http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/index.htmlRandom Thoughtsencordina@rogers.comCopyright 2007 IMac2009-01-19T09:40:23-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:31:49 -0500cordina@rogers.comNone2009-01-19T09:40:23-05:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/34131b5ce06a6195280edd5f81f803b0-31.html#unique-entry-id-31http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/34131b5ce06a6195280edd5f81f803b0-31.html#unique-entry-id-31
All of the usual suspects, the UN, the EU, Sid Ryan of CUPE, the Canadian Postal Workers Union, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Bono, you know, all of REAL deep thinkers of the Culturati and their house organs such as the New York Times, The Guardian and of course, the Toronto Daily Star have jumped on the “proportionality” gap between the IDF 22 day incursion and 7 years or so of missile attacks from Gaza into Israeli territory.

Sadly, their idea of proper proportion is limited only to the number of casualties that are reported each day by both sides. One would think that after the enormous body of evidence of fake reporting, staged ambulance’s “destroyed” by “the jews” and a parade of photo shopped images of “Israeli atrocities” that surfaced after the Israeli incursion into Lebanon to stifle the exact same kind of attacks from Iran’s other puppet outfit, Hezbollah, that we would have learned our lessons about just who is the truly aggrieved party in this dispute.

It would seem that just because the Hamas missile launchers are just not very good at it, and that they do not kill as many Israeli citizens as they set out to do, that somehow, the Israeli response should be similarly ineffective “just to be fair”.

This is of course utter nonsense and just continues the constant stream of guilt ridden angst that emanates from the Leftist wing of almost every democratic country that can afford to be smug and point fingers at Israel because they are not in range of Hamas nor Hezbollah rockets. If Jersey City was lobbing missiles across the Hudson River into Manhattan on a daily basis Mayor Bloomberg would be calling on President Bush/Obama/whomever to turn New Jersey into a glass slag heap with B-52’s within a week.

What was proportional about the NATO intervention into Yugoslavia? Who, outside of the borders of that sovereign nation was under threat before British, US and Canadian aircraft destroyed all of their bridges and their electric grid?

What was “fair” about turning mud huts into dust all over Afghanistan with missiles and bombs from B-52’s and Tornadoes sent under the auspices of NATO to retaliate for Sept. 911?

No talk of proper proportionality then. Just heated, war time rhetoric and blood lust screaming from every major news outlet in the free world.

Hamas has received much better missiles from Iran lately. The Russian made Graz for instance. Do you think it would be OK with her critics if Israel just waited until one or two of these missiles actually hit Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona? Would a toxic cloud of radioactive dust settling down over Jordan, Egypt, Syria as well as Gaza and the West Bank spur condemnation of the Hamas rocket attacks?

The only thing disproportionate about all of this is the talking heads once again blaming the victims of aggression for fighting back instead of just meekly being led off into the ovens once again.

A master of satire over at the Peoples Cube blog put together the following mockup of a New York Times front page back in 2006. I think it speaks volumes about the mindset of today’s so called Main Stream Media and also explains why the NYT’s is today considering a financial bailout from a rich Mexican. Print media have dug themselves into a cavern of debt and well deserved disrespect with their out of touch view of the world as it is today. The sooner they either wake up and start reporting the news instead of writing the news the better. Otherwise, “Asta La Vista, Baby”.

From The Peoples Cube.



]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-07-25T12:02:57-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/64408c971d1ffc90941516b4fe961461-30.html#unique-entry-id-30http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/64408c971d1ffc90941516b4fe961461-30.html#unique-entry-id-30
I am reminded of a circle when I see in today’s (July 25/08) National Post, a snippet of an article referencing a professor of some kind of science from Carnegie Mellon in PA, who, according to the article, has pronounced cell phones for toddlers as dangerous and deadly and all but declared that your new iPhone, RaZr, LG, device is nothing more then a battery operated cancer generator.



This seems to dovetail nicely with the pronouncement last week from those noted scientists at the Toronto Board of Health who, in total defiance of the conclusions reached by an exhaustive study released two weeks ago by Health Canada which concluded that there was ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE to support any such stupid claims, released their own press release which claimed that it just sort of made sense that cell phones emitting all of those nasty X-Rays and stuff so close to your brain must be bad and even though we can’t prove it we are sure that the medical study never really looked at the long term effects of cell phone use on toddlers who after all, had to be protected at all costs.

Well, here we go again, we are doing it for the children. When you do not have any evidence, or facts on your side, you throw out the old, “if it can save the life of just one child, it is worth it to ...................” you know the rest, you have seen it a thousand times. It never fails to stir the mothers instincts of a dedicated group of worriers who invariably show up on the evening news, crying huge tears and bawling that “Somebody’s got to DO something” before their baby dies.

So that must pretty much wrap it up, eh?. First Toronto Health Board, a known font of really important thinking, and now a study from prestigious Carnegie Mellon University. Bye, Bye Health Canada’s, multi-million, multi-year, multi-patient, study. We now have a new truth with confirmation from a University!

Well, not so fast. I just happened to notice two days ago, a little meme on the Interweb about a professor at Carnegie Mellon, the department head of some scientific discipline or other, who had sent out an EMAIL to all department staff, expressing his concern about and advising against the extended use of cell phones and in particular, he advised, that children not be allowed to spend hours a day with cell phones pressed against their tender little skulls or they might get cancer sometime, maybe, much later in life.

This was the sort of memo I used to send out when I was a captain of industry to my troops in July warning people about to go on summer vacation not to swim for 3 hours ( yes, I am that old.) after eating and to watch out for poison ivy while camping.

Further reading of this guys motivation and source of information that formed the basis of his concern reveals that. A: The wife of his best friend and fellow faculty member is suffering from brain cancer. A tragedy to be sure and I am equally certain that being able to point to a cell phone as the source of this poor woman’s pain would be comforting. You know how that goes, “It wasn’t anything I did or ate, it was the damn cell phone company’s fault. B: The professor also noted that a city in Canada, (Toronto) had recently declared cell phone use dangerous and especially for children.

Circle closed! Some numbskulls at TB of Health manufacture a concern out of whole cloth to fit in their weekly press release and then some head of department reads that, sends out an email and the next thing you know, the National Post publishes the news as a fully qualified pronouncement regarding something as important as Cell phones causing cancer.

There are a lot of very frightened people out there friends, and they seem to really need to cajole, bully, persuade others to share their fears in some kind of twisted need for verification of the validity of said fear. I wish I could say this was amazing but it is not, it is as common as dust these days.

It went like this: Birth, Life, Death, Infinity. It did not read: Birth, Life lived in fear, Death, Infinity.

All my life’s a circle, sunrise and sundown..... Somedays, the circle is smaller then other days.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-07-20T11:25:08-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/427f35ef3a5d26af932c8bf28255ec04-29.html#unique-entry-id-29http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/427f35ef3a5d26af932c8bf28255ec04-29.html#unique-entry-id-29
Killing me softly...... with new bicycle lanes on Eastern Avenue. I know, this seems silly and makes no sense to anyone who doesn’t know or care to know what or where Eastern Avenue is. But just think about this. Toronto Council voted last year to create more bike lanes in the downtown core, this time on Eastern Avenue, a four lane, the last four lane, road into the city centre. This came on the heels of constricting Dundas Street, the other four lane road headed downtown, to two lanes plus bike lanes two years ago.

They waited until the daily rush traffic moved to Eastern Avenue, just a few blocks south of Dundas, and then this week, new paint, and voila, a four lane roadway becomes a two lane roadway and another Snaildarter or rare Salamander is saved from extinction. An enterprising news crew spent a day counting traffic. The count? 12 bicycles and hundreds of cars, backed up, angry drivers, road rage, council rage, cyclist rage and, (if you happen to believe in these sorts of things.) tons and tons of evil carbon emissions floating up into the air from said stuck cars to block the sun and endanger the children.

Killing me softly.... This move comes just days after Toronto Council, yes those same jokers who are always crying poor to the Provincial and Federal Governments, voted to spend $11 Million to study tearing down a large section of the elevated Gardiner Expressway which, I detect a pattern here, is an incredibly efficient transportation corridor bringing cars, trucks, (read employees and essential goods like food, fuel, supplies) into the downtown core.

The study is to come up with a plan to tear down this roadway and replace it with an 8 lane boulevard of some description which is projected to cost $300 Million, have zero affect on traffic flow and of course be revenue neutral or some other such tripe. None of this latter part is even remotely true of course, it is just pap to get people to sign off on the study. The chances of any city ordered study coming up with a plan for an eight lane roadway are pretty remote unless of course, two of the lanes are for bicycles, two for buses, two for pedestrians and two for cars who purchase special passes allowing them into the downtown core.

Killing me softly......Little Davey Miller, Mayor of all the people, hails from England you see, and he has fallen in love with the “Congestion Tax” implemented by his hero and political inspiration, “Red” Ken Livingston, until recently Mayor of the City of London. Miller wants to implement a congestion tax, highway tolls, and if he could get away with it, an immigration entry tax levied at the city’s borders on anyone entering by bus, train, car or horse drawn vehicle.

Every time he floats these ideas, a couple of adults come out of hiding and speak publicly about how stupid they are and he backs off. Then a while later, one of his pet clones on council comes up with a back door way of sneaking up on the same plan couched in terms filled with references to “the children”, “global warming initiative” or that all encompassing, means nothing phrase, “sustainable development”.

Killing me softly......This week also saw the knuckleheads vote to send city staff out on a one year mission to record, catalogue and report on SHADE! That’s right, council has authorized a massive study to find out all we can about shade in the city, how much we have, how to make more, likely how to tax it, and who is going to pay for it. The councillor behind the motion berated skeptics with the appropriate magical, shut your mouth, words. “Because of Global Warming, we have an epidemic of children getting skin cancer” which was of course enough to snuff out all hope of any meaningful debate on the useless, huge waste of millions of dollars.

Even the study sited, which was one of those, 1 out of 4 people has mental health issues, vagaries that mean absolutely nothing, only said that 1 out of 7 children born today will (likely?) develop skin cancer in their lives. So of course, the alarmist faction jumps up with a burning need to DO SOMETHING FOR THE CHILDREN’S SAKE! . And they all fall down and vote to spend money on this outrageous study.

It should come as no surprise to those of you fortunate enough to live in what Torontonians refer to as “Fly over country”, that these city dwellers really cannot understand why the rest of the country either actively hates Toronto, or just wishes that it would slide into Lake Ontario sometime soon.

I can only offer this explanation and fervent wish. They are all NDP’rs who have fallen into power and are trying to do to the City what Mr. Rae did to the Province when he was very briefly Premier.

My wish is that “this too will pass”, and these pinheads will venture too close to the Sun and their wings will melt and they will finally come down to earth with the rest of us.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-07-11T14:41:14-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/9ee34225ef3afbd3a51d6241679978bc-28.html#unique-entry-id-28http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/9ee34225ef3afbd3a51d6241679978bc-28.html#unique-entry-id-28
Today we pay tribute to the government led program from those progressives in Argentina, who have come up with the following solution to their major “Greenhouse Gas” emission problem.




This 21st century mechanism does exactly what you would think the very first time you see it. It effectively captures cow farts which, as every frightened Al Gore sycophant knows, is mostly methane and therefore BAD since methane is one of the deadly “Greenhouse Gases” that are destroying the planet and killing all of the Polar Bears.

The Argentinean scientists, working on a government grant to study this problem and come up with a solution, have calculated that up to 30% of Argentina’s annual Greenhouse Gas emissions emanate from the nether regions of the abundant cow population.

The Argentines could take a page out of the Quebec City playbook and utilise the clever device used by Caleche drivers and also capture cow flaps which, when dried, can be burned quite efficiently in that old campfire out there in the middle of the Pampas with happy Gaucho’s all around. The future is indeed bright.

Here in Canada, over 30% of our Hot air emissions (which surely come under the category of “Bad” gas) originate with Politicians. I eagerly await the engineering study that will be undertaken by the NRC to re-size and re-shape the Argentine solution to fit our emitters. I can see Elisabeth May and Stephan Dion dancing at the Inaugural ball wearing the socially responsible gas capture devices. The start of a new fashion trend for sure.


30
]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-07-11T14:08:57-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/72a038702026d59bea567b162e1e6db4-27.html#unique-entry-id-27http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/72a038702026d59bea567b162e1e6db4-27.html#unique-entry-id-27After being warned by all the usual alarmist suspects that this summer the Polar Ice Cap could melt and be ice free for the very first time in the planets known history, the photo below appeared in wide circulation.



I found another picture of the USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole in 1962 but this one had the date and the nice signatures so I decided to use it. I hope it helps you get through the night knowing that the Chicken Little’s of the Climate Change wing of humanity got it dead wrong once again.

Cruise lines who specialise in Northern Ice voyages sometimes advertise that it may be possible to have a “dip at the North Pole” in one of the open patches of water that appear on a fairly regular basis near Santa’s home base.

I have to assume that now that the good folks of BC are paying 2 cents more per litre of gasoline as a Carbon Tax so that the Government of BC can “fix” the problem of Global Warming that pictures like this will not be possible in future generations. The Pole will ice over once again and forever. I would be willing to bet that, once the goal of the iced over North Pole is met, that the 2 cent (7cents by then) will never be rescinded.
]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-06-25T14:32:35-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/6ad62d8826b3263e63daaf3bf3e65ec8-26.html#unique-entry-id-26http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/6ad62d8826b3263e63daaf3bf3e65ec8-26.html#unique-entry-id-26Or, maybe not. But if it is, I am dead certain that it is not my fault. The planet may be warming, I happen to think that this is a good thing. I often see a photo from the Glacial Highway in the Rockies which shows a sign post which says that, (sic)”This glacier was at this point in 1954” or some other silly time frame. Of course the background shows the current glacier location to be a couple of thousand feet further up the valley. Proof positive, many say, that the ice sheet is retreating and we are all going to die.

I am tempted to put a sign on my front lawn which says, “The Glacier was at this point 17,000 years ago! Repent!” All of North America was under ice less then 17,000 years ago. A blink in geologic time frames. When I think of this fact, I feel good about warmer weather. I don’t feel responsible for it, but I feel happy that it is warmer today then it was “then”.

A knucklehead of the first order is appearing this week before the US Congress making grand statements about how we are all going to die from the heat unless we listen to him and floating the idea that any corporate oil types and/or political leaders who do not listen to him should be placed in jail.

Mr. James Hansen ( a NASA scientist, which is kind of scary) is appearing on or nearly on the 20th anniversary of his historic (in his mind) first appearance before Congress wherein he claims that he was the very first to blow the whistle of despair by telling us that the earth is getting warmer and (you guessed it) we were all going to die.

To help you put this pinhead’s credibility in perspective, I have cadged this nifty chart from the wonderful Small Dead Animals blog which shows just how much the planet has warmed up since Mr. Hansen’s first alarming statements.

I hope it is both self explanatory and that it has a calming effect on your anxiety quotient. Lord knows we could all use any respite from the caterwalling din that we hear on a daily basis.

So, the good news is that not only is this mythical warming not happening, it is not your fault either.

More on this in our next post.

]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-06-24T09:54:00-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/cf807673523843b427db72bc2761fc3e-25.html#unique-entry-id-25http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/cf807673523843b427db72bc2761fc3e-25.html#unique-entry-id-25Well, I don’t really plead. I wouldn’t want to give “Them” the satisfaction of thinking that I succumb to their self appointed ‘moral’ authority to insist that I am guilty of anything their tiny minds can come up with.

But I do insist that I am NOT guilty as charged of any or all of a litany of so called “crimes”.

Today’s crime:

Giving natives Small Pox impregnated blankets 400 years ago so that I could steal their land and condemn them to a horrid future of bad water, booze filled days and nights, a propensity for blockading highways, smuggling cigarettes and casino ownership.

I did not do that. I don’t know that anyone actually did those things and I frankly don’t care. It was a long time ago, get over it. My ancestors in Malta were not very good fighters who lived on a small island with lots of fresh water and pretty, dark haired girls with big hazel coloured eyes. They were conquered by everyone with a boat big enough to get there and land.

You don’t see roving bands of Maltese people dressed in Camo and beating drums demonstrating in front of the Phoenician Embassy for some kind of reparation payments. Maltese people aren’t hunkered down in run down huts in the back woods, (well, back shrubs) of the island of Comino waiting for “Whitey”, (or would it have been “Brownie”? I must look up some old photos of Phoenicians to be sure.) to come and make things right.

Malta was even over run by the British, who took over the island to use as a hospital during the Crusades to liberate the Holy Land from the “Heathen”. Thus the birth of the St. John’s Ambulance organization and the Knights of Malta. The Brits stayed for 400 years, until they were asked to leave by the far Left government of one Dom Mintoff, an early clone of Jack Layton, who seemed really surprised that they picked up and left. Dom was left with a lot of unemployed ship yard workers who used to look after the Royal Navy and did not last much longer in office.

However, the Maltese people got over it. The aforementioned “Heathens” who were the subject of those Crusades? Not so much. As a matter of fact, they seem to be capable of holding a grudge for about as long as the myriad of tribes scattered throughout Canada waiting for “someone to DO something” and make things better.

Hint: Apologies and big fat guilty cheques from the weak kneed politicos of the day are not going to make things better. You need to stop blaming me and get on with life. Invent pastizi, learn how to make nice lace doilies, cut the tails off of your cats or something to help you move on. Just like the Maltese people did.

Tomorrow’s sin? BURNING THE PLANET!!!]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-06-23T08:42:14-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/d9992723887dbf9346d4b548ebabdb49-24.html#unique-entry-id-24http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/d9992723887dbf9346d4b548ebabdb49-24.html#unique-entry-id-24
Reid Bryson’s life is a towering monument to not just wisdom, but blunt talk. What follows is a wonderful example of blunt talk and conviction coupled with a long, long, lifetime of scientific study. I sure couldn’t say any of this any better.



The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions

Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there’s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he’s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.

Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.

How Little We Know

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”

Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.

Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

What Leads, What Follows?

What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Renaissance Man, Marathon Man

When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s now practiced for six decades.

“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.”

This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.”

The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.

Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of the science of modern climatology.”

“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.”

Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.

With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t fathom” certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that “Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”

Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.

“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.

“I think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says. “He’s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that’s how real science takes place.”— By Dave Hoopman

Reproduced from the Wisonsin Energy Cooperative News, June 23, 2008 , http://www.wecnmagazine.com

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-06-17T12:07:39-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/028469bbba65fda44ecda8b8b79934ab-23.html#unique-entry-id-23http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/028469bbba65fda44ecda8b8b79934ab-23.html#unique-entry-id-23I get a little bit tired of trying to coerce people into actually examining the words that they use, daily it seems, in conversations all around me to make themselves sound au courant and ‘down with the struggle’ to save the planet and all the cute little polar bears from US, the supposed scourge that an omnipotent god unleashed on his creation.

When I ask them if they really want their governments to borrow against the future earnings of their children and grandchildren based on the word of a failed politician who managed to catch the imagination of all the ‘beautiful people’. I mean this was Al Gore for crying out loud. The guy who also claimed that he invented the internet, and that he was the inspiration behind the screenplay for the movie “ A Love Story” , and also went on record as unequivocally accepting Bill Clinton’s word that “he did not have sexual relations with that woman”. How could you possibly believe anything so important from such a dweeb as this?

He set in motion a waterfall of funding for any scientist, or pretend scientist, who was clever enough to include the words “GLOBAL WARMING” in their grant applications. I remember reading an interview with a Sudbury professor who said he couldn’t get a plugged nickel to finance his study of the mating habits of squirrels in the pine forests until he changed his title to “ An examination of the effects of GLOBAL WARMING on the sexual reproduction practices of squirrels in the pine forests. “ , and so it goes, on and on, billions upon billions spent and trillions asked for and promised.

All of this to pursue some holy grail of stable global climate. Something that no one can define or quantify because the very idea of climate being stable runs counter to all observable fact. Climate changes, every minute, everywhere, we can’t stop it, we cannot control it, we do not cause it.

A weather guy from the midwest US of A cracked me up one day when he said, “ I really don’t know which is more arrogant, people saying that we (humans) cause global warming, or that we (humans) can control it.”.

Today I just want to tackle one canard that annoys me that I found a rather well written response to. It was part of a letter by a fellow named Hans Schreuder, a chemist by training, regarding the Greenhouse Effect and Radiative Forcing.

He said in part :

“ Following on from your piece in the FT on 30 May 2008, as quoted in your latest CCNet
newsletter (31 May 2008) I wonder how we can get it across to alarmists as well as
skeptics that the much hyped greenhouse effect with its radiative forcing mechanism is
scientifically unsound and, in fact, absurd.

Based on UN IPCC dogma and according to this Australian website for children, the
greenhouse effect is "caused by gases in our atmosphere (especially water vapour, carbon
dioxide and methane). They trap energy from the sun's light and reflect it back to Earth,
so we just keep on getting warmer."

As Alan Siddons points out: "You might as well believe that your image in a mirror can
burn your face”. It is palpably absurd, and yet it is an accurate depiction of the theory that
the IPCC has foisted on the public - a theory that IPCC critics won't even attack because,
presumably, they believe it too.

Moreover, the actual trapping of heat cannot raise an object's temperature in the first
place. It only slows down heat loss. For instance, a polar bear is a living thermos bottle.
Its internal body temperature is much the same as ours. But its surrounding fat and fur are
such that - and this is remarkable - a polar bear is virtually invisible to a thermal camera.
Just like coffee in a thermos, you can't tell how hot the inside of a polar bear is by
looking at it from the outside. But neither does coffee in a thermos get hotter because its
heat is trapped. It just retains its temperature for a longer time. Otherwise, both the polar
bear and the thermos would self-ignite.

In short, the earth absorbs enough energy from the sun to reach a certain temperature.
Since it radiates the same amount, its temperature obviously isn't raised by carbon
dioxide absorbing some infrared - for CO2 simply releases that energy at the same pace,
as satellites attest. But even if CO2 did trap thermal energy, as insulation does (creating
an emission discrepancy that would be quite observable to satellites), the earth's
temperature could go no higher than what it began with. To repeat, coffee doesn't get
hotter in a thermos."

I kind of like the way this fellow put forth his argument and hope it strikes a chord with some of you so you can perhaps sleep a little bit easier at night.

30
]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-06-16T11:16:06-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/a355ae3852a67a65cd21192ba36b6783-22.html#unique-entry-id-22http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/a355ae3852a67a65cd21192ba36b6783-22.html#unique-entry-id-22Like most of the communities here in the Centre of the Universe, (COTU), we had a very active weather pattern move through the area Friday night last. For a while I thought the world might end and then it did. I was watching the half season finale, (the TV writers strike gave us a whole new language, didn’t it?) of BSG. That is Battlestar Galactica to the four of you who are not fans of this magically reworked Lorne Green original SciFi big adventure. A really terrific vehicle for a very talented Edward James Olmos who for once plays a brooding, strong character who is not that way just because he is hispanic and misunderstood. I love this show.

At 10:17 PM, the storm of the century caused all of our lights to go out. The world had indeed come to an end. The TV was blank, the room was dark, I was alone in the dark void that had been my family room. I tried to read the newspaper by tiny flashlight all the while hoping that the power would come back on any minute and I would not have missed much of my show.

It did not come back until 3:38 AM. Who knew if the Cylons had killed all of the hostages? Was the rescue successful? Will they find Earth? This is important stuff and I had missed it.

A few days before that, I would have been OK. As a tech savvy person, I know where to look, I know how to get, and I know how to watch video that I can access through the communications tool of the 21st Century, The Interweb.

I knew that I could log on, down load and burn out, the right file to allow me to see the episode that Thor, the God of Thunder, had blocked me from watching. It would take me mere minutes.

As the old Chad and Jeremy song goes, “that was yesterday, and yesterdays gone” . Now, Jim Prentice, the Industry Minister of our “nomore BIG government or BIG Brother” Conservative government of the day, has introduced Bill C61, a new, made in Hollywood production, passing itself off as a well thought out Copyright overhaul to bring Canada squarely into the 19th century.

Now, for me to download and view that copyright protected episode of BSG could get me and the person who uploaded it into serious jail time and tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

You might think that you have another option. Your buddy Ralph loves the show, works nights and always tapes the show with his VCR. You know he will have come home, watched the show and if you move fast, you can get that tape from him before he overwrites it with Desperate Housewives.

Not so fast Felon Face! Under C61, Ralph is ALLOWED to tape the show. HE can watch it once and then he must erase it. If he lends it to you, there is a good chance a SWAT team from the local RCMP detachment will break down your door, his door, seize everything with a power cord attached to it and cart you off to the Crowbar Hotel.

All this, for a 1 hour television show that was BROADCAST for FREE over the airways and the cable networks. You could pick this show up with rabbit ears, why the hell does it need to be protected to such a degree. One would think, I don’t know, based on 50 years of being bombarded with TV schedules full of shows chosen only because of their Neilsen ratings, that the idea behind this whole Television thing is to get as many eyeballs on the product as you can. More eyeballs, better ratings, etc. , etc.

Not in Canada in the 21st century you don’t. I don’t even want to get started on how if you BUY a CD from Sony music and you load that CD onto your computer so you can then download it to your iPod to listen to it while you jog or ride the subway, you have now won the right to pay $20,500. per song and possibly times 4 if you get sued by the song writer, song singer, the band and the cleaning lady at the studio.

So a 10 track disc violation like that would amount to $820,000, if all fines are applied. That is $500 per track, $20,000 for breaking the digital lock on the CD by loading it onto your computer, time the number of complainants that will come out of the woodwork if Sony decides to make you their newest best friend and example to felons everywhere.

Folks, I am not making any of this up and it is a lot worse. For the first time in my life I sent an angry email to a cabinet minister, Mr. Jim Prentice, and told him how I felt about this regressive, draconian piece of legislation. Make no mistake, this is not about piracy, or stealing anything from various “stakeholders” as they like to style themselves these days. This is just about the money.

The Recording Industry has not evolved since Edison recorded sound onto a tinfoil sheet on Dec. 6, 1877. Every technological advancement has been met with massive resistance, lobbying, new legislation and fear mongering on the part of the Recording Industry.

Their time is up, their business model can no longer support the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, their Star system of artist promotion is gone, the radio business no longer supports a Top 50 format and their sales are in the tank while Apple sells a Billion songs over the Interweb.

My local FM radio station used to have a playlist numbered in the hundreds or thousands. Since the dawn of the “targeted format” aimed at computer selected demographic groups the number of songs played on the largest Rock FM radio station in the largest market in Canada has dwindled to less than 40 songs.

And they wonder why artists are not selling records. Less than 10% of all songs written in Canada every year ever get aired on radio. Yet when I go to Best Buy and purchase a package of blank CD’s to burn my photos, my Computer OS software to, I am forced to pay a large fee, (roughly $10 per spindle) on top of the cost to be given to the 11,000 English songwriters in Canada who have registered with the Government program designed to ‘compensate’ artists for my “stealing” their work.

I am not to blame for this. Any of it. If Mr. Prentice and his cronies in my once favourite Conservative caucus would get their heads out of their collective asses and look around a little bit they might just figure it out.

Maybe if this C51 dies on the order paper, (as it could, and should) I will be able to find out if Adama, Laura, Boomer and Starbuck ever find Earth. You know, the important stuff.

If not, if this passes into law, there is another big storm coming. Hold on to your Tilley hat.

30



]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-06-11T09:30:01-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/9ef44de73582fca57a262e83adf9ae00-21.html#unique-entry-id-21http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/9ef44de73582fca57a262e83adf9ae00-21.html#unique-entry-id-21Let me begin by saying that anyone who believes that we have a universal, one tier health care system in Canada should really give up the Grey County Gray stuff and join the rest of us here in reality land.

Every time I read that some American basketball player stubbed his toe during a game here in Toronto and was taken directly to a downtown hospital for a full body CAT scan, an MRI and a neurology consult, all of which was completed before the next morning sports pages were printed I want to throw something at a politician. This battery of tests for you or I would involve the best part of a year of to-ing and fro-ing, several doctors from several different disciplines, a small army of clinic and health care support staff, a couple of dozen civil servants and a note from your mother.

When a politician, or a politician’s friend, needs a heart transplant, don’t stand in between them and the surgical room because you are going to get knocked down in the stampede. And for God’s sake, don’t sustain any head injuries within a walking mile of the hospital or you may get your wish to “donate” a little bit earlier then you had planned on.

For the most part, even though it is not as egalitarian as advertised, I like our health care system. I spent a lot of time working in various US cities with a number of companies filled with normal people who had normal health care issues not one bit different then we have. Their hospitals are wonderful, well equipped temples to modern medicine. Marvelously well trained doctors and first rate drug therapies await your every symptom.

However, you only have to see the effect of one diagnoses of Diabetes for a co-workers young child or a single heart attack to realise just how precious our portable health care system is. In the US of A, any such health care crisis has far reaching consequences. If you have a fairly good health care plan with your job, you are now bonded to that job forever. Any career advancement that necessitates a change of employer will result in you having zero health care benefits as your new employers plan will almost certainly not cover a “pre-existing condition”. You are screwed and you had better not get sick.

Back here at home, our hospitals are few and far between, an MRI may become a scarce precious resource, ‘shared’ on a regional basis by a number of hospitals so book four months in advance and beg a ride to Newmarket if you need one. Meanwhile a trip to the emergency room would try the patience of Job.

During a recent Provincial election, Liberal politicians unveiled, (for a second time already) a big sign touting a massive investment in our local hospital to fund a much needed expansion. Markham Stouffville Hospital needs this expansion.

Election over, sign is fading, minor announcement recently that the funding has been put on hold, ostensibly until the next election.

Not to be left out in the cold, a plan has been announced by the local politicians to levy a 3% Hospital Expansion Tax on homeowners in York Region to fund the expansion promised by the Province. These guys got balls.

It sounds a lot like the “User Pay” plan that is raised every so often and roundly criticized by pinheads like George Smitherman our Health Minister, as not universal, anti-inclusive and discriminatory.

Only in this case, it is a little bit different because it would be a case of Homeowners of York Region PAY while Everyone Else USES.

Markham Stouffville hospital is only a few miles north of Toronto’s border. Hospitals in Toronto are even more crowded then ours. It turns out savvy frequent fliers on the Ambulance Service frequently direct their drivers to take them to Markham Stouffville because the wait time, while still atrocious, is less then in their local hospital.

Run your eyes down the addresses of the patients in any ward in the hospital and you will find a great number are from outside what most folks would see as a logical ‘catchment area’ for MSH.

So, our hospital really does need to expand and we do need to raise some money if the Province is going to renege on their commitments.

I am going to surprise you here and tell you that after much sober thought I am in full agreeement with the 3% tax plan on York Region homeowners to fund this expansion.

They can impose that tax, the day after they start asking for ID with a York Region address on it before they admit or provide any services to anyone who comes through the door.

That I can live with.

30

]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-06-06T11:37:23-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/6025182f2e01f444160a4b538dd17ebb-20.html#unique-entry-id-20http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/6025182f2e01f444160a4b538dd17ebb-20.html#unique-entry-id-20With any luck we will be following and/or participating in two major elections this coming Fall season. Our American friends will be duking it out state by state. The Blue States vs. the Red States as seen on those incredibly stupid massive electronic chalk boards on CNN and FNN ad nauseam during political news casts which seem to run about 20 hours a day now.

In Canada, it will be Les Bleu’s vs. La Rouge with a smattering of L’orange and Vert thrown in to keep the metaphor even more colourful.

It was inevitable I suppose that nations who have been engaging in dumbing down the important debates of our day to reach the lowest common denominator as based on advertising demographics would eventually devolve into using what can only be described as the electronic equivalent of a colouring book to explain the big picture to the folks.

Colour is not the only thing that the two elections will have in common this time round. Mr. Dion has announced his party platform on Energy and it seems to be based on the fallacious notion taxing the Bad Guys and promising tax breaks to the Good Guys will work just as well in this 21st century as it did during most of the last quarter of the 20th. From a “chicken in every pot” to a “Prius in every driveway” is a short slide down a slippery slope.

I actually look forward to Mr. Dion and Mr. Obama running on a platform to raise the price on $1.35 a litre or $4.00 a gallon gasoline by 40 cents or so as well as similar increases in electricity rates, and natural gas. As Premier Campbell of BC is going to find out as the effects of his recently enacted Carbon Tax starts to show up on the Visa statement, hell hath no fury like a voter deprived of the pleasure of their Silverado.

Speaking of which, the outraged auto workers, (Do any of you also think that being an easily outraged, “git her done” kind of person is a prerequisite for admission into the CAW?) now seen on every TV channel are just the tip of the iceberg of the hundreds of thousands of people in Canada whose livelihood is or will soon be threatened by the knee jerk reaction of consumer sheep to the scary talk dripping from the mouths of weaselly politicians and others in the “How are we going to fool them today” camp.

Spend a year of so telling everyone that Oil is bad, the planet is dying, WE are dying and within 30 or 40 years we are all going to be living either underwater, or on a shore somewhere without any breathable air or drinkable water unless we use fewer plastic bags and tax people into the poorhouse if they use any form of energy and guess what? People stop buying Silverado’s and F150’s and take fewer trips to visit the folks in Parry Sound.

Next on the list of unintended consequences is the abandonment of hundreds of development plans for housing projects in what are currently known as Bedroom Communities like Barrie, Bowmanville, Milton et al right across the country. If folks can’t afford to drive cars into the city to work they will either not move out of the city in the first place or try to move back in to be closer to their jobs. Watch what that does to the affordable housing market and jobs in the construction and manufacturing industries.

All of these pinheads persist in characterising their Carbon Tax or Cap and Trade plan as “Revenue Neutral”. Dion insists, as does Mr. Campbell et al, that every penny of the $10 or $20 or $40 Billion that these taxes will vacuum out of the economy into the Federal Treasury will be returned to taxpayers as tax credits. Now, hands up anyone who believes that for a nanosecond. Nobody? I thought so. Even if you trusted their intentions, listen to their words. We will provide tax incentives for people to invest in energy saving appliances and transportation.

What they want you to believe is that everyone will get some money back. What they will do is provide tax credits for buying a Prius or an ultra efficient Zero refrigerator. I don’t know about you, but most folks who I know are driving 12 year old Ford products and paying bootleg repairmen to refill their 25 year old Kelvinator with Freon which was banned in the last fit of useless regulatory activity.

If you pay little or no taxes, which means you are likely not making much money, a $2500 tax credit to buy a $40,000 hybrid car to replace your 10 year old Chrysler minivan is of zero value. They don’t send you a cheque, they just let you deduct from taxes owing.

Revenue neutral? I don’t think so. Furthermore, if these or any taxes are honestly able to be described as REVENUE NEUTRAL, can you understand why they would impose them at all? I mean seriously, they are saying they will take Billions of dollars out of your left pocket, launder it through the machinery in Ottawa and then they promise that they will put EVERY PENNY back into your right pocket. Why bother?

Why bother indeed!

Mr. Dion and Mr. Obama and all of their cowardlly, stay in power at any cost, fellow travellers, in trying to appease their left wing, green focussed, vocal voting minorities will provide easy pickings for the Bleu’s and the Blue’s this fall.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-06-05T15:16:39-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/dca9d3559e08fbc710b6eec8f663ad55-19.html#unique-entry-id-19http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/dca9d3559e08fbc710b6eec8f663ad55-19.html#unique-entry-id-19I remember well the feeling of helplessness that came over me when I first got involved in politics in the early 70’s. Young, inexperienced, more heart the head, I was a large “L” Liberal at a time when it was a good thing to be. I’ d like to be trite and say that the earnest young ladies of the NDP, with their sturdy shoes and shop floor haircuts, could not compete with the bra-less and occasionally bra-burning Liberal Ladies League but the truth is that it was not the ladies nor the parties but the late night discussions about policy that drew me to the Trudeau camp and kept me away from the party of David Lewis, a man I greatly admired.

It was policy and more importantly, a sense that what we were doing was going to have an effect on the world around us, was actually going to mean something, that stirred our hearts and drove us to work ridiculous hours and give up so much of our family life for The Cause.

The helplessness came when we would rub up against old time Conservative voters, either at the door while canvassing, or while involved in some community activity. With the zeal of the freshly converted I would rattle off the benefits of Liberalism and the sins of Conservatism. How one uplifted the spirit and the other crushed the little guy. Time after time these grizzled Tories would nod their heads in agreement about how the last Conservative government of John G. Diefenbaker had bungled one policy after another and we would exclaim how we just could not understand how Dief had ever been elected in the first place. They would agree, smile and every damn one of them would say with an almost beatific smile on their faces, “ He may have been all of those things, but “BOY, HE SURE COULD GIVE A GOOD SPEECH”.

That was it for these folks, damn the results, never mind the carnage, “HE GAVE A GOOD SPEECH” was all that was necessary to win the hearts and minds and wallets and votes of these morons with voting privileges. Unbelievable!

This past Tuesday, I heard it again, as if from some far distant memory, “WHAT AN ORATOR”, “GREAT SPEECH”, “REALLY STIRRED THE CROWD” , were the words I heard the talking heads exclaim over and over, as if that really meant something.

I suppose it does however, much as it pains me to say it. It means Barack Obama is the NEXT BIG THING and woe betide anyone or anything who gets in the way of his rhetoric or dares to parse his actual words.

I dare though, I mean, I know most people today are sheep. The polls tell me every day that even in the face of tons of real evidence to the contrary, most of the folks I share this hemisphere with actually believe that A: Global warming is a real and present threat. and B: That not only did ‘we’ (they usually mean me though) cause it, that we can actually do something about it.

So you see, I am used to seeing this kind of blind acceptance of the public utterances of morons like Al Gore and David Suzuki but surely there has to be some kind of means test applied to the words of the guy who would be the next President of Everything. The guy said the following, to thunderous applause, (sic) “ today is the day that the oceans stopped rising”, ... “today is the day our planet began to heal”. I mean come on, this guy is talking about how June 3, 2008, the day he decided to declare himself, cause you know, Hillary has not decided yet if it is true or not, the presumptive nominee of the Democrat Party for the 08 elections, will go down in history as the day the oceans stopped rising!!! The planet began to heal!!!

This guy should not be worried that folks may call him by his middle name, Hussein. He should be concerned that folks will call him Knud, the Viking King who anointed himself with the power to stop the tides just about 1000 years ago. (1016)

Rapture is what I saw on the faces of the crowd Tuesday night. Awe is what I perceived on the minds and lips of the talking heads of Fox News as they reported this event. But I got to tell you, all I could hear, in that little nagging voice back behind my tired eyes, was, “BOY, HE SURE COULD GIVE A GOOD SPEECH” !

Hang on to your hats, here they come again.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-02-06T09:05:02-05:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/1c4131c924d73e9edcd97ab65dbcaaa9-18.html#unique-entry-id-18http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/1c4131c924d73e9edcd97ab65dbcaaa9-18.html#unique-entry-id-18Super Duper Tuesday, another day in the life of a US Primary Nomination race.

The Clinton war machine twists the truth once again by declaring victory on the day named by our descriptive adjective loving neighbours as SUPER TUESDAY. Although this years addition had additional handles attached as it now comes with "MORE STATES, BETTER NEWS COVERAGE AND LIVE ENTRANCE/EXIT POLLING IN HD, 1080P, 3D available on the Interweb.

One would think that the American public would a: Tire of the constant stream of statements from anyone involved with the Clintons that either have to be "clarified", re-stated, re-interpreted and or denied, or b: Wise up to the fact that these people are serial, pathological liars who, with their willing co-conspirators in the main stream press, have been applying makeup to this sow's ear of a "dynasty" for more then 20 years now.

Here are the numbers as tallied by NBC and the Obama campaign.

With the delegate count still under way, NBC News said Obama appears to have won around 840 delegates in yesterday’s contests, while Clinton earned about 830 — “give or take a few,” Tim Russert, the network’s Washington bureau chief, said on the “Today” show.

"The Obama campaign attached an Excel spreadsheet containing “state-by-state estimates of the pledged delegates we won last night, which total 845 for Obama and 836 for Clinton — bringing the to-date total of delegates to 908 for Obama, 884 for Clinton.”"

While the Clinton's and their enablers dance and spin their way around the facts the juggernaut that the Obama campaign has become continues to build up momentum and every time his opponents HillBilly Clinton try their triangulation strategy to compare Obama to Jesse Jackson or Step 'n Fetchit or Rochester to remind voters that, 'after all, he's only black, WE were/are the first black president" , every time they try that good folks listen hard and vow to support whoever they are running against so that the White House does not ever again have to suffer "love stains" on the carpet of the Oval Office and the Lincoln bedroom is not rented out to gun runners and tax evaders.

My vote for the very best line of the night goes to the (comment from the NBC web article) Martin E. Andersen of Maryland who below looks at the bleatings of the Clintons and is reminded of a marvelous quote. Enjoy.


"Martin Edwin Anderse...
Location: Churchton, MD
Party: Democrat

Reply #: 1
Date: Feb. 6, 2008 - 8:30 AM EST
The Clinton camp's claims of a victory, after spending weeks retreating from a much stronger position vis-a-vis her other competitors, reminds of the story told by John Kenneth Galbraith of debriefing the German Albert Speer at the close of World War II.

"How was it, Galbraith asked, that Speer knew his Germans were losing? It was, Speer replied, because the glorious victories of the Fatherland were growing ever closer to Berlin. "

Let's liberate the Democratic Party from the occupation forces of corruption and moral relativism! The Big "O" has got the Big Mo !!! Go Obama !!!

MARTIN EDWIN ANDERSEN"


You gotta love this stuff.


TEG


30
]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2008-01-07T11:54:55-05:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/e65babc6692726a35c79e455f8f35426-17.html#unique-entry-id-17http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/e65babc6692726a35c79e455f8f35426-17.html#unique-entry-id-17Did you ever wonder why, 30 some odd years after the Americans tricked us into adopting The Metric System, we elder goats, er, geeks, get mocked for having trouble figuring out how many miles per gallon 11.3 litres per 100 Kilometers really is and what coat we should put on when it is 6 degrees out, why is it that you can announce to the world that there is a new baby and (if you are talking to someone of the female persuasion) you have to tell them how much baby weighed at birth in pounds and ounces?

You never hear anyone say that a newborn weighed 3700 grams or so many kilograms or 23 millibars or 700 milliliters. Just 7 lbs. 1 oz. thanks very much and everyone seems to know what you mean and the Metric police seem to give you a pass.

I'm not complaining mind you, I like it. I was just wondering.

30

TEG]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-11-16T09:24:39-05:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/83d0f069a6efabcd7e484d29cdfd3766-16.html#unique-entry-id-16http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/83d0f069a6efabcd7e484d29cdfd3766-16.html#unique-entry-id-16Of all the dumb things that Stephane Dion has come up with since his elevation to the role of chief sacrificial lamb of the Liberal Party of Canada, this latest push for a full Judicial Inquiry into the tired old dregs of what was known as The Airbus Scandal at the time, is the dumbest by far.

While taking bows for "forcing" the Stephen Harper led government of the day to call the enquiry, Mr. Dion is only seeing about one foot in front of his wing tips, politically speaking. He and his cronies are crowing about hitting a home run in the game of partisanship that passes for governance these days and wanting bonus points for making the government extend the terms of the inquiry to include a look into the 2.1 million dollar settlement Mr. Mulroney negotiated from a previous government to settle a defamation suit that he launched. At the time, a major victory for Mr. Mulroney and an embarrassing defeat for the Chretien led Liberals of the day.

Here is where it all sticks to your shoe if you are Stephane Dion. Imagine the two possible outcomes of such an inquiry:

1: Mr. Mulroney is completely vindicated. Mr. Harper stands up and beats on the opposition parties for once again spending taxpayers money on a bogus, partisan witch hunt. Tying it all up in a bow by resurrecting and pointing out the difference between the enquiry into the Tory government vs. the outcome of the Gomery inquiry into corruption in the Liberal government of which Mr. Dion was a prominent member.

Harper 1... Dion 0

2: Mr. Mulroney is found to have done something wrong and perhaps did not deserve the 2.1 Million dollar settlement. Mr. Harper stands up in the House, and says: " An independent Judicial inquiry has today handed down it's report which confirms that the previous Liberal Government of Jean Chretien and Stephane Dion were absolutely stupid, cowardly and incompetent when they gave taxpayers money to Mr. Mulroney when anyone with half a brain should have known that he did not deserve it." Our Government will take steps to correct that error, just as we have taken steps to correct all of the 37 other corrupt and/or illegal things that the Gomery inquiry found that the previous Liberal Government of Mssrs. Chretien and Dion did while in office.

Harper 2 .... Dion 0

Dion is a putz and the sooner his party throws him under the bus so they can elect someone new and wait out the coming Conservative majority government's life span the better.


IMHO Anyway.

30 ]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-09-19T15:33:48-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/7d39066c4286ce84bede057d454419ae-15.html#unique-entry-id-15http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/7d39066c4286ce84bede057d454419ae-15.html#unique-entry-id-15This is the “Age of Enlightenment”?

If you ever find yourself feeling a little bit smug about living in a country where women do NOT have to cover their face and their ankles in public, where they are allowed to go to school, work, marry the person of their choice and even vote, then just come on down to Ontario and tune in to the debate raging over a vaccine (Gardasil, Merck Frosst) that can actually immunize young women against 4 different strains of the virus which cause 70% of all cases of cancer of the cervix and 90% of genital warts.

This is like two miracles for the price of one, first, that such a vaccine has been developed, and then, that a modern day government will actually pay for the preventative treatment. Imagine that, the holy grail of all of those midnight walkathons, the Terry Fox run, the pink t-shirt run/walk, the quilting bee’s, the daffodil drives, an actual vaccine that can prevent a cancer. And the religious Luddites are in full throated uproar over a plan by the Provincial Government to inoculate almost 85,000 young women in Ontario.

The Catholic School Boards, already under siege in the current electoral climate because of plans by the hard charging Tory, Tory party to screw them out of their exclusive status as a publicly funded separate school system, is engaging in some illogical ranting and foaming at the mouth over the plan to start giving this vaccine to all female grade 8 students in the Province which is to start this month. To be effective, the drug must be administered before any exposure to the virus has occurred.

The virus in question, the HPV or Human Papilloma Virus, which can cause cervical cancer, is sexually transmitted you see and even though almost all citizens of Canada are exposed to this virus during their lifetimes, most without any ill effect but more than a few women subsequently exposed develop cervical cancer and die, yet the school boards are arguing about allowing their precious little ones to have the vaccinations.

The arguments being put forth are embarrassingly ludicrous, “the drug company is making too much money off of this” , “there hasn’t been enough testing” and the granddaddy of them all, “if our girls get this needle we know they they will be promiscuous”. Yeah, better they get cancer. One little needle and all of the graduating class of St. Monica's are going to be contestants in the next America's Next Porn Star on the Fox Network.

Now, I know that young Catholic girls don’t engage in sexual acts, at least they didn’t when Mother Syncleta was beating me senseless once a week with a leather strap back at old St. Luke’s. However, I knew the local abortionist in those days and she was doing a brisk business so somebody was engaged in carnal activity with somebody. Just not the Catholic girls I suppose, not then, not today. Place head in sand and repeat after me. There is no place like home, there is no place like home.

That's it Dorothy, wake up and smell the coffee. OZ is only in your dreams, just like a sex free Catholic population. Let's get this straight, if Catholics weren't having sex there wouldn't be any little Catholics running around and since they are having sex they are going to come into contact with this virus. This should be a no brainer, instead, it seems that all of the No Brains are on the Nay side of the equation.

Twits]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-09-17T13:54:32-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/858360a9c4636d13ecd08b812089f073-14.html#unique-entry-id-14http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/858360a9c4636d13ecd08b812089f073-14.html#unique-entry-id-14The Ontario Schools Question, and the hangover to come.


I read Mr. Tory’s words in defense of his proposal to extend public funding education to religions other then those codified in the BNA act that created Canada and I can’t help but hold my breath in eager anticipation.

Mr. Tory said this week that it was just too hard to look into the eyes of Hindu/Jewish/Muslim parents and not agree with them that it is just not “fair” that Catholics get their own schools and Hindus, Muslims, Jews and a host of fundamentalist Christian organisations don’t get the same treatment. He had to “do something” about it and his passion for this cause knows no bounds.

Well, it really does, and even though he says the bounds are around $500 million dollars I think that his typical political mathematics is way off the mark. All of the aforementioned groups and untold others are going to expect marble archways, fleets of buses, gleaming gymnasiums and ultra-modern designed and equipped schools built wherever they live. They won’t put up with rented space and car-pooling cause that’s not what those Catholics have. You have to be fair!

Notwithstanding that Mr. Tory is taking a page out of the Dion phrasebook by making “Fair”ness a major plank in his platform, I do believe that the real challenges are yet to come. They are sitting in the weeds, injunctions and subpoenas in hand just waiting for the precedent to be set.

Next up is, " I want my kids taught in (pick one or make up your own), Mandarin, Cantonese, Farsi, Hebrew, Italian, or Maltese at their own school where they can be with others of their own kind. After all, that is what the FRENCH kids get and we want to be “Fair” don’t we".

There are currently 12 French Language school boards in Ontario, 6 French language school authorities, and they administer 397 schools just full of French speaking kids.

Unlike with the publicly funded Catholic Schools, to which anyone can and do go in large numbers, even if they are not Catholic, if you aren’t French don’t bother showing up at these 397 doors. No way.

Do you think Mr. Tory has thought about how his Fairness Doctrine will cope with all of the creative ways that the cultural isolationists will develop to suck public money out of any government he might lead?

I don’t, not for a minute. I don't believe that he is thinking past tomorrow's poll numbers and such nearsightedness indicates poor judgement and a lack of planning. Perhaps Mr. Tory might have benefitted from a few years of study with the Jesuits.

Twits!]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-09-13T11:15:03-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/1f69414eb2b61c7628e8093bcfec6826-13.html#unique-entry-id-13http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/1f69414eb2b61c7628e8093bcfec6826-13.html#unique-entry-id-13

We are in the throes of an election here in Ontario, and the talking bags of wind are in full throttle, throwing out equal parts of empty promises, ephemeral bags of money and damning accusations in a non-stop orgy of campaigning.

Dalton McGuinty, Liar in Chief of the Liberals, is saying, “ I mean it this time”, “ I am not lying to you now”, over and over hoping that it will catch on and sound like a sincere statement. Not working.

John Tory, who was cruising along towards at least a major role in a minority government or at best, a real shot at becoming Premier, decided that he really did not want to win and announced, a week before the writ, that his government would open up for question and funding the one issue that energizes the old Orange Order base of the Ontario Conservative party, funding for the (Catholic) Separate School System.

Tory has tried to make this all about “inclusiveness” and “fairness”, normally coveted Liberal buzz words, by saying that his plan is to allow government funding for ALL faith based education systems in the Province. He is of course, trying desperately to separate Mr. McGuinty from his cricket playing constituency, the Black Hat Orthodox Jewish voters and the overwhelmingly Liberal and growing like a weed, Chinese ethnic community.

All of these folks now think that if Tory is elected that they will get the same thing the “those Catholics” get, equal funding. They envision gleaming schools, with pools, libraries, and well equipped class rooms, all classes being taught in their native tongues with cafeterias full of nan, or rice or matzo served by properly kosher/ halal educated dietitians.

I see little yellow school buses cruising the neighborhoods, some of them with a Union Jack on the front, others with the Star of David, one over here with a Crescent symbol closely followed by a larger bus with a Papal blue flag flying.

On the corners, flocks of children, all decked out in various uniforms waiting peacefully for their ride. Separated by little chain link barriers to make it easy for the drivers and to avoid anyone getting on the wrong bus. Perhaps the Catholic kids could all wear a large cross around their necks, the Jewish contingent could have little yellow stars on their sleeves. Separate pens for the female members of the hard core Jewish and Muslim sects who insist on such things of course.

Just a heavenly image of peaceful co-existence isn’t it?

Of course, it will never happen, and Tory knows this. His real purpose is to rally to his side all of those old line Tories who were calling for the head of retiring Premier Bill Davis when he extended funding to Catholic secondary schools in 1985. These voters expressed their outrage by staying home on election day and sinking the good ship PC being then captained by the plaid wearing used car salesman from Bracebridge, Mr. Frank Miller. Who was promptly defeated by NDP Bob Rae.

A Workers paradise ensued of course.

Tory has trotted out that very same Bill Davis as his point man on this file, and I am certain that all are convinced that good old Bill will “do the right thing” and recommend abolition of all funding for any schools other then the Public system.

Never mind that under the terms of the BNA negotiated in 1855, upon which our country was founded, Ontario and Quebec were bound to provide equal funding to both a Catholic and a Protestant (read Public) system in their respective provinces. Until 1985, the province of Ontario short changed the Catholic school system at every turn and the Conservative voting base begrudged every last nickel.

John Tory knows all of this, he worked for Bill Davis during that period, and he now seeks to ignite an argument that will force Dalton McGuinty who, as I have read countless times this past two weeks, is a “product of the Catholic School System whose wife is a teacher in that system” . Horror of horrors, the Papists are in charge of the government, where is King Billy when you need him?

All of this is a sickening and transparent bout of pandering of the very worst kind. A whole lot of people are going to be very disappointed and extremely angry when this is over no matter how the election turns out.

John Tory should be ashamed of this and he is not. I predict that there will be a whole lot of shame to spread around when this is over.

Mike Harris must be chuckling in his beer.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-09-13T09:59:46-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/da4ff2f4cdcea83a3a5dea508aebd0b4-12.html#unique-entry-id-12http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/da4ff2f4cdcea83a3a5dea508aebd0b4-12.html#unique-entry-id-12NATO & the NUTSO’s

The top brass from the NATO member nations were meeting in Victoria BC last week. A nice place to visit, get away from the demonstrators in Brussels and, for something completely different, check out their Canadian counterparts waving signs and shouting insults around the Harbour in Victoria.

All of this is old hat by now, a bunch of folks with too much time on their hands and altogether no idea why/how they have the freedom to protest and how important that right is, band together, occasionally dress up in stupid costumes and show that they are “down with the struggle” of “poor, oppressed, people of colour/ethnicity/religion/status” everywhere. Throw in a few people wearing G. W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld masks and you have yourself a party.

Ho, Hum, send in the clowns.

I don’t much mind these people unless they start destroying things or hurting other people to show that they are really, really, really, in favour of Peace. I do often wonder about their level of understanding of the issues that they purport to hold dear however and one sign in particular caught my eye which made me laugh/sigh/weep and mutter “suspicions confirmed” to no one in particular.

Sign said, “ Pull out of NATO now and preserve Canada’s reputation as Peacekeepers”.

I am pretty sure that this dimwit has no idea what NATO stands for, it’s history, and dead certain that they have zero clue as to how Canadian soldiers gained their reputation as Peacekeepers.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, founded in 1949 and now comprising 26 member countries not only were the thin green line that kept the “Commies” from taking over Europe during that long 40 years or so of the Cold War, they also kept belligerents apart in Cyprus, Bosnia, The Golan Heights, Egypt, Lebanon, Croatia and most recently Afghanistan.

The member nations are pledged under this treaty to treat an attack on any one country as an attack on all members and to respond when asked with whatever help is necessary. The events of 9/11 were deemed as just such an attack and Canada (with a lot of foot dragging from Mr. Chretien et al) responded by signing on to assist in eliminating the threat in Afghanistan posed by the Taliban government’s sponsorship of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization.

By taking part in this operation Canada is not only fulfilling it’s obligations to the NATO treaty but also maintaining it’s long and honorable tradition of Peacekeeping.

I can understand the problem with the language. Soldiers, trained to inflict death and destruction on the enemy of the day, have been saddled with the title “Peacekeepers” by soft spined politicos and soft headed editorialists who don’t really ever want to talk about all of that “icky” killing and dying stuff.

Safe at home, squishy “activists” like to think that soldiers are just kept around to fill sand bags during floods and put up tents after a natural disaster. To build schools for the little children and hospitals for the sick. So, when they see real blood and real caskets on the ground they get all panicky and decide that “somebody has to do something” so they make up signs, write catchy slogans and crash a NATO meeting in nice, safe, close to a Starbucks, Victoria.

Really useful, thanks for the message, we didn’t really even think that killing and dying was not a good way to spend a couple of summers overseas. Never occurred to us. We get it now, you can go home and pet your poodle and feel good about yourself now. The adults will finish up here soon and go back to Brussels, and Kandahar.

Twits!

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-09-07T11:23:04-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/d02ab61fc7e5ff031729c79920480382-11.html#unique-entry-id-11http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/d02ab61fc7e5ff031729c79920480382-11.html#unique-entry-id-11A Mr. David Onley became the latest representative of The Queen in Ontario this day. Mr. Onley is by all appearances a decent man and I am certain that he will not embarrass the citizens of Ontario nor the Queen whom he purportedly represents during his tenure.

Mr. Onley is the latest example of a good idea gone horribly wrong and would perhaps be the last if there were any politicians active today who had any sense of decorum or responsibility. Mr. Onley, a victim of childhood polio who rides a nifty little scooter to navigate any distance and can stand and walk a very few feet with the aid of a cane, is a former Television talking head who is very familiar to Toronto viewers of the local chapter of City TV.

He has pledged to dedicate his term in office to expanding computer literacy amongst Ontario’s proud native people’s legion of youth. A noble cause chosen, we are certain, with noble intent.

Mr. Onley’s predecessor, a Mr. James Bartleman, was distinguished as the first native (read aboriginal) person to attain this lofty office in Ontario. An issue grabbing appointment choice just recently duplicated in BC I am told.

This all follows the appointment of Adrienne Clarkson as Governor General of Canada not long ago, a former Television news talking head of recent Chinese immigrant lineage. Ms. Clarkson was hailed as a sterling example of tolerance and inclusiveness and touted as a credit to her “race”.

Her successor in the job of representing the Queen in Canada was one Michaelle Jean, a former Television talking head from Quebec who was herself a recent immigrant from Haiti and boasted ties to slave ancestors.

Does anyone else detect a pattern here?

Roland Michener, Jeanne Sauve’, Ed Schreyer, Hilary Weston, Vincent Massey, Georges Vanier, et al should be rolling in their graves or sending back their purple sashes in outrage at the blatant dilution of the requirements for one of the most prestigious political offices in the land.

It is hard not to envision the earnest selection committee searching in vain for the perfectly “correct candidate” with the perfect optics. One can be forgiven for speculating on their disappointment when they discovered that Michaelle Jean was not confined to a wheelchair.

Mr. Onley seems to be a decent man, the fact that he had to dip into the bag of tricks more commonly used by beauty contest entrants for his “mission” is just sad and a reflection on the carny sideshow the office has become rather then on his intentions. One must suppose that combatting computer illiteracy amongst our proud native youth is the Canadian equivalent of “ I want to work with disadvantaged children when I grow up Monty” which is uttered breathlessly by 90% of those airhead wannabe Beauty contest queens.

I am of an age that remembers well the scourge of Polio in this country. Pools were closed, going to school was a crapshoot and organized sporting events were sparsely attended. The Ex was avoided as a hotbed of disease carrying fellow citizens.

I have tried in vain to explain to my daughters how difficult it was to go and visit a friend who was spending all of their time in an Iron Lung and had to look at you through a little mirror. It was tough going for those kids who came down with this disease. I applaud all of them who made it through.

I don’t think for a minute however that surviving a bout of Polio is a decent criteria for being appointed to be the Lt. Governor of Ontario. Not one minute. Nor is the ability to read a teleprompter while looking straight into the camera while giving the weather forecast. Nor is it an acceptable criteria to just be a victim of something, anything.

Appointing someone to these offices because of their race, their colour, their sympathy factor or the degree of their claim to victimhood, whether or not they personally use that in their lives, is the absolute height of political pandering and should be loudly condemned and stopped. Or the Institution’s themselves should be abolished.

Sorry David, I wish you luck but to the folks who gave you this job you are nothing but a cliche. I only hope that you can rise above it and do some real good on some real issues. The pathetic Ontarians’ with Disabilities Act would be a great place to start.

This is very, very sad.
30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-08-16T15:19:25-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/7f27bef2c932702776ecd907a2da1788-10.html#unique-entry-id-10http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/7f27bef2c932702776ecd907a2da1788-10.html#unique-entry-id-10
So, THEY say that Elvis Presley went to that big concert in the sky 30 years ago today. I am not sure I believe it yet but will go along with the joke for the sake of getting along.

Unlike the Kennedy assasination or the still fresh events of 911, I don't remember precisely where I was when I heard this news, but I do remember the day. As I sit here listening to Blue Suede Shoes I can still see the television stations trying hard to react to this news. A good friend of ours, Ed Wideman, had backed up Elvis as part of the Toronto based Laurie Bower Singers at the famous Aloha from Hawaii concert in 1973. This concert was the very first ever broadcast around the world via satellite, another first for the King. So when I turned on the TV to catch the news here was Ed Wideman, along with Toronto's most famous adopted Arkansan, Rompin' Ronnie Hawkins being challenged to come up with fresh stories every 60 seconds to feed the voracious appetite of Live TV.

Ed didn't look too comfortable but Ronnie is old soft shoes enough for ten people so the words and one liners flowed like mustard down your fave tie just before your sales meeting. They managed to do a good job while the news sunk in that the guy who really started it all may actually have assumed room temperature sitting (fittingly) on the throne in Graceland. Elvis wasn't just a great singer and a great performer. Long before Paris Hilton stained a diaper or a reputation the King invented star power and celebrity. I know he wasn't first with just about anything and a tip of the hat to Bill Haley ( of The Comets) and all of those black singers whose style Elvis covered but he put it all together in one package, stardom, movie star, rock and roll god, trophy wife, he practically invented bling, and along with all of this came the inevitable entourage and it's attendant sychophants bearing booze, broads and edge enhancing pharmecuticals.

It ended badly for the King but turned out pretty good for his heirs and anyone else who circled planet Elvis during the good times. Priscilla made out OK, I still don't want to talk about the whole grandaughter Micael Jackson thing and I think his dad made a pretty good living out of the estate. The King is always right up there in record sales every year. It is hard not to weep however when you listen to yet another radio interview with some schmuck who "sang with Elvis" and was his "close personal friend", and is appearing at the local Jack in The Box every Thursday evening. These things can make you hit the old RCA Victor a smack at times.

Good old Ed Wideman didn't last much longer then Elvis himself, not surviving a late night car crash that would have made Cronenberg spit up his milk. I like to think that Ed wouldn't have sullied his or Elvis's legacy with any tell all stories but we will never know. Ronnie generally has too much of the gentleman in him to be so foolish and is currently in yet another come back as spokesman for some flooring outfit opening a plant in Bolton this year, so I guess he will be too busy and in the chips enough to take part in the annual rite of remorse that takes place every year on this anniversary.

The Collingwood people have it right, Elvis lives there every summer and a lot of tinkers, tailors, bankers, bikers and soccer moms let it all hang out to Lawdy Miss Clawdy with abandon.

This is a good thing.

Wherever he is, I hope he is looking down at all of this while munching on a peanut butter and banana sandwich and giggling.

The King is Dead, and I miss him.]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-08-14T13:43:37-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/aed6a1e9703355f4cd40e0ab9fc2117d-9.html#unique-entry-id-9http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/aed6a1e9703355f4cd40e0ab9fc2117d-9.html#unique-entry-id-9
In those days, it was pretty rare for anyone to water their lawns. That is what rain was for after all and if it didn't rain the grass could just go dormant, the way it was designed to. A lot of brown lawns around here this summer and the lady who cuts our lawn, (OK, her lawn) is bemoaning the fact that she has not had to cut the grass since June. Got so bad the other week she stomped all over the acreage with a battery operated weed whacker looking for any blade or leaf bold enough to poke it's head up above it's peers or looking a little bit green. Thankfully, she is a farm girl and understands the cycles of nature and knows that Feast follows Famine just as Night follows Day. A remarkably practical attitude that is all too rare these days. We could do with a lot more farmer's daughters in the world and in Ottawa.

Big news this week that the squints at NASA have been miscalculating, and mis-reporting their warmest ever years top ten list since 2000. Caught out by a Toronto blogger they (to their credit) quickly revised their list to reflect the fact that the dust bowl year of 1934 not 1998 was the warmest year on record, as a matter of fact, the revised data shows that 5 of the top 10 were in the Dirty Thirties. Remarkable too when you realise that this occurred when the Industrial output of North American Industry, oft blamed for the current so called Global Warming Crisis, was in a slump having suffered a 30% decline as a result of the Great Depression as we have posted before on this blog.

Another blogger has caught out a Chinese American researcher from a New York College who is a contributor to the ICCP report on Climate Change, in "fabricating" data to support his pre-conceived conclusions. He quoted data which he said was from 30 years of detailed record keeping weather stations in China when there did not appear to be the number nor the locations of stations listed in his report.

Earlier this week I heard another "expert" come down on the side of Global Warming as a catastrophic event. This guy, a "communicator" for the Toronto Chapter of the SPCA, a hotbed of whackos and animal "activists" at the best of times, was on the local CBC expounding on his theory that Global Warming has modified Nature by influencing CATS of all things into having an extra litter of kittens each year. This genius has elevated the work of Charles Darwin to new heights with this claim.

No big surprise that he was given air on the CBC to distribute this drivel.

I think I am going back into my burrow until it cools off, talk to you in September.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-07-05T09:35:11-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/0a21af67d18de49b717c5a612262817b-8.html#unique-entry-id-8http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/0a21af67d18de49b717c5a612262817b-8.html#unique-entry-id-8It is fitting, just a few days before the much anticipated Gore-Fest weekend. Where people all around the world, (except Rio) wil gather together and actually allow themselves to be photographed and identified as members of a cult that worships at the feet of THE BIG LIE which trickles from the lips of failed politician, internet inventor and Clinton patsy, Al Gore. I would not doubt that here in Canada we will once again be treated to the septugenarian with the FuManChu facial disguise, our very own, David Suzuki.

What is fitting is that this event comes so close to the anniversary of the following event, as posted on one of my fave sites, www.smalldeadanimals.com earlier today.

July 5, 2007
70 Years Ago Today

1937 - Canada's hottest day on record; temperatures reach 45.0C (114F) in Midale and Yellow Grass, both in southern Saskatchewan. *

And still the dust blew.

On June 24 it blew with such fury that it forced the Moose Jaw fair to cancel its horse races and shut down. The force of the storms blowing across southern Saskatchewan was felt as far east as Winnipeg, where once again a dust haze obscured the sun.

Highways became so drifted with dust as to be impassable. South of Moose Jaw the blowing alkali from dried-up Johnstone Lake coated the countryside a dirty white and drove everybody indoors. Sixty miles to the south, near the town of Rockglen, Fife Lake, which had once been thirty-five miles long, dried up completely. Far to the east in the Oxbow area, the Lake of the Rivers went dry and in the process a great mass of prehistoric buffalo bones was uncovered. The farmers of the area lived that year on the returns they got from the fertilizer plants for the carloads of bones them managed to harvest. Near Arcola, the trains were dealyed by the myriaads of grasshoppers that lit on the rails and were ground to grease.

The Saskatchewan crop was destroyed by the fourth week of June. Then the heat got worse. At the end of June, 100-degree temperatures were common everywhere and the areas as far north as Prince Albert got a bitter taste of what Regina and Moose Jaw had experienced in 1936. The peak came on July 5 when it touched 110 degrees at Regina, Moose Jaw, and a dozen other southern communities. For the rest of the summer ninety-degree heat was the rule, for the hot weather extended well into August, and the records established all over on August 23, when it went well over the 100-degree mark again.

There had been hotter Junes than 1937, hotter Julys, and hotter Augusts, but taken together there had never been a longer and hotter summer. - James H. Gray, The Winter Years

Long before SUV's, plastic bags, snail darters and filter tip cigarettes we had extreme weather conditions courtesy of Mother Nature or Yahweh or whomever you want to tip your hat to. The Dust Bowl was by all accounts a full blown climatological disaster. But it left us a legacy of tough farmers, drought resistant wheat, some great John Steinbeck novels and rich banks in Central Canada.

One could argue that this period engendered a fierceness of independent spirit that still thrives today in Western Provinces and States. A spirit much admired in the rest of the country. A fine crop and an enduring strain of plain speaking, promise keeping politicians grew out of the Dusty 30's and we are all better off because of it.

One can only hope that the current crop of this stalwart seed has the courage to face down the bleating of the "Sky is Falling" crowd before they Rock Concert their way any further into the hearts, minds and wallets of those few of our citizens who seem all too eager to sign on to this latest religious fad and bumper sticker trend.

Yes, climates do change, naturally. But not just the temperature, wind and rain type of climate. Political climates are also subject to wild fluctuations and trendy causes. Not a good thing. Fortunately, I detect a tightening of the sphincter around the subject of actually breaking out the chequebook to pay off the blackmailers from Kyoto. Hang in their Stephen, this pendulum is swinging back towards sanity, slowly but surely.

30

]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-06-18T10:51:09-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/7f72916208ca5c0f9c1ba13fbb4f4827-7.html#unique-entry-id-7http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/7f72916208ca5c0f9c1ba13fbb4f4827-7.html#unique-entry-id-7I sense a disturbance in The Force and it is way overdue. An announcement this week that General Motors is shifting 500 design engineers over to the production team for it's upcoming entry into the Green Wars, The Volt, is really big news. Described as a "Leapfrog" in technology over the wildly successful yet highly over rated, Toyota Hybrid designs, the Volt will have bigger and better batteries, be able to run for the first 40 Kliks without the gasoline powered generator engine running at all, and most importantly, the ability to be charged up at HOME by plugging it into the wall.

What a concept! A real breakthrough! Ask anyone old enough to remember The Jetsons if they think the idea of PLUGGING in an electric car to charge overnight in your own garage is a radical concept and they might ask you if you are chewing peyote. Of course you should be able to plug it in at home, or at the office, or the grocery store if necessary. No one but an engineer in the employ of a major car manufacturer or an oil conglomerate would think otherwise.

Only someone whose primary mission in life is to appear to be trying to reduce the consumption of liquid fuels of all types while preserving the integrity, and profitability, of a vast distribution network of refineries, pipelines, ships, trucks and service stations would have trouble with the "Plug it in at Home" concept. Hence the serious looking ads on TV lately that have regular looking folks opining on the necessity for Oil companies to be actively looking for and developing new energy sources for our transportation needs.

WHY on earth would anyone expect an OIL company to do that? Tell me that General Electric is working on it, have Steve Jobs announce the ICar on national TV and I would be thrilled. But have Shell oil tell me to just keep filling up with that $1.10 a litre stuff while they are working on the problem and I may have to put a mortgage on Casa Cordina to pay next years transportation bills.

If you have not watched the smash hit documentary entitled, "WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? ", run, do not walk, to your nearest video store and rent it. In this great film we find that General Motors already had such a car. Sleek, stylish, fast, plug it in at home, drive downtown and back, plug it in again, the car was a home run. Except GM would not sell it to anyone, they leased it, and then they terminated all the leases and shredded all the cars. Way too successful.

Imagine how frightened GM must be of two things, 1: falling behind Toyota in world wide sales for the very first time. 2: Watching Toyota sell over 750,000 hybrid vehicles since inception, imagine how frightened they must be and should be to make this stunning commitment to the new VOLT.

The Force is positively quivering.


30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-06-06T09:24:23-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/6aa8078a12ac37567db5bdafcf10a802-6.html#unique-entry-id-6http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/6aa8078a12ac37567db5bdafcf10a802-6.html#unique-entry-id-6I am certain that we have all heard enough already about the self indulgent dweeb from Atlanta who put half the planet at risk just so he would not have to give up his deposit on his destination wedding plans. It will become even more tiresome by about September when I fully expect the Movie of the Week, TERROR IN THE SKIES!!!, to show up on our flat screens.

However, can't we just take a moment and enjoy the delicious irony of a man, a family, of Personal Injury Lawyers, the members of the bar who are responsible for all of the bad jokes, broken antennas and general bad vibes that the 98% of lawyers who are NOT blood sucking Shylocks recieve or put up with on a daily basis, being in this situation.

Dad, senior partner in the PI firm, coaxes some doctors from the health authority to a meeting where he secretly records their words while he bullies them into saying out loud, (speak right into that flower pot) that they are really covering their collective ass when they beg Junior to stay away from airplanes. Junior, immediately moves up his departure date by two days, thus avoiding the letter sent by these ass covering medicos as soon as they got back to their office, spelling out their concerns and putting these two jerks on notice that flying is bad.

Doesn't that sound like pre-meditation to you? They had a plan to, first, set a trap for the docs to provide a, "we acted on doctors advice" defense and then they modified their travel plans to make sure that their little trap was not undone by the not-quite-that-stupid but slow-to-act doctors. About Junior's return trip, he knew he was on a No Fly list so he flies to good old unsuspecting Canada and drives across the border, leaving a trail of (now) terrified potential victims across 7 countries behind him.

And how about that US Border Patrol agent, a highly trained infectious disease diagnostician no doubt, who looks at his computer screen which says, DETAIN HIM, KEEP HIS PASSPORT, PUT ON YOUR BIO-HAZARD SUIT, DANGER, DANGER, and then looks at Junior an decides that he "looked OK, cause he wasn't coffing or nuffin" and LETS HIM THROUGH!! You couldn't invent this stuff, come to think of it, when you throw in the REAL CDC expert in TB, the father of the Bride, and you begin to wonder WHAT WAS HE THINKING when he let his daughter not only go out with but marry and go on a honeymoon with this numbskull and presumably kiss him on the lips to seal the deal.

When you put all of these elements together, this isn't good enough for a Movie of the week. If Fox gets ahold of this it will be a full blown series! Move over Lincoln Burrows, get out of the way Jack Bauer, here comes TB Guy, Andrew Speaker.

Given all of this, Mr. Speaker putting up the LaCoste defense by using crocodile tears in his interview with Diane Sawyer and pleading that he never meant to harm anyone and really did not know that he was doing anything wrong sounds much more like a guy that knows just what can happen to him and his money and his rapidly disappearing future career if any of his potential victims gets together with a real smart Personal Injury Lawyer and decides to clean him out then he sounds like a contrite victim of unfortunate circumstances.

Really, Steven King's remarkable story, The Stand, about an infectious agent escaping a government lab and killing 90% of the population was turned into a 6 hour mini-series and it did not even come close to starting out with the same great cast of Keystone Cop characters as this one. I think this show, Terror in the Skies, Love Amongst the Anti-Biotics, will be a great hit.

Who needs fiction?

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-06-05T14:59:40-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/6085ecc352581f442ed3e1587dde4594-5.html#unique-entry-id-5http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/6085ecc352581f442ed3e1587dde4594-5.html#unique-entry-id-5I don't know about you folks but here it is early June and we have blown our entire years budget for tissues. (Curlers are not allowed to say the "K" word!). Ever since early May, it seems everytime I turned around, somebody I knew or lived with was straining to deposit most of their cranial cavity contents into a tissue through their nose or wiping red, dripping wet, eyes with ever decreasing little balls of tissue.

Each occurence is immediately followed by statements like the following.

" I don't know what's wrong with me."
"It must be hay fever but I have never had allergies before."
" THEY say that as you get older......."

Well, I just have to say, WAKE UPAND SMELL THE WEEDS! As I look out our back yard my eyes take in a sea of yellow dandelions where there used to be a pristine, beautifully groomed, soccer field and park. As we drive, or creep, along Ontario's 400 series of Highways, the formally well maintained boulevards and rights of way are choked with weeds of every description. Very soon now, an entire graduating class of University students will be the first to have NOT paid for their tuition working at cutting grass for the MTO at jobs their fathers/mothers/uncles and/or MPP's got for them in return for who knows what consideration.

Our Provincial and Municipal political Leaders/Followers have swallowed whole the mantra of the (figurative) sons and daughters in the GREEN movement of Rachel Carson, author of that wonderful work of fiction called, Silent Spring, which was used to cower the linguini spined bunch in charge at the time to ban DDT. Miss Carson's work not only resulted in the death of millions of people from Malaria, (a real threat), it spawned a movement who got their rocks off dressing up as turtles and marching on politicians and shouting a lot. Over time, Politicians only had to meet an ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST and they would lay down and roll over like a cat in front of a fireplace on a cold day. It wasn't long before all of that weed killing, grass cutting and soccer field grooming gave way to shouts of SHAME and put all of those students out of work.

When we bought our current home over 30 years ago. The Town of Markham had a bylaw that would send a municipal crew to your home, at your expense, to cut your lawn and kill your weeds if you let the evil weed dandelion run amok. Such acts were usually called THE NOXIOUS WEED ACT or something similar and they would put the charge on your tax bill. Now that we have gone all NATURAL, having a week choked lawn is some kind of sacrament and people who let their lawns go all to seed and weed get all smug at town meetings and act all superior like their stuff don't smell bad at all. I keep telling you, the world is upside down!!!

And on top of all that, a whole lot of folks who never had to before are walking around with a box of Scotties Tissues under their arms, red noses, weepy eyes and a look of puzzlement on their faces which is saying, "why is this happening to me?".

Well, I know why, you can thank the next GREENIE who comes to your door begging for money, your signature on a petition or your vote. Be creative, really show them how grateful you are. Use a stick or something, a green one.

Thank you Rachel.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-05-28T09:00:30-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/fd60540f23efa1821bfd1d2807ab1812-4.html#unique-entry-id-4http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/fd60540f23efa1821bfd1d2807ab1812-4.html#unique-entry-id-4May 28th, 2007, better write that date down in your diaries as the day the world changed.

The venerable, (they say) Toronto Daily Star, Canada's largest city's entry in the rapidly becoming irrelevant world of print media, introduced their first format change since they invented coloured ink a couple of decades ago. They said it would be smaller, but it is exactly the same size as yesterday's edition so I can't tell. They point out that they have changed the typeface, which the modern world calls "font", and made some wonderfully exciting changes to the size of the headlines and column widths. All very thrilling and bound to revitalize the subscriber base and bring in new readers.

There is no doubt that they need to do something. They keep trumpeting any increase in circulation but you would have to be a moron to not notice that you can hardly walk into a hospital, government building, or Business Depot without tripping over a pile of FREE, TAKE ONE, Star papers already counted as being part of that days "circulation" numbers, anything to keep the advertising rates up.

What has my sphincter tightened however is not the new font, or the not very new size but the pearls of wisdom on the front page from the chief gnome of the day, one Jagoda Pike, Editor. Jagoda takes the occasion of this exciting format change to write about the NEW Star and how thrilled she is to be part of the NEW team, and bringing us NEW and exciting fonts and headline sizes, it is all very dizzying and makes me reach for more expresso to calm my nerves.

Jagoda also takes the occasion to tell us in breathless prose that she CANNOT THINK of a better occasion then this to announce that the Star is opening a brand NEW dialogue on one of the most important issues of the day for all Canadians, MULTICULTURALISM. That's right folks, the NEW Star's NEW direction is going to tackle the big issues of the day head on. Too bad that the "day" in question was back in 1971 when the concept was first accepted by the Federal Gov. and we first started out on the now decades long guilt trip that was sold as the pursuit of national harmony using the tools of reason and understanding of one another's sacred cultural heritage. Multiculturalism was enshrined into law in 1982, (and again with Bill C-93 in 1988) and as you can imagine, millions and millions of dollars rained down on anyone with an accent, a colorful native costume and an axe to grind or a grant to apply for. Pimping out your cultural differences became the new currency of exchange between "Community Leaders" of all stripes and any politician with access to a bank account full of OPM, (Other Peoples Money) to exchange for votes or a good Photo Op. A practice which sadly flourishes to this day.

I was there, I remember it well. Before I became a Lapsed Liberal and subsequently further evolved into political independence, I used to swallow, and (full disclosure with much shame.) spout the mantra that the world would be a better place if we all just tried harder to "embrace the rich tapestry of cultural diversity and heritage....blah, blah..." . It was pathetic. You couldn't throw a stick at a Liberal convention or meeting of any size without hitting someone dancing around wearing feathers in their hair, beads around their necks and covered in dead deer skins. It became obligatory to have a gaggle of little Greek kids in those nifty little tutu outfits bouncing around to bouzouki music at the ribbon cutting of any building or road project. I could have gotten rich if I had opened a "Rent An Ethnic" stand in any Liberal riding.

As you can tell, I could go on, and probably will some day soon, about the dumb things we did in the Age of Enlightenment Era that was the beginning of the Trudeau years. However, the point of today's post is to point out to Jagoda that her NEW direction, is not only NOT NEW, it is boring. It was boring then, boring now. Welcome to the 70's Ms. Pike.

Just further proof that your life and mine, is one big Circle song. Peter Allen, that swishy Australian boy who was married to Liza Minneli at one point, wrote and sang the lyrics that perfectly capture today's Front Page news at The Star. Mrs. Geek and I saw Mr. Allen perform "Everything Old Is New Again", in the old Imperial Room at the Royal York back in the early 70's. He was not only a great performer but a prophet as well. Truer words were never spoken.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-05-24T13:55:55-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/954b8a657610f885257e9b762d15f4af-3.html#unique-entry-id-3http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/954b8a657610f885257e9b762d15f4af-3.html#unique-entry-id-3Of course, I am not really going to apologise to that blowhard wrecking machine of a failed politician Al Gore, but I would like to send him a message. Here in Southern Ontario, if you are lucky, you have natural gas for heating, by far the most reliable and cheapest of the mainstream, keep your ass warm in winter, heating choices. The gas companies have an enormous interest in tracking what they refer to as "Degree Days", which in short means that they pay a lot of attention to weather patterns and forecasts to enable them to predict loads on their distribution network. They are very good at this and they keep scrupulous records.

Here at the Elder Geek Casa we got our annual equal billing statement the other day and were expecting that the "WARMEST JANUARY ON RECORD" and various other "'warmest" or "mildest" calendar events over the past winter would help drive our monthly payment to South of affordable for a few months. I really feel stupid about this, I, more than most people, should be able to resist the plastic headlines and the hysterical talking heads all wound up over the inevitability of Man made Global Warming and the coming Planetary Apocalypse, but I am weak somedays and it just seeps into my consciousness. In any event, the real experts, the Gas Company, tells us that the temperature this heating season over the previous one was DOWN 8%! That is, for those of you in Ottawa, COLDER by 8%.

Sorry Al, but I'll put my experts up against yours any day of the week. These guys don't rely on grants, or government handouts, they have to get it right or lose their jobs. The jury is in. You are exposed, better get some warm clothes.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-05-17T11:23:48-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/3e4f2aacaf824ce0aa7bc49de2f89d32-2.html#unique-entry-id-2http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/3e4f2aacaf824ce0aa7bc49de2f89d32-2.html#unique-entry-id-2Big announcement this week threatening to "fix" our passport problem. This problem has come about because our American friends, in response to very real threats to their security, have been thrashing about looking for a "fix" to their own problems and, as all bureaucrats do, they have pounced on the easy stuff to make noise about first. This habit of picking off the low hanging fruit whenever you are challenged by the war cry of "activists" of all stripes is all too pervasive in our present day society and comes with enormous hidden costs to us all.

Whenever you start hearing the bleating of the Chicken Littles that "SOMEBODY'S GOT TO DO SOMETHING" just hold on to your wallet and keep your head down. In this case, in knee jerk response to the wildly popular but totally untrue myth that an abundance of the 911 attackers, you remember, those Saudi Arabian guys, passed into the USA from Canada because of our lax border security and weak laws.

Notwithstanding the obvious problem with that statement which is that even if they had crossed into the USA from Canada, it was the lax US border security that let them in. Whether it was at the Rainbow Bridge or LAX or JFK or El Paso, these turkeys entered the USA under the eyes and guns of US Security Agents. NOT OUR FAULT.

So, the popular myth drives the populace to bleat at their politicos who raise their heads from grazing at the trough and pronounce that the problem has been identified and will be dealt with. Henceforth, all Canadian citizens will have to have a valid passport to enter the USA. Of course, our own politicos, in denial about whether or not this will really happen, do absolutely nothing to prepare for what a 6 year old could have told them was coming. A big rush on the passport office. Canada wide we supposedly have an ability to process 17,000 passport applications a day. We have been getting 20,000. We are way behind and gonna be that way for a long time.

One of the difficulties faced by our hard working civil service in attempting to speed up the process is that our current laws require you to reapply from scratch for a new passport every 5 years. New picture, new guarantors, new application, everything. Very time consuming, totally redundant, very much a system designed by committee.

However, a not so well remembered incident is at the root of our current inability to respond to the actions imposed on our borders by the unfounded rumors driving the political agenda of our American neighbors. It was, the assassination of Martin Luther King. You see, prior the the sudden demise of the Reverend, at the hands of Mr. James Earl Ray, our passports were good for 10 years, renewable and you could actually smile in the photo. After the Reverend passed on, rumor had it that Mr. James Earl Ray, (Assassins always have 3 names, have you noticed?) was traveling on a Canadian passport. Rumor further had it that Canadian passports were very easy to obtain, preferred by assassins world wide as the passport of choice for clandestine travel and that Canada had lax border security, and weak laws to boot.

A huge uproar ensued of course and we heard that magic sound, "Somebody ought'a do sumpin about dat" and the sheep in charge in Ottawa at the time, did. The brought in 5 year passports that needed to be completely renewed with new address, background checks, the works. The very same law that we now are going to have to change to respond to the new unfounded and totally bogus response to the new myth about Canada being the source of the security problem in the US.

Dizzy yet? Harry Chapin wrote and sang a wonderful song called The Circle Song. "All my life's a circle, sunrise to sundown....." , sometimes it seems just so.

God help us if anyone ever gets past Jack Bauer and actually does nuke Santa Monica. God help us all.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-05-09T15:15:06-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/aaa9df91e452da549e0f020f56a7ee01-1.html#unique-entry-id-1http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/aaa9df91e452da549e0f020f56a7ee01-1.html#unique-entry-id-1
Not necessarily so. We had a warm day in Toronto yesterday, about 27 C or so. Drove our weather people bananas. They were screaming into their mics that this was the ABSOLUTE WARMEST MAY 8th ON RECORD, which of course is further proof that we are all going to die and that Algore should really get that Nobel Peace Prize some pencil neck nominated him for.

Not quite so loudly is that we only beat out, by 2/10ths of a degree, May 8, 1932. Not sure what caused that hot day way back in '32. Couldn't have been SUV's, pretty sure it was not because we were using too many plastic bags for our groceries. Dead certain it was NOT because a bunch of silk-stockinged socialists were criss-crossing the planet in their Gulfstreams all the while telling us that WE were causing pollution induced Global Warming by driving to the beer store for a twofor.

As a matter of fact, there is a curious thing about the "Dirty" Thirties, that is worth knowing the next time some pin head tries to tell you that the rise in planetary temperatures is in direct correlation with Industrial Activity and man made carbon emissions. You see, we can really measure the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere over most of the last century. We have graphs showing a steady increase of CO2 in the atmosphere from the late 1890's to today. A fairly straight line headed up. Unfortunately, when said graph is laid alongside a graph for the same period showing Industrial Activity, we have a small problem.

During the Great Depression, industrial output decreased by over 30% in the decade from 1929 to 1939. Guess what happened to the CO2 chart during this dramatic drop in man made emissions? It kept going up, didn't blink, stutter or stammer one little bit.

Scratch one more theory.

30]]>cordina@rogers.comNone2007-05-07T09:51:14-04:00http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/128dc409ae27a106165e35c052514aad-0.html#unique-entry-id-0http://%20http://cordina.org/index.html/page2/files/128dc409ae27a106165e35c052514aad-0.html#unique-entry-id-0
Indeed, the hitherto unknown Moore received a well deserved Academy Award for his efforts. It is unfortunate that his then unique style has proven to be the pinnacle of his thinking. Although his fame has grown and he has become enormously rich because of his subsequent efforts, this is a sad reflection on the way modern society rewards those among us who make us laugh, sing along, or cry at the movies, and not really a meaningful measuring stick to apply to the judgement of someone's character or worthiness for praise. He has tried to repeat his formula a number of times, sticking with the game plan of picking off the low hanging fruit of what modern western citizens will react to.

Jam a microphone in front of a victim of something, anything really, and victims are not hard to find in American Society, get a tear-jerker of a quote, then ambush a politician, bureaucrat, or civic official whom may be considered responsible for the suffering of the erstwhile 'victim's" troubles and watch, (record) their squirming. No imagination required, just line 'em up and knock 'em down.

As for my dilemma, I am chasing a Roger of a different sort. Ted Rogers, he of the communications empire that is Rogers Communications Inc., is the target of my animosity and the source of my pain and I would dearly love to stick a microphone in front of his face and ask him why he is messing with my karma on a regular basis. Ted and his minions have decided that the software protocol known as bit torrent is bad for his profitability and he is actively inhibiting my ability to download files from the Interweb using this protocol.

Bit Torrent is a concept for the modern world. The almost perfect tool for the sharing of information, data, programs and multi-media files. Just the thing to allow folks to realise the promise of the usefulness of the Internet that was conjured up by the advertising geniuses working for the very same Rogers Inc. that coerced you into paying $50 a month for life to Ted and his family in the first place. Live the Dream, download movies, music, Television and chat online with new friends all around the world starting at $29.95. At least, you can do all that until it hurts Ted.

Now it seems that there is a little tarnish on the Dream. Even though you may pay $50 a month for 5 MB download speed and 100 GB a month of data transfer, Ted's boys have decided that if you actually use a piece of software that lets you come close to using that speed or transfer amount (bandwidth) they will declare you an enemy of peace and tranquility and degrade your speed to a few KB's of transfer thus making your Hi Priced, Hi Speed internet use, useless. This action on their part turns loading a web page, normally a few milliseconds of activity, into a 50 second ordeal designed to make you break something in frustration. This is what Rogers calls Traffic Shaping and they seem quite proud of it, although they spent the better part of the last year denying that they engaged in such a practice.

If this effort at Customer Behaviour Modification isn't enough, they also have been blocking access to the more popular Bit Torrent information sites. Most particularly a site " www.rlslog.net " which is a blog that talks about the latest file sharing releases available on the web. It doesn't host any files, you cannot download anything from this site, you just (used to be able to) go there and read some reviews on a web page. Unless you are a Rogers Customer that is. When I could not reach the site for a week or two I just thought that they were experiencing tech troubles, this happens. But as I began to read at various sites other people referencing Rlslog I suspected that Ted was up to a new trick and when I changed (sorry, geek speak) my proxy server address to avoid Ted's scrutiny, Rlslog popped right up without a problem.

When this kind of URL censorship goes on in China we go nuts here in the west. We post petitions, various "Activists" post nasty thoughts about China's worthiness to host the Summer Olympics and belong to the UN or take their place in the world community. But Ted just sends out his talking heads to first deny and then imply that anyone using such software is obviously some kind of terrorist, thief or at the very least a "system abuser" and "bandwidth hog" who is threatening the peaceful internet usage of all Canadians.

This is wrong folks, and if it is not illegal for Ted to do this it damn well should be. Charge you $50 a month for 5MB speed and 100 GB of data transfer and then do everything they can to make it impossible for you to use that much speed or bandwidth? Wrong. Their arguments are weak and without any merit. It is like the phone company saying to you that they are limiting your calls to local calls to people that they approved of and only personal calls at that because they discovered that you were sending FAXES over their phone lines and using up their precious lines.

Looking for suggestions. Already thought of, changing providers, ( I don't appear to have any other Hi Speed options), writing a politician, the CRTC or even Small Claims Court. Email me if you have a better idea. I would welcome the help. Sympathy would be good too.

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