Wideleft

Shachi Kurl @ShachiKurl·21h I think some of the most shocking/rattling findings for me in this survey had to do with some of the giant, colossal misconceptions ppl in Canada have about WHERE our permanent residents are coming from. Just check out this graphic: #elxn43 http://angusreid.org/election-2019-immigration/

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

More than 10 times the emissions of the smelter in Thompson. Boggles the mind.

Nevermind Alberta, the Koch's are Manitoba's biggest polluter: Top large emitters in Manitoba: Koch Fertilizer Canada: 688,159 tonnes of CO2 (2016); TransCanada Pipelines: 258,559 tonnes of CO2 (2016); Graymont: 130,624 tonnes of CO2 (2016); Canadian Kraft Papers: 78,964 tonnes of CO2 (2016); Husky Oil: 75,252 tonnes of CO2 (2016); Vale: 60,641 tonnes of CO2 (2016) Source: Government of Manitoba

Coal and bitumen: Why the Norwegian pension fund is ditching the oilsands KLP executive explains decision to sell $77M in shares of oilsands companies "Norway's largest pension fund is no stranger to Alberta's oilsands, having invested in several different oil producers over the last decade including Canadian and Norwegian-based companies. Now, those investments toward ramping up production from the bitumen-rich areas of northern Alberta have come to an end. KLP, which has assets of about $94 billion, has sold its stocks in oilsands companies. In its evaluation of the oilsands, the pension fund came to the conclusion that the oil production in the Fort McMurray region was akin to the coal industry in its harmful impacts to the environment. "Both are very high in emissions in producing the energy or fuel and we've decided to treat them similarly," said Jeanett Bergan, KLP's head of responsible investment during a phone interview with CBC News from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. "We are seeing a lot of signs in society that say 'This is not what the future will look like.'" https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/oilsands-norway-pension-fund-reduce-investments-alberta-1.5312066

He's not sure if he should be distracting from Kurdish genocide or his failed appeal on income tax submissions. Also, he might be running out of Sudafed. JRehling@JRehling THREAD In 2016, Trump posted a photo of himself that gave away more than he intended. An open desk drawer revealed box after box of Sudafed, piled on top of one another.

But, but - the Bidens! @IvankaTrump 8:56 AM · Apr 20, 2012·Twitter for iPhone Thank you Prime Minister Erdogan for joining us yesterday to celebrate the launch of #TrumpTowers Istanbul!

It's a trope designed to stifle language that supports progressive and empathetic thoughts and goals. It suggests that "left" thinkers have to be perfect while allowing those on the right to say and do whatever the hell they want. Nothing more and nothing less. Also see: "tree hugger", "liberal", "democrat".

So tell me what's greener: Carbon offsets X2 for 2 polluting planes or 1 polluting plane with no carbon offsets. FFS, the Conservatives don't even try!

He's a good writer. I'm interested in this now: "How Not To **** Up Your Kids Too Bad -- A Guide to Modern Fatherhood" has been released on Audible, May 2018.

The Woke Will Always Break Your Heart Canadian progressives have to decide whether they care more about Justin Trudeau’s policy achievements or his offensive style. "The 2019 election is a test for Canadian progressives: style or substance. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is the most successful progressive government in the world. It instituted a carbon tax and legalized marijuana. Last year, for the first time, Canada settled more refugees than any other country. Because of higher government benefits, child poverty is at its lowest level in history. Economic growth this year reached 3 percent. That is what Trudeau has done. He also appeared in brownface at an Aladdin-themed costume party in 2001 at the age of 29." "The main criticism from Trudeau’s opponents on the right has usually been that he’s a spoiled brat—a son of privilege—not up to running the country. A faker. The brownface debacle has now become, on the left, a symbol of his lack of real commitment to progressive values. But the cross-party consensus that Trudeau is slight and phony doesn’t survive even a cursory examination of his record. An independent assessment by two dozen Canadian academics found that Trudeau has kept 92 percent of his campaign promises, the most by any Canadian government in 35 years. He is measurably, demonstrably the most sincere and effective prime minister in living memory. He is the rare case of a man whose virtue-signaling has distracted from his real virtues. Only the left struggles with these standards of style. Right-wing political opponents in Canada and elsewhere have a completely different understanding of acceptable behavior. In the United States, President Donald Trump’s supporters take his brand of nastiness, his aggressive rejection of even the most basic social norms, as a sign of authenticity. Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren is still apologizing for her Cherokee-ancestry claim." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/trudeaus-progressive-style/599203/?fbclid=IwAR0GbnDOezq1Kb5-0t7b9w1up5dSbgTR7OueiCfMIP9bAMlfQ6GEN-1Qp44

About this Tides Foundation malarkey which aligns with Jason Kenny's "war room against oil opponents" - a former Crown Prosecutor has done 9 months of digging and data analysis and finds that it's all BS. She judiciously counters the following myths: Myth 1: Powerful American foundations have subjected Alberta to a targeted campaign of economic sabotage, turning the province into a 'whipping boy.' Myth 2: Environmental funders give a free pass to U.S. oil and gas projects, allowing American production to soar while Alberta stalls. Myth 3: Pipeline opposition grants dominate foreign funding in Canada. Myth 4: U.S.-based foundations, led by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, have made Alberta a central focus of their strategy. Myth 5: The Tar Sands Campaign is directed out of San Francisco by an organization called CorpEthics International, and its principal, Michael Marx. Myth 6: Tides is the 'funding and co-ordination juggernaut' behind anti-pipeline activism. Myth 7: Land and marine conservation grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation are a hidden part of anti-pipeline efforts. Myth 8: Foreign money made all the difference. Myth 9: The Canadian oil sector is a victim, out-funded by large foreign foundations. A data-based dismantling of Jason Kenney's foreign-funding conspiracy theory "As long as the foreign funding conspiracy theory was a lone researcher’s crusade, this thing had a great run. Underdogs are popular, and suspicion of foreign plotting is a guaranteed box office winner. Now that it’s official Alberta government policy, however, things are about to get a lot trickier. The foreign funding conspiracy theory is a house of sand, where every pillar crumbles to the touch. At its core, this theory, which Jason Kenney has adopted as the Alberta government's, is that the province has been targeted by a cabal of American foundations led by the Rockefellers in a deliberate campaign of economic sabotage. By directing money and influence to an anti-pipeline movement called the Tar Sands Campaign, these foundations seek to advance American energy interests by landlocking Canadian oil. As I wrote earlier in September, the sham outrage over foreign money is just a cynical ruse. Unscrupulous governments are employing it around the world to discredit, silence and intimidate environmental dissent, and ultimately to choke off resources to activist groups. Nobody cares about foreign money, least of all Jason Kenney." https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/10/03/analysis/data-based-dismantling-jason-kenneys-foreign-funding-conspiracy-theory?fbclid=IwAR3IQaBOMBznIKyZp6D9irEu1dG5q6L3RL3MAaxVgmFblXlm83zjC0zlOS4

Somehow, some people can't be convinced that climate change isn't real because they won't believe it until their mother bursts into flame in the middle of a dried up Lake Winnipeg. The thing is, it's happening and the evidence is everywhere. Forget the 10 year warning, it's already happening. Just because you don't believe you have seen or felt it, doesn't mean others haven't. Also, if you think you're out of ideas on what to ask for for Christmas - ask for a digital subsciption to the Washington Post - it is an amazing newspaper. Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground ON THE ZYRYANKA RIVER, Russia — Andrey Danilov eased his motorboat onto the gravel riverbank, where the bones of a woolly mammoth lay scattered on the beach. A putrid odor filled the air — the stench of ancient plants and animals decomposing after millennia entombed in a frozen purgatory. “It smells like dead bodies,” Danilov said. The skeletal remains were left behind by mammoth hunters hoping to strike it rich by pulling prehistoric ivory tusks from a vast underground layer of ice and frozen dirt called permafrost. It has been rapidly thawing as Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet's warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia's temperatures have already spiked far beyond that. A Washington Post analysis found that the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average. The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless. “The warming got in the way of our good life,” said Alexander Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in the regional capital of Yakutsk. “With every year, things are getting worse and worse.” For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017. In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland. Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand. This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade. And then there’s that rotting smell. As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change. “The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.” Against this backdrop, a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold. The long-frozen mammoth tusks — combined with Chinese demand for ivory — have imbued teetering local economies with a strike-it-rich ethos. Some people bask in instant money. But others watch in dismay as Siberia’s way of life is washed away. ‘Nature is in control’ The first sign of change was the birds. Over the past several decades, never-before-seen species started to show up in the Upper Kolyma District, an area on the Arctic Circle in northeastern Siberia 1,000 miles west of Nome, Alaska. The new arrivals included the mallard duck and barn swallow, whose normal range was previously well to the south. A study published last year by Yakutsk scientist Roman Desyatkin said ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life. Then the land started to change. Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them. The village of Nelemnoye was cut off for three months in late 2017 when the lakes and rivers didn’t fully freeze, stranding residents who use the frozen waters for transport. With the village in crisis, the government dispatched a helicopter to take residents grocery shopping. (much much more if you can follow the link) https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-siberia/

Welcome to my life.

I totally read your posts with a Trump voice in my head now.

As you probably know by now (but didn't delete your misleading post), the person was a plant for the LaRouche PAC, a far-right Trump supporting group. Conservatives attacked Ocasio-Cortez over a bizarre town hall speaker. Now, a pro-Trump fringe group says it planned the stunt. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/04/conservatives-attacked-ocasio-cortez-over-bizarre-town-hall-speaker-now-pro-trump-fringe-group-says-they-planned-stunt/ You may want to reevaluate who the "crazy" people actually are. And buy a mirror if you don't already own one.

This week in climate inaccuracy: let's talk about the two airplanes "But on the only relatively important level — I say “relatively” because the whole discussion is of so little relevance to Canada’s collective action on climate change that we may as well be discussing the carbon footprint of the catering at campaign events — there is the question of whether Scheer’s “hypocrisy” claim holds water. Let’s dig a bit deeper on that. Consider the centrepiece of the Liberals’ climate plan: the carbon tax. The core logic of a carbon tax is that the best way to change collective behaviour on climate change is to make polluting activities more expensive. In lieu of, just for instance, curtailing air travel altogether, the carbon tax makes flying a bit pricier. If, again, just for instance, the managers of a national election campaign still want to fly, they can pay more. Choosing to pay even more through voluntary offsets on top of whatever surcharge the carbon tax builds into their flights only underscores the argument the Liberals are making to all Canadians, which is that if your activities generate emissions, those activities should cost more. This is not hypocrisy, but pretty tidy logical consistency. Hypocrisy, on the other hand, might be, yet again, just for instance, spending the first weeks of the campaign (and the first several pages of your climate-policy brochure) spreading falsehoods about the impact of carbon taxes and then attacking your opponent on national TV over an inconsequential climate-related detail, all to mask the utter lack of substance in your own climate plan." https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/10/03/opinion/week-climate-inaccuracy-lets-talk-about-two-airplanes

I have my doubts that you understand how carbon offsets work because you didn't read the article explaining just that. Your faux outrage about blackface is so rich considering almost everything you've ever posted or danced around regarding multiculturalism/refugees/immigrants etc. And if you ask me to prove it, you'd better get busy deleting old posts.

The Beaverton nails it again. Update: Scheer kept US citizenship secret for fear of being persecuted as a white American man "REGINA – Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said that he kept his US citizenship a secret until now for fear of being persecuted as a white heterosexual male from the United States. “I didn’t want anyone to know that, in addition to my Canadian citizenship, I also have roots with a country that’s tremendously different,” said Scheer. “Growing up, I knew the white Catholic Canadian kids from Ottawa would treat a white Catholic Canadian kid from Ottawa with dual citizenship differently. I looked like most of the other kids, which made me feel so different.” Scheer detailed the difficulties of fitting in, speaking the same language, and struggling to be just like all the other kids who didn’t have the right to vote in US elections or freedom to work in the world’s largest economy. Scheer was routinely discriminated against in his schooling for not placing a “u” in words such as “colour” and “honour.”" https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/10/update-scheer-kept-us-citizenship-secret-for-fear-of-being-persecuted-as-a-white-american-man/

Because they're buying carbon offsets. End of story. https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/carbon-offset.htm

IRS whistleblower said to report Treasury political appointee might have tried to interfere in audit of Trump or Pence Oct. 3, 2019 at 3:25 p.m. CDT An Internal Revenue Service official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president or vice president’s tax returns, according to multiple people familiar with the document. Trump administration officials dismissed the whistleblower’s complaint as flimsy because it is based on conversations with other government officials. But congressional Democrats were alarmed by the complaint, now circulating on Capitol Hill, and flagged it to a federal judge. They are also discussing whether to make it public. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/irs-whistleblower-said-to-report-treasury-political-appointee-might-have-tried-to-interfere-in-audit-of-trump-or-pence/2019/10/03/0c768b34-e52e-11e9-a331-2df12d56a80b_story.html

deleted. More research required.

The Hoarse Whisperer@HoarseWisperer · 1h Last week, the Intel Inspector General got roasted by Congress for not turning over a whistleblower complaint in the legally required seven days. Now, the State Department’s IG, Steven Linick, an Obama appointee, has summoned congress to an “urgent briefing” this afternoon. 1/3 Per reporting: “Linick reportedly asked for the meeting after his office obtained documents from the State Department's acting legal adviser.” Sounds to me like State withheld information it was legally mandated to provide to Congress which Linick is now hastily forwarding. 2/3 Given the fact that last week’s drama centered on IGs’ obligation to forward *whistleblower complaints* though, don’t be surprised if State had received its own set of documented whistleblower concerns and buried them... until now. We’ll see. Listen for more whistles today. 3/3

Clean energy shares streak ahead of fossil fuel stocks Sharp fall in wind and solar costs has made renewables cheaper than coal and gas "Investors who bet on a shift from fossil fuels to clean energy are being richly rewarded as solar and wind stocks outperform oil and gas shares by a widening margin this year. The iShares Clean Energy exchange-traded fund has risen by 32 per cent so far this year, streaking far ahead of the oil-dominated Vanguard Energy ETF, which has risen by only 1 per cent. In August, the renewables fund bettered the fossil fuel ETF by the biggest margin in five years. Renewable energy developers have been benefiting from a sharp reduction in the cost of wind and solar in recent years, which has made them cheaper than coal and natural gas at certain times in many markets. The cost of solar has fallen 85 per cent since 2010, while wind power has dropped about 50 per cent, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Renewable stocks also outperformed oil and gas shares in 2017 and 2018, although both sectors ended last year down." https://www.ft.com/content/2586fa10-e122-11e9-b112-9624ec9edc59?segmentid=acee4131-99c2-09d3-a635-873e61754ec6

There's a big chunk of fiscally conservative voters down south who are saying the exact same thing right now. Ontario too.