Beijing Olympics Results, Day One: The 1500 M Smog Dodge

EIGHTH PLACE:

"The expert advice that we are getting is that the situation continues to improve."
-Simon Clegg, British Olympic Association (UK)


SEVENTH PLACE

"Haze does not mean poor quality air."
-China Daily web site (CHINA)


SIXTH PLACE:

"I haven't heard from any athlete that they're not going on with the job."
-AOC VP Peter Montgomery (before any events)(AUSTRALIA)


FIFTH PLACE:

"Most of the smog here is evaporation. It's due to humidity."
-Arne Ljungqvist, chairman of the IOC medical commission (SWEDEN)


FOURTH PLACE:

“The pollution levels are coming down."
-Jacques Rogge, AOC Chairman (BELGIUM)


BRONZE MEDAL:

"I suffer from asthma, and I'm having to take supplements to protect my lung lining"
-Alison Williamson, Archery (UK)


SILVER MEDAL:

"The weather conditions aren't conducive to the dispersal of pollutants,''
-Guo Hu, Beijing Meterorlogical Observatory (CHINA)


GOLD MEDAL:

"If Chinese officials do succeed in temporarily 'clearing the air' in Beijing for the Olympic Games, one is left to wonder what Chinese will say if . . . severe air pollution once again is allowed to return. Will they interpret this to mean that there can only be Potemkinized clean air for foreign visitors?"
-Orville Schell (US)

Now, please rise for the Olympic Anthem:

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Oil Prices Change. Greed Remains The Same.

Consider this before you heave that big sigh of relief that the price of a barrel of oil is down a couple of bucks:

Chevron just announced a record profit of 11 billion dollars in the last quarter. Exxon is currently making over $89,000 per minute.

And you? Where is your piece of this juicy free-market pie?

Forgive my bitterness: it's probably just from my attempts to afford a loaf of bread and a bus ticket.

Absolutely no one... certainly not the experts, believe that screwing up the environment with more American drilling offshore and in the Arctic will do any good at all, any time soon. But of course that hasn't stopped the major oil companies from crying for it, using your suffering at the pumps (directly and indirectly... you don't think that loaf of bread got to the store itself, do you?) as ugly and cynical leverage to push for it anyway.

Who would be crazy, stupid, greedy, and nearsighted enough to support that sort of thing? Who would be vile enough to push that social, economic, and environmental suicide agenda?

This guy, that's who. You know, the guy who gave you this problem in the first place:

Angry yet?

Oxycontin And Oil: Two Tales Of Addiction

1)  We had left home two days before, but had hardly been anywhere outside of either the car or the hotel room. Scattered on the dresser was an assortment of pills -- prescription opioids of every description. They were dumped out like a kid's candy on Halloween night. It was a festival of numbness.

I had been awake for over 24 hours, but had been fully alert for almost none of them. I had recently discovered the joys of crushing and snorting Oxycontin -- the champagne of cheap prescription highs. I slowly surveyed the remaining drugs... morphine mostly, with a healthy mix of methadone and some other things... but I had been snorting. Nothing makes the buzz come faster than crushing and snorting an Oxy. Well... nothing that doesn't involve a needle, anyway.

This is perhaps the only matter that I will ever wholeheartedly agree with Rush Limbaugh on. Oxycontin is fucking great.

We were out of Oxys. I half-seriously considered waking (if in fact "asleep" applied in the normal sense) the naked beauty on the bed to see if we could get more. Normally contemplating the generous curve of her hips would have me thinking other things. And sure, there was still plenty of other junk left, but I know what I like. Besides, the feeling was starting to return to my extremities.. and what kind of a vacation is that?

But then I saw it. Ground into the carpet was one last Oxycontin, trampled in our rush to get back into the room with our drugs. I sat on the bed for a long time (or so it seemed -- everything takes a long time on a good Oxy buzz) contemplating my options. I didn't like what I was becoming. But the sensation... or perhaps the lack of it... was simply too good a time to neglect. I also contemplated my dignity, and whether or not I wanted illegal brain chemistry to be the driving force in my life.

Eventually, I got up and wobbled over to the crushed tablet. I stuck my nose down on the carpet. I smelled powder and carpet cleaner and sneakers and dirt. And I snorted as hard as I could, taking in every last speck of pill and carpet fibre I could inhale.

I ran to the bathroom and gagged, as often happens when one snorts these things. I would have vomited if there had been anything left in me, but it had been a long time since I had eaten. And then I wobbled to the bed and laid down, watching The Weather Network and drooling, unsure of where the remote control was, and unmotivated to look for it.

And for a little while, things were good again.

2) A recent report from the US Geological Survey indicates that The Arctic holds 90 billion barrels of untapped oil... enough to keep the world's appetite for it fuelled for three whole years, most of it in Canada! And Alberta's Oil Sands are loaded with oil, at a cost of only 80 kilos of greenhouse gases for every barrel produced!

Let the good times keep rolling!

FEMA Lies Make Baby Mothra Cry

More proof that the indomitable will of Mothra will not be denied:

Although US Government lies by press conference are so common they're (apparently) not noteworthy any more, FEMA external affairs chief John Philbin has been fired for holding a fake news conference about fake news with fake questions from fake reporters. Specifically, the fake news conference was addressing all the fake aid being made immediately available to all the wealthy, predominantly white victims of California's recent wildfires. This is in contrast to the real news conferences about all the fake aid to the predominantly black victims of Hurricane Katrina.

As this is a global-warming-related issue, Mothra has directly interceded, crushing Philbin's career, like a bug.

Mothra, Guardian Spirit of the Earth, smites you FEMA! Beware her wrath!

We Have To Stop Meeting Like This

The Alberta NDP is demanding that Premier Ed Stelmach release information about a closed-door meeting with oil execs.

"Government spokesman Tom Olsen says the premier hasn’t met with any energy industry officials since the royalty report was released, but the deputy premier is willing to identify who he’s met with from the energy sector."

Oh, I get it. You didn't shoot anyone, but that darned bullet of yours sure did...

Stelmach was always big on the whole "open and transparent" and transparent thing. It's just a shame that by "open and transparent" the Conservative government was talking about being "open and transparent" about it's complete contempt for the voters or sustainability.

Maybe Ed needs to get some quick bullshit PR for hire mercenaries to parachute in and save his ass...

Encana Killed Santa Claus: A Reasoned Response To The Alberta Royalties Issue

The level-headed responses to The Alberta Oil Revenues issue keep pouring in:

-Canadian National Resources says they'll cut drilling operations up to 65 percent.

-Petro-Canada (Remember? The guys who were supposed to be looking after our national interests? Me neither) Boss Ron Brenneman: "...acknowledged the system should 'share the upside' with Albertans through higher royalties when prices are high.

'But right now at current prices, investment can't tolerate much higher royalties."

...which raises questions about which alternate universe Ron fills his tank in.

Prime Minister Harper, in a sudden display of common sense (at least politically), is staying the hell away from the issue.

It's time for reason and common sense to prevail equally on ALL sides of this issue. In that spirit, I offer this sane and wise counter-punch:

Encana killed Santa Claus.

Calgary's annual Santa Claus parade, originally planned for November 18th this year has now been canceled. This is because traffic downtown is hopelessly bunged up (as it will be for a year) in order to construct the breathtakingly fugly Bow Building, which looks like it was designed by a cyborg Albert Speer.

In the meantime, Christmas will still arrive as scheduled in Venezuela.

Is Big Oil As Smart As A Chimp?

Interesting things happen when you teach chimps to play with tokens.

Chimps, it seems, are better at some decision-making processes than humans. Imagine a game where you are given X number of tokens. You then offer Player 2 Y percentage of those tokens... 50 percent or 5 percent or 80 percent or whatever, your choice. A human player of this game will usually offer up something around 50 percent of the take. Humans also have a tendency to reject an offer if it falls well below the 50 percent threshold, even though rejecting that offer means that the human in question gets nothing. In other words, the average human will tend to reject a gift of twenty bucks from someone like Donald Trump. A chimp, on the other hand, will gladly take Trump's twenty without question and go spend it... or whatever chimps do with their money.

It's a little like the current situation the Alberta government is in -- except the chips are petroleum, and Alberta has all the chips.

In (I swear!) completely unrelated news, Canadian Natural Resources has joined the ranks of those petroleum companies who want to take their bat and ball and go play somewhere else if Alberta dares to increase oil revenues to match reasonable standards elsewhere.

My analogy may be a little weak, I admit. After all, chimps are not noted for having the grasp of language, culture and psychology required to be deceptive bastards like oil companies and other humans.

Also: Do you think Ed Stelmach has fully grasped what a shitty job his party has done of diversifying the Provincial economy yet?



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Render Unto Big Oil: Hill & Knowlton Whitens Your Sepulchres

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness."
-Matthew 23:27

No one should be surprised that the petroleum companies are threatened by the Alberta government's admission they they should be charging more for the hand jobs, and no one should be surprised that The National Post is in the front row of the cheerleaders. Today's Post nicely manages to compare increased royalties to the crucifixion of Christ under the emperor Tiberius.

(By the way, if the Canadian public applied The Tiberius Standard Of Accuracy to The National Post, that paper would have been thrown to its death ages ago...)

So, who defends the moneyed interests, when the money needs defending? Some soldiers fight for a cause, others do it for money. We call those soldiers "mercenaries"... those who kill for profit. And Alberta's petroleum interests have hired one of the biggest and baddest mercenary armies out there: Hill & Knowlton.

Hill & Knowlton is the international PR firm behind getitrightalberta.ca, a polished and professional web site disguising itself as a grassroots movement of Alberta pro-oil citizens that sprang up seemingly overnight in response to the Alberta oil royalties issue. This underscores Hill & Knowlton's "24x7x365" readiness to respond to a crisis. Of course, we aren't talking about the kind of crisis where things are burning down and lives are threatened... we're talking about the kind of crisis where the livestock suddenly demands slightly better feed. Business Edge even ends their article on the matter with the phrase "Can Alberta get it right in 2007?"

The fear and rhetoric building up around the Oil Royalties issue reminds me of the buildup of fear and falsehoods about Iraq before the invasion(s). And maybe that's not entirely coincidental.

In 1991, many were moved by the testimony of a semi-anonymous "Nurse Nariyah" who testified to a Congressional hearing that "I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." What was lost amongst the tears and outrage is that "Nurse Nariyah" was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, and that H&K coached her to say things even the Kuwaitis knew at the time weren't true, in order to justify the invasion.

Our dependency on oil is a bad habit. Hill & Knowlton has lots of practice at defending those. In 1954, H&K helped the tobacco industry try to dismiss the recent notion that smoking might not be such a good idea. And let's not forget Hill & Knowlton's stirring defense of torturers, corporate criminals, Enron, Scientology, and polluters, among others.

Will Albertans (and their government) cringe in superstitious terror about losing their oil money, or will they realize that oil is money... more so than ever... and it doesn't belong to the companies to extract it and sell it, any more than a pimp owns his prostitutes?

Big Oil: Still Hungry For Beaver

Some petroleum companies operating in Alberta, according to today's Calgary Sun, have actually figured out that people are still hungry for oil. While Encana still pouts and threatens to take its money and go play in someone else's sandbox, Enbridge vice-president Richard Bird says "We're doubtful the royalty variable is going to be the make-or-break economic variable in those decisions."

Oil still runs the world, and ask any addict: the hand that supplies the crack rules the world. Even the oil companies themselves seem to be having a harder time than anticipated swallowing that, unlike Paul Jackson, who may have thrown himself behind a rapidly-losing cause. Paul, like much of the Alberta Establishment, is more than willing to keep licking corporate boots in exchange for the occasional bit of change that accidentally falls on his head.

For those of you (like Paul) who fall to their knees in superstitious terror at the thought of the petro-teat being removed, there's always getitrightalberta.ca. It's a web site started by regular, ordinary Joes like you and me to help save Big Oil from the scraping peasants of Alberta.

Regular, ordinary Joes who, as daveberta.ca points out, just happen to be Hill & Knowlton, a big PR firm that specializes in (among other things) rapid, made-to-order spin control for large interests when they feel threatened by the rabble. I'm sure these people are serious, concerned Albertans, and their area code and address is just some sort of typo.

Thanks, Dave, for doing the job that the local media don't seem to have time for. Boot-licking can be awfully time-consuming.

Since this may be the only time I mention petrochemicals and "beaver" in the same blog entry, here's a plastic cowboy video for all the Albertans out there: "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver" by Primus...

Ann Coulter Is A Single Female, And Is Therefore Stupid And Shouldn't Vote, According To Ann Coulter

Oh Ann Coulter, you stupid girl.

If you need any more proof of the creeping neuropathy afflicting the American Right, look no further than Ann Coulter. Prepare yourself for more stupidity from the author of "If Democrats Had Any Brains They'd Be Republicans" which hits book store shelves like a big flaming sack of crap today.

Here's the current state of Ann's brain, according to a recent interview with her The New York Observer:

-In the rush to blame Bill Clinton for 9/11, we've overlooked the complicity of History's greatest Monster: Jimmy Carter:

"Jimmy Carter got the whole thing started, Bill Clinton let it build, build, build, build, build. He wouldn't deal with it, because he had no credibility on deploying the military. He was a pot smoking draft dodger, and so when he was presented with credible evidence that this or that country was behind a terrorist attack, he’d just have to look the other way: “No, don't let me hear that. Call in Monica!”

...which raises the question: did Jimmy Carter secretly direct Ronald Reagan's foreign policy for eight years? And if so, why isn't Jimmy taking credit for the fall of the Soviet Union? Oh, right: Jimmy's too busy building hiding places for al-Qaida in Georgia.

-Ann Coulter doesn't trust members of her own (alleged) gender:

"If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women."

You're right. All single women are idiots except you, Ann honey. It's utter stupidity to let those left behind most by the US economy in the last decade vote. Well, second most, anyway. Why didn't Ann have the cojones to invoke Jim Crow while we're at it? Of late there's been more noise about using Voter Registration to keep poor folks from voting... why not add a quick, Olympic-style gender test at the polls?

-And finally, this twisty bit of non-reasoning as to why "The Left" (read: "living organisms") treat Global Warming like it's their "religion" (read: "an established fact"):

"Because we can't prove them wrong for a thousand years, and I think the other thing about it is, it goes back to Chesterton’s statement: that when people stop believing in God, the problem isn't that they believe in nothing, it's that they'll believe anything. And that's what you constantly see with people who don't believe in God: They're always imitating the most ridiculous, primitive religions. And it is like a primitive religion, thinking if we just change these lightbulbs, we can change the temperature of the ocean. It's the craziest thing! Even primitive people wouldn't believe something that silly."

Funny, I thought "they" had been "proven right" a few years ago. Of course if Global Warming is a religion, then climatologists must be its priests. You can hide a lot of collection plates under those lab coats, you know. I'm just disappointed Ann didn't write us a list of which religions are the ridiculous, primitive ones. I'm guessing "Pentecostal" isn't on her list. Off the top of my head, I'll bet she's referring to voodoo.

You know, the one where you make a false image of something you hate and attack it from the comfort of your own home, rather than confront the issue directly. Ann, of course, knows better than to use pins and dolls, when a word processor is so much less work.

Ideology is one thing, but the American Right is acting more and more all the time like there's an actual neurological issue. Ann has recently lost the ability to understand basic human social behaviour. Rush Limbaugh continues to slander the troops his ass pimple wouldn't let him join, and Bill O'Reilly continues to lie about liars lying about him.

This sort of thing worries me. What if it's contagious? Never mind the Democrats... someone call House!

And isn't it amazing that a stupid girl like Shirley Manson of Garbage could have written a song about stupid girls like stupid Ann Coulter years ago, with hardly any help at all from boys?

What drives you on

Can drive you mad

A million lies to sell yourself

Is all you ever had...