll all probably get a first hand look. They have no clue as to what they have wrought. A lot of people are asking, why BP is still in charge of the response to the spill? That includes democratic strategist James Carville, and while I disagree with his assessment he's probably right about how people are going to respond to this crisis - blame the administration and Obama for not doing enough quickly enough.
To wrap for the evening, two reminders of why BP should be held to account criminally: This story about survivors of the explosion being kept in seclusion and coerced into signing legal waivers. And the fact that an acoustic switch costing .004 % of BP's 2009 profits would have prevented this from happening in the first place.
Note: Full slide show can be found at greenpeace.org
New Media and Politics - War News
Today, I thought I'd get a bit personal. I didn't post links to the usual litany of stories on Friday as a week of staring at the computer was just too much. I'm the host of New Media and Politics, a progressive radio talk show and play jazz in between the stories. Most of the stories I talk about were found somewhere in the blogosphere or on twitter. Needless to say, I depend on the help of many good people to point me in the direction of those stories the MSM finds inconvenient to pay much attention to.
I blog American, International and environmental stories here and Canadian news at the sister site NMPCanada. I also post all this stuff here at the radio station. So Friday, after a busy week I'd had enough and went for a 60k bike ride, cooked supper and collapsed in front of what can only be described as bad TV. So I didn't post my newswrap - which I should clarify is generally a list of the stories I talked or will talk about on my radio show.
So, it's a busy Saturday as always but I'll try and hit on stories that seem to be the day's most important. Beginning with those related to the wars of occupation in the Middle East. (Whoops! Slipped into early Sunday morning.)
As always, war news is unwanted and unsexy but the US has kids and good people doing grunt work in two wars of occupation, Canada in one, so it is important to never forget.
Today in Afghanistan, the third major attack on NATO forces in six days occurred. Insurgents fired rockets, mortars and automatic weapons and launched a ground assault against NATO's largest base in southern Afghanistan. The AP is reporting twelve Afghans were killed outside of Kabul when US soldiers spotted two suspected insurgents of trying to plant IED's - no word if any among the dead were civilians. Marjah, the object of a major spring offensive faces a deteriorating security situation. Afghan civilians fleeing for their lives.
Someone on twitter today, noting the lack of prosecutions for torture and BP's seeming impunity from charges both for the negligent death of the 11 who died and the ongoing ecocide in the Gulf, said it sometimes feels like GWB's third term. I'd like to echo that and point to a story about a ruling today by a DC Circuit court today that ruled detainees being held by the US at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan don’t have the right to challenge their detention, even though that right is guaranteed to prisoners in the US Constitution.
In Iraq, anger over the deaths of six detainees who died while being transported. Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi said in a statement that the deaths constituted "murder." A busy Friday in Iraq as 56 were killed and 158 wounded.
Since the war began back in 2003 so many of Iraq's legacies have been destroyed and lost forever. Since the last American "surge" Bahgdad has been made a city of rubble and walls. Push aside any romantic notion you may have in your mind about what has often been called the cradle of civilization. Read this story from 2008 about the city of walls 5 after the war began and this poignant story about the loss of the home of the renowned Arab novelist, poet, painter and translator Jabra Ibrahim Jabra which was destroyed in an April 4 car bomb attack that also killed 17 people in Baghdad.
News May 21st 2010
News produced by Drew Pascoe and pronounced by Erica Fisher
Stories by Jose Espinoza, Corentine Rivoire, Jonathan Moore, Alina Gotcherian
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