Where the Hell Have I Gotten To?

Archie of the Archive popped up to ask the question.

Of my long absence let me say this: Never take on the lawyer recommended by your cellmate.

Nah ... Actually it's just a work thing. I returned to my trucking roots, or routes, just this past week. I'm still doing some work for a guy who's publishing a book, and I'm applying for a job somewhere between grunt work and middle management, with just enough elements of each to keep me interested.

But there's more to it, you know. For one thing I'm honestly not feeling very Metro lately.

You've heard the saying "I used to be disgusted, now I'm just amused," no doubt?

The personality of Metro originated as a response to the lapping of the Conservative wave on the beach of North American politics. The wave became a tsunami in the Bush years, with similar effects on the political landscape. Now there's little left, so it seems to me, beside the lower life forms--Namely dust mites and religious fundamentalists.

Metro, as a voice in the babble, isn't helpful at a time when our own Prime Minister can come out with such outrageous falsehoods as this:

We look forward to both complying with the ruling and with the legal obligations that have been established by statutes, passed by this Parliament

That, sir, is a load of goddamned bullshit.

Had Harper and his merry band of censors, crooks, and lobbyists wanted to comply with their legal obligations, they'd have handed over the ₤µ©λing documents!

When stuff like this is happening on the floor of Parliament, it's time to back away from the keyboard and go the ₤µ©λ outside. It's time to try and put one's time and energy into restoring something approaching Parliamentary democracy in this beknighted land.

The US is slowly creeping from the mire it was left in by the Bush League--Slowly. Note, for example, that Obama STILL hasn't closed Gitmo, repudiated domestic spying, or brought Cheney and co. to justice for authorizing torture. And it took last week's undersea oil gusher (or as the oil companies would doubtless have it "natural resource relocation") to get him to reverse himself on new offshore drilling.

But progress has been made. Obama has, in fact, kept more than eighty percent of his promises. And they finally have a sort of universal health care, despite the preponderance of teabagging morons who'd prefer to stay sick and poor.

Canada, in typical fashion, is still plunging headfirst into the oilsands-toxic-waste pond of Conservative governance. We tend to follow the US by about five years, and I think we're just hitting the perigee of their performance now.

And my fulminating about it on a keyboard isn't helping. I need to find a way to make a direct contribution to sending the Conservative Party of Canada into the wilderness for another fifteen to twenty years. Ideally they'll be in prison for half that time for contempt of Parliament. And it's only too unfortunate that there's no such charge as "contempt of Canadians"--They'd get life without hope of parole unless they succeed in reviviing the death penalty before they come to trial.

So that's why I haven't been showing up here. I've been amused to the darkest depths of what I like to think of as my soul by the antics of my current placeholder government, but not sufficiently energized either by their perifidy or by the ideas coming from the Opposition to want to write about my feelings on the matter.

Now I just need to pry a few hours a week from my schedule to join whatever organization I can find that's working to make sure Harper et al. get exported to, say, Afghanistan, where their style of governance might be more at home. In fact, since we still occupy part of it, I think we should deport Harper now, before 2011. It'll save time.

I'll keep posting here, I guess. But between trucking, editing, rebuilding vehicles, and cleaning up a political cesspool, I'm not sure I'll have a lot of time to blog about it.

Since three common methods of government reform are guns, lawyers, and money (and let me state here that unlike the American teabagger movement I tend to prefer the second of those options if, as now, "human decency" is unavailable), et me leave you with a little Warren Zevon for the moment.



And hey, this may just turn out to be an existential reboot while I try to figure out wither Metroblog. But for now, honestly, I've got too much to do, and I don't feel sufficiently engaged to want to try and shovel shit against the tide at the moment.

Be nice while I'm away, I'll pop back from time to time.

Okay, We're Back

This seems like as good a time as any revisit Mr. Bunk Strutts' comments from back about the last ice age. Sure, we both have better things to do, but ...

Well actually at this precise moment, I don't. And as I'm leaving town for a while, I figured I should get a post up. Plus I'd been looking into this for a while.

Because recently the Daily Mail made a total ₤µ©λup of an interview with a climate scientist from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, renown in song and story for the "Climategate" emails, which proved only that science isn't for sissies.

The Mail piece has been thoroughly dealt with, though in by no means as loud or obnoxious a fashion as it ought to have been, by better writers than my noble self.

But I wanted to return to Bunk's comment, because a challenge to one's ideas that one cannot immediately answer should be researched. I'm sorry it's taken so long. And it'll take longer.

Before proceeding, let me say that I want to try and keep this discussion as civil as possible. I don't intend to insult Mr. Strutts for holding a view he considers reasonable.

Our mutual acquiantance Raincoaster says that were we to meet, we'd probably argue late into the night over pitchers of beer. We might even agree on what brand of beer to order.

So let's get to part one.

Bunk visited my post about the tepid Copenhagen Conference on climate change and left a long comment.

It raised a number of points, some of which were correct in their facts but incorrect on the interpretation. And what is the internet after all but an extension of the great search for meaning, eh?

For clarity, I'm enclosing Bunk's statements in blockquotes and italic font.

I'm sure I won't change Bunk's mind on this. In order to do that he and I would first have to agree on a credible set of sources, and I doubt we can agree on that point.

But I feel that I should know why I believe what I believe, and at least have a nodding acquaintance with what the science says. Which is why this is such a long post.

Bunk opens up thusly:
The premise of manmade global warming (AGW) is a false alarmist myth designed to create public hysteria for the purposes of taxation, both locally and globally.

Then who's behind this myth? That taxation theory's certainly not supported in my country, where the science minister thinks belief in evolution is a religious position and the PM called AGW a "socialist plot."

On the other hand, a number of authorities one could hardly describe as left-wing loonies are taking the position that AGW is real.

But more importantly, the position has nothing to do with taxation. If alternatives to carbon taxation were found (such as Kyoto's carbon credit system) the position would not change: "It ain't happening, and wouldn't matter if it were."

For example, carbon pricing is a free-market solution that's rejected by the same people who claim the free market has all the answers.

The premise that a [1-to-2]*-degree Celsius increase in average global temperatures over a century is a catastrophic danger is false.

[*Edited from "1/2" to clarify what I think Bunk means. Any error is the fault of my interpretation.]

In fact the main thrust of anti-warming efforts is to hold warming down to something around two degrees in order to forestall worse warming and worse cocomittant effects. But don't take my word for it: Read the Times.

We're also not talking about a century. We're already past the first degree. The question is whether we can keep it to two, probably within the next fifty years.

The premise that a relatively small percentage of sentient animals (humans) can significantly affect long-term global temperature variations is absurd.
Did we cause acid rain? L.A.'s horrible smog? Fewer than 500 million humans created those effects. In the case of L.A. they're still trying to fix them. A cross-border agreement helped stop acid rain.

Why is it so inconceivable that we could effect change on a global level? After all, we really aren't a "relatively small percentage of sentient animals." There are eight billion-plus of us, all of us burning fuels at increasing rates to make our economies do what they do.

The premise that human-generated CO2 is the culprit ignores the fact that water vapor is the major uncontrollable greenhouse gas by a factor of tens of thousands.
Right, except possibly for the "uncontrollable bit." As CO2 warms the atmosphere, more water evaporates, and more water vapour increases the warming effect. So adding more CO2 increases the rate at which the world is warming. But we could slow the rate at which CO2 is being added to the atmosphere by reducing the other crap, along with the CO2, we put into it.

The fact [is] that global temperatures are always in flux due to thousands of variables, as they have been since the creation of this planet.
So natural factors like sunlight, cloud cover, and vegetable rot can apparently change the climate, but not gigatons of carbon emissions?

There is no possible way to determine what the ideal global temperature should be, as that is merely a philosophical argument, i.e., do you favor plants or animals? Reptiles or mammals? Algae or bacteria?
My philosophical position is that judging by the lessons of history, we're better off trying to not screw things up any further.

We have some idea of the potential effects of a warmer climate, and aside from less snowblowing (which would be offset by an increase in lawn mowing), they don't sound good.

But most life on this ball of mud is interconnected anyway, and we mess with other species at our peril.

So the ideal global temperature, to me, would be something in the range of the past couple of thousand years, during which humankind has lived and thrived.

This concludes part one. It'll be at least a week before I can post a second part. Thanks for reading, if you got this far.

Blowing the Dust Off

Phew. Who the hell left this sandwich lying on the console?

Okay, so I was away for a while. I want to thank the staff and those husky damn interns at the Sunnyvale Home for the Particularly Stressed for the length of my stay, and a certain pathological psycologist (you know who you are, sweetie) for its abrupt end, and I'm sure the insurance will cover everything.

Lots going on in Canada right now. In particular there's the Olympics. Yet somehow they seem smaller and meaner than the 2000 gala. My country's neuroses seem to be on full display. Perhaps because everything feels like a little too little of most things (snow, actual tickets rather than fake ticket shops, the hopeless bloody Canada Pavillion pictured below) and far too much of others ("own the podium," Prime Ministerial photo-ops, those stupid-ass mascots and also the Canada Pavillion).



Parliament still isn't sitting. The Harpercons are relying on the Olympic spectacle to distract the masses, so it seems. Well hey, if you can't give them bread, give 'em circuses, I guess. O'course bread could be had had we not spent our bread money on tax cuts and Olympic circuses.

But still, whatever gets you through, eh?

Of the Olympics, I think the best thing is that due to the neurotic rah-rah "own the podium" propaganda push, we have at least learned the names of some of our athletes.

Me? Well I've been busy elsewhere. That is all ye know and all ye need know. I haven't forgotten my promise to address the silliness of global warming denialism, and I plan on making that my next effort.

Hope you've all been behaving while I was away.

O Avid Fan, You Are Not Forgotten!

That goes for both of you.

I promised Sr. Strutts that I would revisit the comment he left me on my post about the all-too-predictable failure of the Copenhagen Conference, and that's part of what I'm doing today.

But I just cleared a major project and have some other stuff to do. So I'll content myself with posting this:



This seems to be a pirate video, so I'll refer you to the site where the original may be found: Weebls Stuff.

Abominable Things From the Depths of the Net, #341

Once in a while we who haunt the interwebs run into something so vile, so wrong, so against the laws of gods and nature that we wish we could un-see it. Here, then, from the "cultural blog," "dog's breakfast," and unholy lair of the Forgotten Ones that is Nag on the Lake, is one of those things.

I urge you to hide children, lock doors, douse your monitor in holy water, and ideally blindfold yourself prior to watching. At least put on some goggles: They'll keep you from clawing your eyes out.



You can't unsee that, can you?

Happy New Year

Well the 00s were, to quote Garry Trudeau on the 70s, "a kidney stone of a decade." I'm glad they're gone, and I hope that the 10s will be better.

I was going to tot up some of the best-and-worst of the decade, but I'm sure it's been covered by better people, and who wants to hear me go off on Bush the Lesser again? Personally, I don't.

What I really want is to wish you and yours every good thing this next year and decade.

What I really want of the next year, and the decade to come, is that it be better.

Goodnight, and good luck to us in 2010.

Constitutional Monarchy: The Stephen Harper Edition

I'm not even dully surprised at the grotesque wankery of Canada's Conservative Government.

We don't have "democracy" the way the rest of the world has it. Our head of state is the Queen of England, our Senate is appointed, not elected. At one time Mr. S. Harper made much of this, promising an elected one, which I personally don't want for reasons I've mentioned here before. He also has expressed a dislike for the monarchy.

A year ago, threatened by a move to establish a coalition government that would have represented the 60-odd-percent of Canadians who are currently shut out of Bushland North, Stephen Harper, demonstrating a quick-change in principles ummatched except in every other thing he's done, ran for the umbrella of the monarchy he previously deplored.

He asked the Governor-General to protect his failed government by shutting down, or "proroguing" Parliament for three months. And for no known reason she acceeded.

At the time, his excuse was that Parliament wasn't functioning. Which it wasn't, because he'd ordered his winged monkeys not to co-operate when working on Parliamentary committees.

This year, he ordered his people to do this again, especially in regard to the Afghan detainee investigation. He's in contempt of Parliament, and should be under indictment for such.

Now the news says that he's asking the GG to prorogue again.

The only thing worse, if she once again bends Canadian democracy over the table for him, will be the conservative wankersphere orgasming all over itself at Harper's "statesmanship."

Is it any wonder that half the electorate stayed home last election?

I hope the GG tells him to go ₤µ©λ himself with a rasp.

Pre-publication update: The CBC reports that the PMO is announcing proroguement has been achieved.

If there were a god I'd ask him/her/it to damn these lousy bastards to hell. As it is, I'm stopping just short of expressing a public wish for a competent assassin. Let me be clear: I don't actually want Harper assassinated. But I do think about wishing for it.

What democracy remained in this country just died.

Merry Christmas, That Is All

Just wishing compliments of the season to all those who randomly stumble across this blog, whether you came here intentionally or are simply fascinated as you might be by a really interesting traffic accident, like say a clown car piling into a school bus, pushing it out into the runway into the path of a 747 which sheers away at the last minute but clips a sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer and carrying an obese elf ...

Anyway. I wish you a merry Christmas or whatever you celebrate, and a happy New Year.

This Is News? #94

Caribou Barbie has blackened her running mate's name.

Uh, didn't she do that pretty much as soon she joined the campaign? Not that he wasn't making a fine job of it on his own, but he needed someone to ensure that there was something in his platform for crazy, gun-loving, Bible-thumping, white people who weren't male, too.

Do You Think the National Post Could Use an Editor?

Canada's National Post, whose "Full Comment" section would make fine budgie-cage liner did it but exist in print, has been allowed by a bankruptcy court to shuffle under a different corporate umbrella and has thus survived the death of its parent.

Oddly, this has not improved the quality of its content, save that John Baglow has apparently decided he enjoys bear-baiting sufficiently to allow the NP to reuse his blog posts. I believe he feels this will promote discussion.

While I must admit the comments there are considably smarter than the NP average, I feel this is because the standard is improved by the presence of actual thinking commenters, not common elsewhere. Witness the savaging John Moore, the sole critical thinker writing in the NP until Baglow came along, receives on this post.

However, they've clearly cut back on actual editors and actual journalism. The wrong is tremendous and the irony could shoe a racetrack.

First, the Senate didn't "weaken" the bill. They affirmed the rights of individuals. I'm personally in favour of Bill C-6 because it'll trounce some of the woo-practitioners unless they can prove that their bark, roots, herbs, or magic can actually DO something. But I never wanted inspectors to be able to raid homes without a warrant.

Secondly, a paper that staunchly defends the Federal Government's right to evade torture accusations claims that reaffirming the need for a warrant "weakens" legislation. It is to laugh, hollowly.

Third: Here's the accompanying picture.



This, on the other hand, is Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, an Inuk and one of the few Conservative Ministers I've had any respect at all for.

Clearly, all brown people DO in fact look alike to them.