Our era of global commensality also brings us EBOLA, CHERNOBYL, and ATMOSPHERIC CO2

In the decades after 1945, it became clear to the entire world that long range bombers and ICBM missiles could deliver near instant nuclear energy death (energy too cheap to meter) to anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world.

Even the wayward winds would help out,  pushing the deadly radioactive fallout clouds hither and yon, willy nilly.

And that supposed boon to Progress , all those post-1945 ultra-fast civilian jets speeding business people and tourists from anywhere to everywhere in a few hours ?

All those jetliner routes also meant that thousands of very recently infected people could leave an area where a deadly infectious outbreak had not yet been medically detected, to make their way forth to innocently (and ultimately) infect the entire world --- all in the course of a day or two.

Gradually , our sense of the security we had always had that our own locality and our own nation-state could be a separate island of calm in a sea of global chaos has evaporated.

My claim that the post-1945 world is in an era of global commensality does not just mean the benign global re-cycling of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus etc for the benefit of all life : it is not all cute lamb lying down with tame lion.

It also means the global re-cycling of radioactive clouds (and of Ebola viruses) to the detriment of all life.

It can mean that the baneful genetic effects of a nuclear explosion in this decade could still be harming our grandchildren in that decade --- for global commensality has a global time spectrum as well as global space spectrum.

It even means that one nation burning coal on this side of the world could raise the ocean waters enough to drown that island nation on the other side of the world.

Global commensality re-affirms that indeed no man, woman, child or beast is an island ....

1943 : UK overheats the heavens.... while Bengal starves

Churchill always claimed that the UK just couldn't spare the shipping needed to help feed the starving millions in British Bengal in 1943.

But it turns out that what Bengal's would-be rescue ships were really needed for was to bring the millions and millions of gallons of overseas petroleum to the UK, to feed the FIDO systems set up around British airfields beginning in 1943.

Burning petroleum at a rate as high as one to two hundred thousand gallons of fuel per hour, per airfield, was used to create an artificial climate above the airfields - literally burning off the ever-present British fog so bombers could take off and land in all kinds of weather, night or day.

Climate Change and Global Warming, RAF-style.

For those lanky, metallic, mechanized citizens of the British Empire must be feed at all costs, even if the darker human citizens of the Empire must starve to make it so.

The relentless logic of Modernity ....

PQ posts SMALLEST PLURALITY EVER for a full-slate Canadian government

smallest plurality EVER !

The PQ set a new record low (31.9%) for the winning government party in Canada on Tuesday - maybe a new low anywhere and anytime in a "first past the post" electoral system.

 (Yes the previous record holder was the provincial Liberals in BC in 1924 (31.3%).

 But as my former Professor Murray Beck was often at pains to point out about "the good old days", many times the major parties chose not to run a full slate and let a nominally "independent" Liberal or Conservative candidate run instead - a independent who soon supported their party once again,  after the election.

 In this case, the true Liberal popular vote , at the first meeting of the legislature,  was a point or two bigger than that of the PQ in 2012).

Impact on Climate Wars at election time ?

Partisanship this loose and fluid gives both sides hope in the ongoing climate wars : because the positions on the question "is the climate changing due to human activity ?" can no longer be resolved by simply counting the party with the most heads in a stable two party situation.

Politics is now very competitive in Canada with no party counting on more than a handful of their faithful to actually remain "faithful" through thick and thin.

The pro global warming vote going solid for one party could spell doom for the smaller but - until now - much more concentrated "climate denier vote"....

1939 & 2039 : does the first world CATASTROPE hold useful lessons for the second ?

WWII : first global man-made Catastrophe

God it feels so good to be able to use the words catastrophe and science in the same sentence and not get immediately strung up from the nearest tree by a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth raving atheists.

That is one of the inalienable freedoms we gained as we moved into today's post-hegemonic age.

We can now call WWII for what it truly was : a global - man-made - catastrophe.

And if current educated guesstimates are at all accurate, 100 years after this first global catastrophe caused by Man, we'll be well stuck in the next man-made catastrophe : runaway global warming meltdown.

It looks to be far far worse than even 1939-1945 was at its very worst .

The catastrophe of Modernity's very own war

So if there are any scraps of lessons we can salvage from the wreck that was Modernity's very own war, let us by all means find them and apply them, while there still is time.

A scientific cum political ideology can be spectacularly successful rhetorically if it chooses to never test its theories in the real world.

But if its Utopian scientific illusions are not in tune with the physicality and the restraints and limits of the real natural world,  it will fail catastrophically when fully challenged.

That is what Modernity discovered in early 1943,  on the steppes of Russia, in the waters of the Pacific and the organic chemistry labs of Oxford University.

In 1939-1945 ,The Rhetoric of Modernity hit The Physicality of Reality (and just guess who won ?)

With sterling rhetoric, Sterling T Perkins calls for an END to rhetoric on Climate Change ...

Bombast Central

With friends like Mr Perkins, the case for Climate Change need hardly fear enemies.

We do need more action to reduce disastrous climate changes, but which actions to choose out of a cornucopia of choices ?

 Is it precisely here where more , not less  - and sharper, not softer - rhetoric is needed : to make the differences between those various choices more apparent for all of us to better decide.

Truly nothing is windier, nothing more cliched,  than newspaper opinion pages and opinion page writers getting up on their tiny hind legs to decry rhetoric --- in highly rhetorical language.

Rhetoric is the lifeblood of social, co-operating, beings

I am one who holds that even truly private diaries intended only for the eyes of the writer are filled with rhetoric (a subtle form of whistling your way past a graveyard ?) - as are most business accounting records.

Most students of rhetoric feel the same way - to judge by current research articles.

Humans are highly rhetorical beings - social, co-operating, beings -and it is time that both The Montreal Gazette and my fellow political science enthusiast Sterling Perkins accepted that fact.....

Newspapers report Global Warming like they did the Holocaust : urge caution, await further confirmation

We didn't report the LAST holocaust either

If you want to be a bystander at a new Holocaust (if you want to be be newspaper editor), there is no need to stretch yourself to penning anything like truly original thoughts.

 Why not just cut and past what past editors at your paper wrote at the first discovery of an intact Nazi death camp , like the infamous Lubin-Majdanek back in the summer of 1944 ?

As today with climate change, most editors then studiously ignored the reports of dozens of senior western reporters.

In this case, the reports of those who personally visited this Soviet-liberated hell-horror in the summer of 1944.

"Let us not jump to conclusions and hasty actions."  "Let us  seek further and further and further confirmation." "We need more - yet more - and more - and more eye witness reports ." "We need more and documented proof."

 Rather like playing out to the bell, in a game of sport, when your team is ahead.

On and on it went - to the end of the war and beyond.

Some still deny, still await further definitive proof, more documents, still seek 110% total certainty.

Sound familiar ?

Delay, delay, delay ; deny, deny, deny.

No wonder  so many Jews ,then and now, felt that the Allies' unspoken wish was that the Nazis would do their dirty work for them (if only the newspaper editors could be relied upon to stall the story getting wide - and angry - coverage, until it was far far too late.)

And we know how well the press did do its (non) job.

Fortunately, none of those publishers, editors or reporters has been allowed to sleep easy in their graves on this one.

Thousands of otherwise fine people are remembered only today for "Blowing the Big One" .

No "ongoing news peg" has been so thoroughly studied and dissected from all angles, day by day, in all papers, in all countries as has the non-reporting of the Holocaust, 1939-1945.

A thousand book-length theses have been written on it, country by country, newspaper by newspaper - all the guilty named and dismembered.

About a dozen new theses are written every year on the subject - and probably will be till the end of time.

Or perhaps not.

Because there is all the new non-reporting, the new skeptical shoulder-shrugging, lip-curling in denial, the new could careless-ness, the new un-reporting of a new Holocaust.

This time the non-reported-seriously story is how all humanity is sleep-walking itself to its own globe-sized crematorium .

And it will become a New Generation's ready thesis material.

Time-transport the Terrence Corcorans of this world back to 1939-1945 and watch them counsel delay and inaction..

All of the Terrence Corcorans of the world will be dead by then, but haste not to erect monuments to their undying honor : they will be remembered - yes, fulsomely - but in disgust and horror.

Just as their fore bearers of 1939-1945 are today.

I personally do not doubt that if Terrence had been an editor back in 1939-1945, he would have counselled " much more detailed research and no hasty calls for action".

This, despite the news about Majdanek merely confirming five solid years of  earlier reports of Nazi mass killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

 He just seems to be that type of guy. Now he will deny this,  as it is de rigeur to support the Jews today among his type of political  thinkers.

But based on how he is not covering the Second Holocaust, why should anyone believe his claims about how he would have covered the First Holocaust ?

Poetic justice then, his final fate at the hands of the historians : their wheels may grind exceedingly slow, but they grind exceedingly fine and his actions during The Second Holocaust will be caught between them forever and ever.

And may I add, in my old-fashioned Catholic way : Amen .....

"DR STRANGELOVE" of the global-warming-Jewish-flouridation-vaccination-9/11-conspiracy-plot is long overdue

let's NUKE the warmists !

Listen up, people ! Particularly people of the-Babylon-that-is-Hollywood.

A new 21st century "DR STRANGELOVE" is long, long, long overdue.

But not a re-make of  "fluoride in our water is destroying the vital gonads of the cold-war warrior race" .

No, rather a new one : all about the mad, wacky, bizarre world of  those millions of climate deniers who firmly believe that global-warming-is-all-a-Jewish-vaccination/fluoridation -9/11-conspiracy-plot.

The hitherto hidden racism of those who believe in global warming...

A sinister plot to take over the world and make black carbon and not white gold the basis of the new world order currency of terror.

(Er : shouldn't it be the Negroes ,rather than the Hebs , in charge of this particular black vs white paranoia ?)

It could be a docudrama torn from the pages (er, frames) of YouTube videos and body-snatching podcasts.

True, it could prove a bit hard to exceed these videos' own self-satirizing efforts : out of the mouths of wack jobs, as they say.

But trust the dinosaurs of the newspaper demi-world to get it so totally wrong : by focusing on the science of the deniers, when really - by their own words - it is really all about conspiracies of world domination.

Hmmm , I wonder what Ed Riche or Rick Mercer is up to these days - or the Donovans, for that matter ...

QUEER-BASHING and CLIMATE DENIAL : related ?

Gay-friendly Tassie !

Australian politics perhaps shows best how closely related are the strident opposition to both Gay marriage and the reality of Global warming .


In that Antipodes nation, the right wing of the socialist party joins with the capitalist parties in opposing both : and that adds up to about 70% of the voters on Election Day, though polling on these issues alone shows a much more even split among the  population.

Electoral systems that favour the two biggest parties give the "paranoid" voter the final say on every thing.

Clearly the parties are well behind current public opinion. This is because both main parties need to get as many of the "paranoid" voters as possible, to form government in a distorted electoral system that wildly favours the two biggest parties - by design.

(The left wing of the socialists joins with the Greens in favouring gay marriage and the reality of climate change.)

At the federal level, the governing Labor (socialist) party is trying to straddle the fence, knowing it appeals to both queer-bashing Labor activists and gay-supporting Labor activists..

But in Tasmania, the governing Labor party will use a small loophole in the Australian constitution to allow gay marriage in the tiny island state - heartedly supported by most Greens but opposed by some Labor activists.

(By contrast, the Libertarian party and its rural and far right fellow travellers are undivided in roundly opposing gay marriage.)

Much the same for global warming ; the right denies it 100%, the Greens support it 100% and the centre-right socialists tries to have it both ways.

Switching to America , a life-long active Republican worker and professional denier for Big Tobacco and a host of other big rich unpopular industries, Frank Schubert , is leading the richly financed anti-gay marriage movement in the United States , further cementing the arguments that all denier movements are intimately connected......

Film review : "WILD BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD" a must-see global warming parable

Could Quvenzhane Wallis, only six at the time of the film shooting, become the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award as best actress, for her starring roles as Hushpuppy in the new indie film, "Wild Beasts of the Southern Wild" ?

A lot of film critics are beginning to speculate the possibility.

The film is like nothing you have ever seen before  - a sort of cross between the famous poetic docufiction Louisiana Story by Leacock and Flaherty and Yeats' equally famous anti-modernist poem , The Second Coming.

Only this time, the " vexed, rough beast " slouching to the Gulf of Mexico is the auroch , the large fearfully-horned ancestor of today's cattle, driven into extinction in the 17th century by man's greed.

In the film they are supposedly frozen into the ice of the last Ice Age, only to be awaken when man's new Global Warming Age melts the ice caps.

A poetic time capsule about a soon to be drowned real-life community

The film about the fictional community of Bathtub, as seen through the eyes of a very young and independent girl , is a poetic, magic realism take on the first - real - community in America fated to disappear through Man's destructive efforts.

 Isle de Jean Charles is being steadily washed away by man made levees , canals and global warming's rising waters: a football field sized area every hour.

Its mixed race Indian tribe residents are being ignored by their governments ; hopefully this film will change that to something half way better - even if it is too late to reverse the rising sea....

Sun-hegemony in a post-hegemonic world

It is a very very brave - and rare - reader of the TORONTO SUN who publicly dares to define the group hegemony among its readers.

But recently, 6% of those readers defied the SUN Hegemony that there is no change in the Climate.

 No word as yet if other modern readers of this most modernist of Canadian newspapers headed out, cane & walker at hand, to torch the offending six percent's retirement homes and extended care villas.

The Toronto Sun planted a news story entitled "Green Drivel Exposed" ---- exposed by journalist Lorrie Goldstein as a suitable cue, in case readers were still unsure how to vote in the poll below the story that asked  " Do you think global warming is a real threat ?"

Now in the good old days, back in Albania or Alberta, you could be sure that 99.87% would answer correctly , with the other .13% presently 'recovering from their injuries' in police custody.

But in this post-wildrose-spring, things are much freer now and while 6 % said "yes" ---  mysteriously 91% answered "no" and only 3% gave the correct answer  which was "it won't be my problem" .

I don't know if you have seen a recent photo of the moderns en masse --- the white hair , the knobby knees, the walkers , the canes, the oxygen assists - it is a sight to behold.

Most have lost a lot of weight from their heyday back in the 1950s, and are down to about ninety pounds of skin, bones and bile.

I really think bile must be the only biological substance that goes up in production as we age.

Now if the same question was asked at ,ehem, the greenbloggers website, I have a feel that 91% would have given the correct answer for its editors : "yes we believe in global warming" .

We're in a post-hegemonic world and the varying hegemonies will have to war it out for control of the collective political consensus, if it still can be re-consituted , while the skies above get ever hotter and the planet below watches its biodiversity flatline.

The effort to save the earth should be a race against aging as much as it is against Time.

However, with the aging moderns getting fresh new supporters among the millions of young "Spacers", as starry-eyed about Mars Colonies as they are about saving the rainbow-blowing LGBT-friendly whales, this battle will go on for a very long,long time - a longer time than the planet has to right itself......

The Who, What, Where, When of Climate Change I leave to others : I seek the "Why"

The Climate Wars are but the latest skirmish in an old, old war.

But with the stakes never higher, righteous anger fills both sides, each convinced that the other will lead their planet to rack and ruin.

I am Canadian, but I hate hockey and you will certainly see no climate hockey sticks here - nor any other peer-reviewed science either.


But I am passionately interested in the "Popular Science" of the Climate Change debate ----seeing it as the latest public expression of two wildly different and long-standing world-views/ philosophies/ ideologies/ theologies - call them what you will.

In my view, "all quarrels are about axioms and only about axioms", so I intend to peel back the hidden assumptions that fuel the animus ,found on both sides of the global warming debate.

There are hundreds of blog sites out there that are daily, nay hourly, actively reporting on the climate change front.

I don't share their collective passion for dissecting the details in scientific and quasi-scientific papers and reports, unfortunately.

But as a political science graduate and a long time politician, I feel much more comfortable putting this recent skirmish - maybe, at best, only ten years old - in its historical context.

For these clashing world-views are, at least in my view, as old as the human species itself.....

Coming soon : "OFF-PLANETTING" the 99%'s jobs to Martian robots ...

    Let's pretend it all began in 1870.
    Some uppity bunch of employees in New England's pioneering factory mill system now want a fairer share of the money rolling in - as does the town and the state legislators.
    Farmers downstream from the mill complain  that the river water is now making their cows sick and want something done about it.
    In a soon-to-be-classic gambit, the mill owners first deny everything - the existence of profits or pollution.

   Then they 'light out to the Territories', closing the old mill and opening a new mill "Out West" "On the Frontier" - after getting a tremendous bonus voted to them for doing so by the easily bribed territorial government.
   Cue 1905: the Territory is now a State and like New England, its voters too want more revenue and less pollution. The mill owners deny the existence of either, yet again - their lines (lies) well rehearsed.
   They regret that the "Closing of the West" will damage the character of the American people - or at the very least, threaten the autonomy of mill owners to cut'n'run / slash and burn.
    The federal government, they demand, must subsidize the taking up of overseas colonies, so we can open mills, pollute freely, pay low wages and lower taxes.
   The government obliges , moving from subsidizing (with dollars and blood) the Opening of the West, to Opening the Orient.
   Cut to 1950: the Americans have sternly told France and England that directly run colonies are so yesterday ( besides the natives in American direct rule colonies are getting restless and demanding they be treated as if they were subjects of the freedom-loving American people).
   Which they are - awkward that.
    Much better to move to indirect colonies: nominally-free nations run by impoverished dictators eager to sell off their peoples in return for enormous Swiss Bank Accounts.
    We can move our mill there - we will get high profits and his American-supplied guns will ensure no one lives long who dares complain about pollution or low wages and terrible working conditions.
   So it has gone on through the ages - offshoring mills from Boston to Kansas City to Manilla to Laos to Zambia to ????
   Slowly but surely greedy slimy mill owners are running out of countries where people are willing to put up with slave wages in Dickensian hells.
   Where to next, for the newest colony and the newest mills?
    Mars, that is where.
    Only this time the denial and the flee is global,  not on a city by city or nation by nation basis.
   The denials come first: we are not polluting the atmosphere with global-warming carbon / our CEO salaries are not high.
   Meanwhile, secretly, behind the scenes, tax dollars are being handed out to create the newest colonies - this time on Mars.
   "Permanent Mars Colonies by 2023".
   Maybe we could work it so that robots will ship the raw materials in, work them up and ship them back.
   No taxes on Mars - obviously.
   And if you do pollute it - well, frankly, that will only improve its looks.
   Why bother to stay on Earth and why bother to work to heal it ?
    Cutting and running ; denying and then fleeing worked for great-great-granddad and all of his descendants - it should work just as well for me....