Why Aren't You Outraged?

I am running for office in the province where I live for the Green Party of British Columbia. I am here to ask you for what all aspiring politicians want from you. Your support.

Why does that matter to you, someone who probably does not live where I do? We all share a common atmosphere and we all share a common future.

I am here to ask you to help me buy some time. Time for us to implement the solutions, time for us to come up with more new ideas to try to soften the blow of what lies in our future. The thick purple line on the map below is the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline which if built would carry bitumen across the Rocky Mountains, across thousands of streams in a pristine wilderness with little or no environmental oversight on construction. The thick blue line is the Kinder Morgan pipeline that is currently in the permitting phase of a doubling in capacity so it can also carry bitumen to the coast for export to Asia. Both pipelines would require a massive increase in tanker traffic on the irreplaceable British Columbia coast. Both pipelines, just like the Keystone XL, would facilitate the build out of the tar sands.

A recent examination of the net energy of the tar sands points out that once all sources of energy input are accounted for that the Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) is probably 1:1, making it a process for turning natural gas and large amounts of fresh water into a liquid fuel. This makes the tar sands an economic as well as ecological nightmare for the majority of people on this planet. Some, a very few, will do extremely well from this situation. They need to be slowed and stopped.

The province of British Columbia has the power to stop both of these pipelines and to stop any increase in tanker traffic on the coastline. 

I am asking every one of you to support my campaign. I am running in a riding where I have a real chance. Electing the first Green MLA in Canada will send a message loud and clear to the power structures in this country.

I ask every one of you to send me what you can. $5, $50 or $500, depending what you can afford. The political contribution rules here in British Columbia have no restrictions on how much an individual can donate, nor any residency requirements. You donation will be publicly displayed on the government website only if it exceeds $250.

Please consider buying us all a little time by supporting my campaign. And please pass this on to everyone you can in your networks.

We are all in this together.

Chris George
Candidate – Green Party of British Columbia – Shuswap
Healthy People, Healthy Places

Campaign Page: http://www.greenparty.bc.ca/chris_george

Donation Page: http://www.greenparty.bc.ca/donate_to_chris_george

Tar Sands Backgrounders From Skeptical Science

http://skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=1545
http://www.skepticalscience.com/SW12.html

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"The future belongs to those who can give the next generation reasons to hope." – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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- Vladimir Pozner

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I tell you: the end is the means by which you achieve it. Today's step is tomorrow's life. Great ends cannot be attained by base means. You've proved that in all your social upheavals. The meanness and inhumanity of the means make you mean and inhuman and make the end unattainable.” – Wilhelm Reich

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"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." -Frederick Douglass

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“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.” – Seneca

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To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. – Manly P. Hall

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"What's extraordinary about these findings is that it provides some of the first evidence that early American hunter-gatherers were not as simplistic as we've tended to imagine," says study co-author T.R. Kidder, PhD, professor and chair of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Archaic Native Americans built massive Louisiana mound in less than 90 days
A massive earthen mound constructed about 3,200 years ago by Native Americans in northeastern Louisiana was built in less than 90 days, and perhaps as quickly as 30 days, according to new research in …

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Can you see the sasquatch?

So what happens when we classify in the absence of theory? We aren’t yet inductively constructing theory, and we aren’t able to deduce from theory (since there isn’t any yet) the classes of objects in the domain we are investigating. We argue that what is happening here is pattern recognition (Bishop 1995).

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Pattern recognition: neither deduction nor induction
It occurs to me as I read Rosenberg’s Philosophy of Science (2005), that we tend in that field to classify epistemic activities into two kinds: induction (about which we have many arguments as to i……

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Eventually we must realize that there simply is nothing like oil.

Though it takes significant energy and resources to produce the super-small silicon balls, the particles could help power portable devices in situations where water is available and portability is more important than low cost.

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Just add water: How scientists are using silicon to produce hydrogen on demand
Super-small particles of silicon react with water to produce hydrogen almost instantaneously, without the need for light, heat or electricity, according to new University at Buffalo research.

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"A 5-year-old girl was suspended from school earlier this week after she made what the school called a "terrorist threat."

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Kindergartner Suspended For “Bubble-Gun Terrorism”
Alt-Market.com – supporting local economies, barter networks, farmers initiatives, and alternative currencies backed by tangible commodities.

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Who knew?

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Astroturfing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Astroturfing refers to political, advertising or public relations campaigns that are designed to mask the sponsors of the message to give the appearance of coming from a disinterested, grassroots part…

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

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First Amendment Terrorist: Pentagon Says Protests Are Acts of “Low Level Terrorism”
Even the very act of assembling with other like minded people to influence policy by petitioning the Government for a redress of grievances can land you on the domestic terrorism list.

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"The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable receiving." – Albert Einstein

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A very brave perspective on being in the world.

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Bucky’s Self Disciplines | The Buckminster Fuller Institute
Self-Disciplines. I decided that Nature might support a man who was doing what Nature wanted to be done and concluded that I would be informed by Nature if I proceeded in the following manner: 1. Use …

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Always their rationalizations start out with "They". They will do this or they will do that. What "They" have been doing for my entire lifetime is whatever it is that is in their own best interest. And this time their own best interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the majority of people who live here.

"They" are not going to lift a finger to do anything to mitigate the destruction of the planetary ecosystem. "They" are going to continue to milk this system of exploitation for as long as they can right up until they can't any do it any longer. It is up to us to recognize this fact and to start doing what we can to make a difference for our kids.

To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

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The Myth Of Human Progress, By Chris Hedges
Reposted from TRUTHDIG. Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change”describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change i…

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"Favourable regulatory terms" means a government who is willing to use violence to stop opposition and a government that is willing to continue providing them with rock bottom royalty rates.

They need to be disabused of that notion and we are the only ones able to do it. We still have the limited democratic powers that our system grants us. We need to use them for the benefit of all of us.

Focusing on shale oil and other hard-to-reach fuels and citing "favourable regulatory terms" in North American countries (namely the US and Canada) for current profit growth, BP plans says that it now hopes less developed countries "will succeed" in paving a path for more unconventional fuel extraction in the coming years. BP's plan says that its global oil extraction could increase over the next two decades.

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BP’s Big Plan: Burn It. Burn It All.
BP CEO Bob Dudley. (Photo: AP)Ignoring overtly and by design the dire and repeated warnings of scientists who say that in order to avoid catastrophic and irreversible changes to the world’s climate we…

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Stop being lazy, get off the couch and educate yourselves.

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Racism, hunger and laziness: A First Nations youth perspective on Idle No More media coverage |
Change the conversation, support rabble.ca today. As Chief Theresa Spence has demonstrated since December 11th, there is supreme hunger in this country. For too many First Nations people, that hunger …

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I keep coming back to Buckminster Fuller's idea on how to handle industrial pollution.

Demand zero emissions from industry. Government would compensate them for the costs associated with developing and implementing the technologies required to achieve this goal, leaving these industries in as good a competitive position as before the new regulations. The catch? Government would become entitled to all of the basic elements that the technology would sequester. Government would then come and pick up said materials, warehouse them and when industry is in need of more basic materials they would come to government to purchase the materials. This would compensate taxpayers for their initial investment in transitioning and close the materials loop, eliminating the need for rapacious extraction and exploitation of mineral resources.

This approach makes far too much sense for us to ever implement, but every time I read articles about the precautionary principle in action and the incessant whining from CEOs and shareholders about how difficult their lives are because of the stupid environmentalists, this idea comes swimming back up to the surface of my brain.

And what kind of absolutist statement is “the precautionary principle will absolutely undermine the economy”? Can it not be equally argued that ruination of aquifers will most decidedly undermine local economies of any region in which it might occur? Cities cannot survive without potable water.

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Exxon Mobil and the precautionary principle
A recent poll conducted by the Civil Society Institute (CSI) and the Environmental Working Group found that the vast majority of Americans favor more political leadership when balancing domestic energ…

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