Canada The Sinking Lifeboat

A Non-Partisan Option For Electoral Protest

2011-04-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

I have no preference for any of the five main parties. All have one agenda---massive and unending immigration-driven population growth. There is no candidate in my constituency worthy of my vote. But as Churchill said, while there may not be anyone worth voting for, there is always someone worth voting against. And if I cannot cast a vote against someone in another riding, I can always lend financial support to the candidate best positioned to defeat the worst candidate. Therefore I would send money to the following campaigns:

The (Liberal) candidate who has a chance to defeat the NDP Immigration critic, Olivia Chow.
The Conservative incumbent Gary Lunn, who has the best chance of defeating challenger Elizabeth May of the Green Party.
The Bloc candidate who has the best chance of defeating Liberal immigration critic Justin Trudeau. ---and---
The Liberal candidate who has the best chance of unseating ethnic-ass-kisser Immigration, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenny.

I am an equal oppportunity quisling-hater. All these open-borders champions---Chow, May, Trudeau and Kenny deserve to be turfed from the public trough and returned to the hole that they sprung from. A curse on them and all like them in whatever party. We need MPs who will put Canadians first.

Tim Murray

SIERRA CLUBBERS ANONYMOUS

2010-02-09T11:39:00.000-08:00

Sierra Clubbers Anonymous

A 12-Step Program for Recovering Population-Deniers and Green Growth-Managers

You finally hit rock bottom—and you just can’t seem to summon the stamina to climb out. But don’t despair. Realizing that you are in trouble and are powerless to get out of it without assistance is the first step to recovery.

Once when you had control of your life you were an authentic environmentalist. You regarded the “IPAT” equation as axiomatic. That is, you accepted the fact that environmental impact (I) equalled the population level (P) times per capita consumption (A) times technology (T). But then you fell off the wagon, and in deference to political correctness you discreetly dropped the “P” and refused to acknowledge that population growth, and particularly immigrant-driven population growth was a key variable of environmental degradation. You could only think about one thing, “over-consumption”, or another, “green technology”. Until one day you woke in the gutter without a brain and without integrity, without everything that made you an intellectually independent being. You suddenly came to realize that your escapism and self-indulgent quest to feel good about yourself by making token “green” consumer choices only promoted more growth, and that growth of any kind was harmful. Oh, the guilt and the shame of it. You are ready to change but you just can’t find the strength within yourself to make it happen. Where do you turn to? Whom do you turn to?

Friend, Sierra Clubbers Anonymous (SCA) is there for you. You are not alone. Other soft greens have also lost their way and lost their wits too. With their help, together you can locate that strength, that power that exists beyond yourself that you can draw on to effect and repair the damage you have done by your denial. At any time of day or night, at your weakest moment, when you feel that you must forfeit your new found courage and return to the soft but suffocating bosom of an environmental NGO and surrender your mind to Sierra Group Think---members of Sierra Clubbers Anonymous will be there for you to steady your faltering willpower and keep you to the path of redemption. If they are not immediately at your door they will be at the other end of telephone to guide your through you the darkness of despair back to a comprehensive understanding of the causes of environmental damage. Just when you were about to give up all hope of understanding why things are going to hell, SCA will come to your rescue. Change is possible.

But first you must admit to yourself that numbers matter, that it is not just about per capita consumption but the sum total of “capitas”. You must acknowledge that would be pointless for a society to cut its per capita consumption in half only to turn around and double the population. And you must accept that there are no miracle technological solutions to what is essentially a moral problem—the need to stabilize and reduce our population level. By making things more efficient, new technology makes them cheaper, and therefore provokes even more consumption than before. More efficient use of scarce resources allows for and promotes more growth. You must finally grasp that smart growth is dumb. In short, you must make the decision to think for yourself and not swallow the filtered information of the Sierra Club executive or rely upon CBC Pravda for the facts. You must choose reality over delusion
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As a signal of this commitment, you must pledge to follow the 12 steps to full recovery. They are,

Step 1: Honesty
After many years of denial, recovery can begin when with one simple admission of being powerless to regain your intellectual independence without reaching out for truth and that a self-righteous Sierran yuppie who is semi-literate in the laws of sustainability is more a fool than a so-called blue collar redneck who has no pretensions of superior consciousness.

Step 2: Faith
You must first have faith in biophysical laws and that the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Trespass Carrying Capacity” trumps anything that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai or the optimism of the green apostles of false hope.

Step 3: Surrender
You must surrender your dependence on Sierra Club newsletters and set out on the lonely journey of educating yourself. You must start by understanding the exponential function and the limits to growth. You must understand that the world is finite as are its resources. No feat of human ingenuity can conjure up extinct species, replenish cheap oil or rehabilitate mined out soils without the use of fossil fuel-based fertilizers.

Step 4: Soul Searching
There is a saying in the 12-step programs that recovery is a process, not an event. The same can be said for this step -- more will surely be revealed. You must conduct a fearless moral inventory. Have any of your feel-good green gestures made a whit of difference? Did that solar panel you installed create more energy than was involved in making it? Did that so-called smart car you bought not involve an industrial process, was ore not mined , smelted and transported to a factory to rendezvous with rubber derived from fallen trees? Did not the so-called green factory it was made in consist of materials that inflicted a cost on the environment to make and transport? Were not the gains you made by riding a bike to work wiped out by taking that annual plane flight to Mexico or Bali? By siring or giving birth to two children did you not effectively double your ecological footprint and be responsible for more carbon emissions than a meat-eating man or woman without children could ever make up for? Are you not a hypocrite with your holier-than-thou green conscience?

Step 5: Integrity
Probably the most difficult of all the steps to face, Step 5 is also the one that provides the greatest opportunity for personal growth, the only kind that is benign. You must examine the financial reports of any environmental organization that you belong to and follow the money trail. You must renounce any group like the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy or the David Suzuki Foundation which accepts corporate donations. You wouldn’t accept your beloved NDP accepting such dirty money, so why is it acceptable for these groups to receive money from financial institutions and energy corporations? “Hear no evil, see no evil” is not the posture of anyone with integrity.

Step 6: Acceptance
The key to Step 6 is acceptance – accepting that you have been WILLFULLY ignorant and tolerant of corruption in the environmental movement. You must accept that you need an education. Start with Christine MacDonald’s “Green Inc” which documents how much mainstream environmental organizations are on the corporate take. Then take a look at Canada and ask, why is the Royal Bank funding the David Suzuki Foundation and Nature Conservancy? Why is the Toronto Dominion Bank doing the same for the Sierra Club? What do they want in return? What are these green organizations doing, or more to the point, not doing and not saying to get that money? Why does Suzuki accuse climate change deniers of being shills for the petroleum industry while his foundation accepts donations from the natural gas giant Encana? Why haven’t YOU being doing this homework? Why haven’t YOU being asking these questions? Are not you the same kind of person who shakes his head when Christians in an evangelical church still support a minister who has been exposed for dishonesty, betrayal or adultery? Are you not a credulous dupe too?

Step 7: Humility
The spiritual focus of Step 7 is humility, realizing that your smug superiority complex is unwarranted. That the average logger or fish farm worker is no more responsible than you are for the system that we are trapped in.
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Step 8: Willingness
Making a list of those that have been harmed by your support of false gods. The first casualty is the farmland we have lost to development fuelled by our having the highest population growth rate in the G8 group. And the many hundreds of species that are now at risk of extinction as a result. You must include on that list the fact that the environmental groups you blindly supported by their unwillingness to bite the corporate hand that feeds them have refused to fight population and economic growth and therefore made meeting Kyoto targets IMPOSSIBLE.

Step 9: Forgiveness
You must ask for the forgiveness of those you have slandered and race-baited, and from the constituency that you have betrayed by allowing them to think that your group was a watchdog guarding the environment. Your green “watchdog” stopped barking when corporate Canada fed him a bone.

Step 10: Maintenance
Nobody likes to admit to being wrong. But you must continually remind yourself that your blind obedience to a corrupt, money-grubbing corporate lackey for so many years demands your consistent apologies.

Step 11: Making Contact
You must make contact with reality and with knowledge that your organization and the editors of the politically correct rags that you read do not allow you to see. As the Romans said, “nullius verba”---take no one’s word. Don’t take their word or my word. Do your own research.

Step 12: Service
You can make amends for some of the damage that you have unwittingly done with your ill-informed good intentions by redirecting your donations and your efforts to projects and causes that make a difference. For example , instead of sending money or support to a nation like the Philippines that has no intention of controlling its population growth, re-deploy it to countries like Thailand or Madagascar that are serious about birth control programs. Money to nations like Ethiopia, Haiti, Afghanistan, the Philippines and the like essentially amounts to a birth incentive and too often a bounty on wildlife.

Finally, you must ask yourself, is your loyalty to an organization an informed loyalty to its ideas, policies principles or are you more loyal to the neighbours and friends in it? It is fundamentally a social club that you can’t bear to challenge, is fellowship your main motive? If your allegiance is to the tribe and not the cause then you must ask, is a friendship that is contingent on your fixed opinions and organizational support more important than your integrity and intellectual growth? Are you too weak to stand alone? Is “getting along” by “going along” your survival code? If it is it, you are very human. And that is why we are in very big trouble.

Tim Murray . In your face and on your case. You gave me no quarter, so you shall receive none. With apologies to Diderot, the environment will never be safe until the last counterfeit environmentalist is strangled with the entrails of the last banker or developer.

TEN ECOLOGICAL REASONS TO OPPOSE MASS IMMIGRATION

2010-02-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

1. Overpopulation is more than a third-world phenomena in scope. Even industrial societies with relatively stable and falling population levels are overpopulated.

2. We are not obliged for any compelling reason to replace current population levels anywhere. On the contrary, our obligation is to effort the most rapid population decrease as politically possible in the least inhumane of effective ways.

3. Population growth is a major ingredient of environmental degradation.

4. Immigration is a major ingredient of population growth in many jurisdictions, most especially Canada, the United States, the UK and Australia, and therefore deserves our focus.

5. Restricting immigration not only constrains domestic population growth, it constrains population growth in those countries in chronic overshoot who use emigration as a safety value to relieve ecological pressure and avoid coming to terms with it. Porous borders in affluent nations often stimulate fertility rates in countries of emigration.

6. Restricting immigration and suppressing domestic fertility allows respite for biodiversity.

7. The loss of biodiversity services and natural habitat is a more imminent and serious threat to humanity than climate change.

8. Biodiversity loss and C02 emissions are to a large measure, the product of human population growth. Whether CO2 emissions are an agency of climate change or not, they are ultimately a function of population and economic growth. Therefore addressing population growth is the most efficient approach to solving or mitigating biodiversity losses and containing C02 emissions whether they are of valid concern or not.

9. Reducing population levels is in itself, not the answer to all problems but it makes all problems easier to deal with. Population growth may or may not be THE root cause of all problems, but it is certainly A root cause of all problems.

10. We do not have an energy shortage, or a food shortage, or a water shortage, or a housing shortage, or a job shortage. We have a people longage. Peak oil is not a problem, it is a solution, as are lack of food availability, or a limited supply of water. Growth is the problem. Not the lack of resources that fuel growth. We need limiting factors, not a more efficient method to extract limited resources or make more efficient use of them. The greatest calamity that could ever be inflicted on human and non-human species alike would be the discovery of an abundant, cheap and perpetual energy source, or unlimited availability of cheap food and universal and uninhibited access to bountiful water supplies. Until we put the horse before the cart, that is, reducing and stabilizing the population within the framework of a zero growth economy, relieving the bottlenecks that resource shortages place in front of us offers temporary relief at best. Humanity always grows to meet supply. It is Says Law---Supply creates demand. There is no technological fix to growth and the problems that result from it. Efficient and renewable technologies only provoke more total consumption of the input that is thought to be in short supply, just as freeing up land for more production promotes as well as accommodates human expansion in numbers and appetites. A commitment to the scientific method does not imply a faith in technology---only belief in a rigorous and rational method of discovering truth.

Tim Murray
February 9, 2010

PARADISE LOST----KELOWNA THEN AND NOW

2010-02-09T11:23:00.000-08:00

The fate of Westbank resident Jorden Martz did not surprise me. I have seen it coming for five decades. Martz was the young man who was cut down by a hit-and-run driver at 3am in mid January while he was riding his bike to work at a Tim Horton’s outlet. As he staggered for help suffering the agony of fractured ribs and a broken leg, not one of the half dozen cars he tried to flag down stopped to assist him. Not one driver even bothered to roll down his window an inch to ask if there was a problem. Martz’s sister, reflecting upon his experience, confessed that her perception of the city and its people was henceforth changed. She had once thought of Kelowna as the home of friendly people with a strong sense of community, but that particular incident indicated otherwise. Kelowna had arrived. It was now an urban paradise. The city that developers, businessmen and politicians across Canada aim for. A growing, “vibrant” , “community” with an array of amenities that human beings allegedly can’t live without. Fine restaurants, expansive malls, sports complexes, big box stores and a college. The drugs, the gangs, the violent and petty crime, well , those are the expected growing pains along the road to greatness. A little “planning” will take care of that.

Call me old-fashioned-- a charge which I quite eagerly admit to---but I prefer the Kelowna I knew in 1958. That was a paradise. No one locked their homes or their cars. The beaches were relatively empty and the orchards were unmolested by bulldozers. The mood was friendly and the pace of life relaxed. No wonder--- there were 10,000 residents then. Today there are more than 106,000. And the current OCP (Official Community Plan) growth strategy projects the “City” population to be 153, 222 in 2020, with the addition of another 22,666 people in the following ten years. But as a discussion paper revealed, “With a revised growth strategy, the City would see an additional 22,666 people during the 2011 to 2020 time period and an additional 17,887 people from2021 to 2030, for a total population of 161,701.” http://www.kelowna2030.ca/spaw2/uploads/files/Population%20and%20Housing%20Projections%20Discussion%20Paper.pdf Compound growth rates will decline from 2.13% presently to 1.22% in two decades. But this is meaningless when it is remembered that a lower growth rate for a larger population base will add more people to a region than a larger growth rate would for a smaller population. The environment cares little for percentages. It is the total impact that counts, and the absolute number of consumers and the rate of their consumption and waste is what factors in.

Naturally the quest for more profits and more business will be couched in the deceptive language of trendy growth “management” and “sustainability” principles. Residents will continue to be told that the city can have its cake and eat it too. Those on the left will be recruited to this cause by the tired old arguments of growthism. They will be told that more employment will be needed to uplift those with lower incomes. That more tax revenue will be needed to provide the social services that they will require. That economic growth will allow for the provision of that most Holy of left-wing Grails, “affordable” housing. And the “left” will buy it as they always have, for two reasons. One is that many in the so-called “progressive” coalition have a vested interest in growth. Growth allows the number of dues-paying members in unions to grow, growth increases the number of students and classrooms for teachers and college administrators, growth generates work for the social workers and psychologists who feed off the social problems that come with growth---more cases, more case workers. Growth and the taxes it yields can improve the job security and benefits of public sector workers, a pillar of the progressive constituency. As NDP leader Carol James declared at the party’s convention in November of 2009, “We need to grow the revenues.” And growing that revenue for modern social democrats cannot be done by raising corporate taxes or killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It must be accomplished by creating a “business-friendly” environment. By encouraging economic growth. And only through continued growth, or “prosperity” as it is termed, can we “afford” a clean environment. Notice that the rhetoric of the left has now become almost indistinguishable from that of the right. Both want to “grow the pie” but merely quibble about how it is to be sliced. Growth is good, according to NDP leader Jack Layton, so long its ‘benefits’ are “shared”. So not only do progressives have a mercenary stake in growth, they have an ideological commitment to it as well. That is the second reason for their membership in the growth lobby.

Both left and right want growth, and both attempt to dress it up with assurances about sustainability, now a buzz word devoid of any meaningful sense. The aforementioned discussion paper for the Kelowna OCP stated that “Several growth allocation/land use scenarios will..be developed and tested for impacts on various sustainability criteria (financial, environmental, social and cultural). Hello? There is no such thing as “financial”, “social” or “cultural” sustainability outside the context of “environmental” sustainability. As one grows tired of reminding growth advocates, the economy and the society and culture which it supports itself is a subset of the environment. We make our living in an “economy”, but we live in a biosphere. Without clean air, productive soils, replenished aquifers---without biodiversity services, any economy will collapse. Once the environment is trashed, try using your “robust” economy and growing tax revenues to buy a new one.
Of course, growth-managers will tell us that it is not “whether” we grow but “how” we grow. There is no need to document the failure of smart-growth snake oil nostrums. There is no need to talk about failures in Portland, Oregon or Los Angeles to maintain growth boundaries in the face of unrelenting population growth, or the failure of densification to contain this pressure, or the fallacy that densification reduces ecological footprints. Or that the tax revenues of urban growth are consumed by the costs of supplying new infrastructure to growing subdivisions. Or that more growth may create more jobs but it does not reduce the unemployment rate or catch up with homelessness by creating “affordable” housing. Trying to grow enough revenue to cure poverty through more growth is, to use a recent metaphor, like trying to cure Type 2 diabetes with twinkies. Or a morning hangover with another six-pack. The NDP governments in BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba presided over some of the highest rates of child poverty in Canada. Growth never closed income gaps---it widened them. And wealth became even more unevenly distributed.

But the most compelling indictment of growth is not found in statistics, but in the intangibles, in the more subjective measurement of “quality of life”. We do not need to refer to studies like those of Professor James White of UBC who documented that people in more densely populated areas have about one-third fewer close friends than people who live in less populated areas. We can observe that big city folk are more lonely. And Jordan Martz and his sister can observe that a city of Kelowna’s scale has a much compromised sense of community. I for one noticed the change as early as 1970, when Kelowna’s population was already twice the size it had been a decade before when I saw it first. For the first time, I felt uncomfortable in one section of the city core. The drug scene then was intimidating. Imagine it now when the population is now five times larger than that.

Let’s be fair. Even with its current problems, Kelowna is, relative to most cities, an attractive destination. Eight inches of rain a year, sunny summers and tolerably cold winters, in conjunction with its lake and mountain setting, have ensured that. But nevertheless, Kelowna is a victim of a global malaise—the addiction to growth. Ironically, those few who have attempted to fight it have been labelled as “extremists” despite the fact that it is the pace of growth that is extreme, not those who oppose it.

Perhaps the most cogent argument against growth will be waged not by civic reformers, but by the return of triple-digit oil prices, which will escalate to strangle the best laid plans and projections of mice and planners. Big box stores will be empty warehouses and many cities will resemble Barkerville or Detroit. Urban centres in post-carbon Canada will suffer a demographic crash diet. That’s not my vision, or the hallucinations of a crank. It is the scenario of Richard Heinberg, James Kunstler, Michael Ruppert, Richard Embleton, Jeff Rubin, Christopher Steiner, Chris Clugston and dozens of analysts. It is the forecast of anyone who can see the writing on the wall. Oil production has peaked. And while the world will demand more and more, the cost of extracting accessible quantities will grow to exceed their value. The math is indisputable. Either deal with that reality or have that reality deal with you.

Kelowna, B.C., like countless other localities across the globe, is Paradise Lost. But after a tribulation of untold duration and misery, it may one day become Paradise Recovered. Pity I will not live to see it.

Tim Murray,
January 15/09

VERBAL EMITICS FOR NEO-MALTHUSIANS

2010-02-09T11:18:00.000-08:00

Growthist buzzwords that instantaneously evoke nausea and vomiting

When one is forced-fed an unrelenting diet of growthist, pro-immigration and pro-natalist propaganda, it is common to be afflicted by a medical condition known as G.I.G. (Growth-Induced Gastroenteritis). Similar in consequences to the ingestion of rat poison, it becomes medically necessary to induce immediate vomiting to expel the toxin before it becomes absorbed by your body and causes a brain seizure. It has been conventional to induce this expulsion by the oral administration of an emetic like syrup of ipecac, copper sulfate or, as in ancient times, by salt or mustard water. But recent experience suggests that certain growthist buzzwords can act more quickly and effectively without biochemical complications. These verbal emetics can be regarded as trigger words that induce instant nausea and expulsion of growthist propaganda that relieves pressure and provokes the release of endorphins into the bloodstream. For that reason the experience can prove dangerously euphoric and addictive, and many neo-Malthusians, particularly enlightened teens, have been known to adopt a bulimic lifestyle of deliberate exposure to the programming of state-broadcasting corporations like the CBC, the BBC and Australia’s ABC in order to feel good about themselves after each sado-masochistic viewing. Of particular attraction is the nightly newscast which inevitably quotes meaningless stock market indices that offer no facsimile to the real world. Some addicts organize their day around these reports and refer to the post-CBC purge as “ecstasy” and the coalition of law enforcers, health professionals and psychologists recruited to fight this phenomena have failed to stem the tide. They advise parents, spouses and loved ones to watch for dry heaves and simulated retching that these sustainability junkies often display involuntarily and habitually.

It has even been found that when a group of Malthusians watch a CBC program together, for example, once one Malthusian reacts to nauseating growthist cant, others reflexively react to his reaction. This response apparently evolved from primates who notice that when one of their party ingests harmful food and vomits, it proves advantageous for the others to follow suit. It is therefore recommended that Malthusians only subject themselves to the CBC in the company of like-minds.
What then are the trigger words that evoke nausea and vomiting? Words that once had a precise or legitimate meaning but were subsequently co-opted and rendered meaningless? This is a tentative list. Any of these verbal allergens could result in the gastric relief that victims require. You are welcome to supply worthy additions.

vibrant
sustainable
green
holistic
equitable
tolerant
embracing
life-enhancing
societal well-being
pro-active
paradigm shift
zero waste
stakeholder
accountability
dynamic
robust
sexy
iconic
diverse, diversity
enriched
inclusive
gender-neutral
bias-free
choice
multicultural
"smart" (smart growth, smart cars, etc.)
eco (eg. eco-friendly, eco-density ie. urban sardine cans coated in green paint)

To illustrate how these words can be employed to induce violent sickness, in my former community, growth brought more traffic congestion, pollution, bikers, drug-dealers, drug-addicts, criminals, transients and boom boxes. It therefore at once became both "vibrant" and "diverse". Self-serving development proposals with damaging impacts became instantly benign with the mere attachment of an adjective like "sustainable" or "green". An economy that is ripping up the landscape by deforestation, strip-mining and urban sprawl across arable land can be described as "dynamic" or "robust", but one which pauses to give the environment some desperately needed respite can be described as "stagnant". A car that was assembled in a "green" factory is designated as "smart", despite the mining, the smelting and the transportation involved in producing and delivering the final product to market, and despite the fact that this green factory was not constructed in virtual reality or with angel dust. Seen through the lens of this obfuscatory jargon, the world can be seen as a joyful and wondrous place. If you fail to see it as such, then you are "negative" or "misanthropic". Only by being "positive" can we meet the "challenges" ahead. Hand me your barf bag.

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thought-crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it."
A character in Orwell's 1984

Tim Murray
February 5/2010

PRESS RELEASE
GREENWASH INC.

In the interest of societal well-being I feel it is our moral imperative to think outside the box, to pro-actively develop sustainable, life-enhancing, zero-waste policies that put environmental needs on a level playing field with economic considerations. To meet the challenges ahead we need to effect a seismic paradigm shift that will eventually result in a sea-change of public attitudes. A cultural regime change, if you like. Those who have issues with this agenda typically favour sexy solutions that don't impact the big picture. We can grow and prosper if we do it smart and share the benefits equitably and fairly . It won't be easy, but it is doable. As we say in America, we have a situation on our hands. We have lost our moral compass and our leaders are not held accountable. But to quote President Obama, who has achieved a somewhat iconic status of late, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I think we can handle adversity if we pre-plan for it, and can embrace perspectives which are inclusive of the great diversity of stakeholders we have in our nation. If we remain focused on our objectives, and no one moves the goal posts, if we steadfastly reject negativity and adopt blue-skies thinking, we can make it happen. Reality is after all, ultimately what we perceive it to be. The glass is half full. If we work with each other instead of working against each other it will be a win-win situation for everybody. Tolerance must be our watchword. Do we have a consensus on that?

Tim Murray
Director of Communications
Greenwash Inc

There really is only one kind of sustainability

2010-02-09T10:48:00.000-08:00

The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

Despite our best efforts, there are persistent and common misunderstandings about the rudiments of overshoot and sustainability. Four come to mind:
1. The exponential function. Albert Bartlett is right about that. I can't get people alarmed by lets say, a 2-3% annual growth rate. Like the magic of compound interest, your town can double in population in a mere generation at this deceptively incremental pace.

2. Efficiency paradoxes. People don't understand that efficiencies, outside the context of a steady state economy, by making things cheaper only provoke more consumption and growth. (eg. Jevons Paradox, Khazoom-Brooks postulate).

3. Social justice doesn't solve resource shortages . The integrity of the lifeboat is more important than how the passengers treat each other. Food can be shared equitably between passengers, but if there are too many passengers, the boat will sink. The law of gravity doesn't care about social justice, human rights or human political arrangements. Moral laws, whether handed down by Stephen Lewis, Dr. William Rees or Moses, are trumped by bio-physical laws. Socialists, liberals, federal Greens, clergymen and humanitarians simply don't get it. There ain't enough to go around, however justly and efficiently things are managed or distributed. And economists of course, are equally delusional, if not mad for believing that with some technological 'fix' we can 'grow' the limits.

4. Limiting factors. The weakest link in the chain can bring a society to its knees. It can have everything in abundance, but a shortage in just one critical area can prove its undoing. This to me is the source of this current fashion of assigning "sustainability" to a series of sectors thought to enjoy some independence from others. It is this misconception which I find most pernicious.

Buzzwords

Like the word “green”, “sustainable” or “sustainability” has become the buzzword of the millennia. Corporations and governments of the left or right feel compelled to dress up the most ecologically invasive development proposal or economic activity with assurances that it is “sustainable”. Employed as an adjective it coats the unpalatable with the sweet syrup of delectability rendering the bitter pill of upheaval and damage neutral in flavour. Growth not couched in green psychobabble went down like Buckley’s Mixture, but “sustainable growth”, “sustainable tourism” and “sustainable agriculture” on the other hand tastes like sugary cough syrup. Such is the Newspeak of contemporary growthism, the vocabulary of deceit that promises a new kind of capitalism, capitalism in a green velvet glove, business as usual with apparent sensitivity to environmental concerns that will nevertheless satisfy the shareholders.

Trade-offs or the Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

But even the compromise suggested by oxymoronic terminology does not apparently suffice to satisfy the corporate agenda. As can be witnessed in the tourist industry, economic considerations have achieved a delusional parity in a “holistic” paradigm that sees “environmental” sustainability balanced off against “economic” and “cultural” sustainability. In this three-legged stool model of viability, environmental issues must compete with other “sustainability” concerns on a level playing field with other equally valid objectives so as to achieve the optimal “trade-offs”. This misconception may be termed “The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns”. It is the assumption that would, if applied to the human physiognomy, rate the heart as an organ of equal importance to every other organ of the body when in fact, as we know, a patient can survive with one lung, or one kidney , or a colonoscopy, or brain impairment, but when his heart stops all of these important but ancillary parts die with the patient. The economy is a subsidiary part of society. It is, as former World Bank economist Herman Daly described it, “a fully owned branch plant of the environment. “ We make our living in an economy, but we live in a biosphere.

Environmental externalisation doesn't change Mother Nature's rules

Case in point. Newfoundland politicians were warned that the cod fishery was not sustainable, but they replied that without the cod fishery, Newfoundland’s economy was not sustainable, so the fishermen of Newfoundland continued to fish. Nature replied that what the economy of Newfoundland required was irrelevant, and so refused to yield more cod. In any such contest, nature’s agenda prevails. Similarly politicians and developers want the city of Phoenix, already at 3 million people, to grow even further. Mother Nature’s City Council, however, has set limits to the volume of water available in aquifers. One day folks in Phoenix, together with 15 million other refugees in America’s south east, will discover that any economy without water is not sustainable. The needs and wants of an economy cannot trespass carrying capacity. Nature imposes boundaries. Without clean air, productive soils, replenished aquifers---without biodiversity services---any economy will collapse. And once the environment is trashed, try milking your “robust” economy for tax revenues to buy another one. Yet that is what corporate and government green wash implies. Former social democratic Premier of British Columbia, Mike Harcourt, crystallized this confusion with a classic line of obsolete reasoning, “To have a healthy environment we need a healthy economy.” He does not seem to understand that the environment was doing quite well before human activity arrived to “manage” it. His underlying assumption seems to be that the environment is an externality, a desirable luxury that we can only “afford” once we have achieved economic “prosperity”. This reasoning is equivalent to saying that yes, while it is desirable that I have a triple bypass operation, I must postpone the operation until I can afford it by continuing to work overtime at my strenuous job.

Environmental passengers

Imagine if the officers on board the sinking Titanic claimed that the cabins on the third deck were sustainable because each had a barrel of water, ten sacks of beans, a compost, renewable energy and a water-tight door. Trouble is, they would not be sustainable 5 miles underwater. Every cabin was rendered unsustainable when the Titanic itself was unsustainable after the collision. Similarly, the space shuttle Challenger could have been said to have a sustainable oxygen supply, a sustainable food supply, a sustainable waste disposal system, and a sustainable crew compartment. But one "O" ring was the limiting factor that made the Challenger unsustainable. All the other "sustainable" aspects on that space ship were rendered unsustainable by the explosion that blew the crew compartment away, eventually crashing it into the sea. Until it hit the water, apart from the loss of air pressure, the crew survived in a 'sustainable' compartment. Our economy and our culture are like that crew compartment. They are completely dependent on the health of the environment. Without the estimated $33 trillion in free biodiversity services, we're toast. Trash the environment if you like but the so-called 'prosperity' you achieve won't buy you a new one.

Misunderstanding the structure of the real world

We still believe that we can negotiate with nature on our own terms. We can pursue business-as-usual just by genuflecting to trendy green shibboleths. Government and corporate communiqués are now laced with green-growthist double-talk. Try this from a discussion paper from the Planning Department of a typical Canadian city. Note how it attempts to appease environmental concerns with trendyisms while remaining faithful to the political mandate to keep growing as usual: “Several growth allocation/land use scenarios will...be developed and tested for impacts on various sustainability criteria (financial, environmental, social and cultural).” In other words, there are several criteria for sustainability, and the environment is just one of them. So Mother Nature, stand back. Get to the back of the line and wait your turn until cultural and economic needs have been satisfied.

Hair splitting

Of course, what exactly constitutes “sustainability” is a matter of some debate among ecologists. As one wildlife biologist commented in response to this critique, “Because natural systems are always changing or ‘dynamic’ there seems to be some disturbing latitude in what we consider a sustained ecosystem. What degree of impairment can a system tolerate before it loses the very characteristics that ‘define’ it? The term ‘integrity’ often emerges in these discussions with predictable results. It is much easier to define what constitutes unsustainable or an irreversible change in the system. A boreal forest without fire disturbance is no longer "sustainable"? Or, can forestry be made to replace this disturbance? At what point do we no longer have a boreal forest? This does not at all detract from your argument that clearly shows that without a sustainable natural environment, all other constructs of "sustainability" are meaningless.” A dead planet indeed can achieve an equilibrium, but it cannot sustain life. And this may come as a shock to economists and nationalists alike, but human economic activity, culture, language and customs cannot exist without living human beings.

Sustainability doesn't come in different brands

Even those organizations committed to imposing limits have succumbed to this flawed understanding. An emerging immigration reform organization declares, as one of its aims, “To promote the creation of a sustainable Canada through urgently needed reform of immigration policies that are in the national interest.” Well and good. But then one opinion has it that this proposal “has some merit because it implies sustainability across a number of areas---cultural and institutional as well as environmental.” But mass immigration is not, as Samuel Gompers characterized it, fundamentally a labour issue, nor is it a cultural one. It is not about how many people our economy requires or how many people our culture can assimilate but how many people our environment can sustain. Contemporary culture as we know it cannot survive an ecological meltdown. The nation itself would not endure. When the water you drink is polluted or inaccessible, when the farmland needed to provide food to Canadians after international trade collapses with stratospheric fuel costs, when our exhausted soils starved of fossil-fuel based fertilizers cannot yield crops, when our forests are mowed down and the air unfit to breath, the fact that a lot people in the neighbourhood are wearing strange clothing or speaking in foreign tongues will be of little importance. Cultural “sustainability” in this context will be a mirage. There is ultimately only one “sustainability”. The sustainability of the whole, not its constituent parts.

Tim Murray
February 4/2010

33 Malthusian Truisms and The Laws of Population Politics

2010-02-09T10:42:00.000-08:00

33 Malthusian Truisms and The Laws of Population Politics

There are 23 Sustainability Laws that form the backbone of a comprehensive understanding of population issues.

Erhlich-Holdren equation
Hardin’s Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Trespass Carrying Capacity)
Hopfenberg’s thesis
Abernethy’s axiom
Jevon’s Paradox, Khazoom-Brooke Postulate
Boulding’s Three Theorems
Bartlett’s 17 laws of sustainability

Additionally, I would submit ten supplementary Laws of Population Politics:

Michels Iron Law of Oligarchy--- when a successful grassroots movement forms an organization designed to pursue its radical aims and grows its dues-paying membership, it builds up a bureaucracy that eventually controls it. Then the goal of the organization becomes to preserve the bureaucracy even if that goal conflicts with the original aim of the organization. Exhibit A: Environmental NGOs.

Law of Organizational Ossification, or Salinsky’s Law---since any radical organization, that is, an organization dedicated to the pursuit of root causes and their solution, succumbs to Michels Iron Law of Oligarchy, the remedy is not to waste energy and time in a fruitless attempt to work within the organization and reform it, but form a new organization to fight the corrupted one. As Saul Alinsky confessed, he would frequently have to visit a town to help set up a committee to fight the committee that he helped set up two years before. Conclusion, all organizations have a limited shelf life, and our loyalty should not be to the organization but to its original ideals. Organizations are just vehicles, and like cars, eventually must be traded in, sold or junked.

The Watermelon Law---scratch the green coating of a soft green environmentalist, and you get a bleeding heart refugee advocate who forgets sustainability at the first sight of an incoming vessel of asylum-seekers. Watermelon environmentalism is social engineering and a human rights agenda dressed up in a green cloak, reflecting a mentality that has no fundamental understanding of Hardin’s Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Trespass Carrying Capacity).

The Follow-the-Money-Trail Law----Funding sources reveal more about an environmental NGO’s objectives than the politically correct greenwash and growth-management policies it promotes to rationalize its population myopia.

Mother Nature’s Law of Total Indifference---In a nutshell, nature doesn’t give a crap about our political priorities or moral imperatives. It does not give a Tinkers Damn if environmentalists feel good about themselves by following green living habits or that people have reduced their per capita consumption---it only cares about our Total consumption, a function of per capita consumption and our population level. Nor does it care about our political arrangements, only about our footprint. A Hitler or a Pol Pot is to be preferred to a Mother Theresa or a liberal democrat if he gets the job done. Nature doesn’t care if people we judge to be worthy (the poor, the persecuted, the people of colour, the handicapped, the fashionably oppressed) should be lifted on to our lifeboat, only if it is overloaded. And whether the passengers live together without class barriers or in feudal subjugation is of no concern to nature either. The laws of physics trump the laws of any Holy Text, ethical system or left-wing manifesto.

The Law of Contagious Stupidity—based on the Christakis-Fowler hypothesis, that is, our social network influences our health, wealth and welfare, and effects our weight, whether we smoke or drink or what we believe and how we vote, for example. Murray’s Law is a subsidiary of this conclusion. It reads, “The more you hang around Sierra Club members, by a process of osmosis, the dumber and blinder you get.” Solomon Asch’s study of peer pressure harmonizes with this finding.

The Law of Irrelevant Considerations----Motives and intentions are immaterial to the truth of a policy position. A decent man of humane intentions can promote a policy that results in a net increase of misery and ecological degradation, while a fascist bastard can effect a policy that results in greater sustainability and a net improvement in the quality of life for a more viable human and non-human population. This Law can be construed as a corollary of Mother Nature’s Law of Total Indifference and a precursor to the Law of Truth’s Moral Impartiality and Undemocratic Nature.

The Law of Truth’s Moral Impartiality and Undemocratic Nature---The truth of an argument depends entirely on its merits and not on the moral character or political affiliation of the person who is making it. The veracity or falsehood of John Nash’s Game Theory does not depend on whether John Nash was an anti-semite or not, but whether his theory is testable and verifiable. That Nick Griffin is a racist does not in the least discredit his assertion that the government’s immigration policy is damaging Britain’s ecological sustainability. The fact that a given study was authored by the Mickey Mouse Club does not in itself discredit its methodology, its data or its conclusions. If a zillion people fervently believe something to be true, that does not make it true. And if only one person in the world believes something to be true, that does not make it false. One person in the right constitutes a majority of one. Truth is not subject to a democratic vote. The IPCC can enjoy support from 95% of the world’s scientists, but their support does not substitute for a testable hypothesis.

The Law of Inhumane Humanitarianism---AKA the Denial of Hard Choices. This alludes to the hypocrisy of bleeding hearts who pretend that avoidance of cruel dilemnas, made possible by the luxury of surplus resources, is equivalent to compassion. In a world of scarcity, there is an opportunity cost for almost any government policy. Money spent pursuing one policy goal is money that cannot be spent on another. Affluent societies built on cheap fossil fuels can afford to be more indiscriminate in their financial allotments. Canadian governments, for example, have been able to spend $100,000 of taxpayers money annually on the incarceration of a serial child killer like Clifford Olson or a sadistic torturer like Paul Bernando, but third world countries cannot afford our profligate legal system. If Rwanda was burdened by the Western system of jurisprudence, it would take 25 years to prosecute their war criminals and money that they don't have. In a global context, by opposing capital punishment because it is barbaric and cruel, bleeding hearts subject third world villagers and those who live below the poverty line in their own country to a cruel fate by depriving our government of the opportunity to use the money spent on Olson and Bernardo for family planning education and medical care to help them. The most humane course in a world of scarce resources is the most cost-effective one, that is, getting the biggest bang for the buck. Putting Bernardo or Olson up against the wall and shooting them, in Chinese fashion, is arguably more humane to more people than our present practise of wasting precious resources on useless people. The Chinese would not waste $6 million on trying and convicting serial murderer Robert Picton. They would allocate two days to weigh the obvious evidence, and one day to execute him. Our justice system does the world a great injustice. And our compassionate foreign aid policy of unconditional food dispensation has created more misery than it has alleviated. As Garrett Hardin observed, there is nothing more dangerous than a shallow-thinking compassionate person.

The Law of Counter-Intuitive Results----This speaks to the reflexive habit to designate a chosen policy option as a no-brainer, which is apt because the leftists and greens who favour that option have no brains. Many proposals seem, at first blush, to be obviously flawed or obviously correct. But closer, independent scrutiny and research often indicates that the recommended choice will achieve exactly the opposite of what is intended. Some examples: Food aid dispensed to today may rebound and return a generation later as a famine of far greater scope and consequences. Feed 5,000 hungry mouths now and see 25,000 hungry mouths a decade from now. Bangledesh, Ethiopia and Haiti make good case studies. Rent control designed to make housing more affordable to the poor can act to reduce the supply of affordable housing and minimum wage laws designed to improve the incomes of the working poor may result in fewer unskilled workers being hired. Lower subsidized ferry rates to make transportation for poorer people more affordable can actually reduce their disposable income. Lower transportation costs make an island more accessible and therefore bid up the price of real estate. Higher real estate prices mean higher mortgages, higher rents and higher taxes. Since housing costs soak up 40% of an average family budget, while ferry costs eat up less than 10%, higher ferry rates can put more money in commuters pockets.

More examples. An ugly clear-cut that would desecrate a national or provincial park may actually increase the sum total of unspoiled natural wonderments because it might dissuade tourists from visiting the region. As the Saiz-Carlino study on tourism found, popular tourist destinations encourage tourists to move to those areas and overload their carrying capacity, despoiling more land than if the land was protected from all development at the start. One conspicuous eyesore at the doorstep of an otherwise beautiful community can act to ward off prospective visitors and settlers in the manner of a crucifix repelling vampires---thereby preserving most of the area. A scallop farm, an open pit mine or one hundred hectares blemished by logging can be just what the doctor ordered. And as James Lovelock observed, dumping nuclear waste in the Amazon rain forest might actually save it by keeping the loggers and farmers away. Or more people eating more meat might enhance sustainability because it deprives grain producers the opportunity to use land now devoted to livestock and so feed more people with fewer resources. Feeding more people who breed more people. The negative ecological impact of those many billions of extra people, notwithstanding their vegan diet, would be greater than the much more limited number of meat-eaters would have. Similarly, failure to recycle garbage could stress the landfills to the point that governments would have to cut back on the number of land-fillers rather than inducing people to compact their waste so that more and more of them can be compacted into urban feedlots like garbage. Forcing governments up against the wall sooner rather than later is better than postponing the day of reckoning to a time when many more people will have degraded the environment irrevocably. In summary, there can be more silver in the silver linings of black clouds than the silver found in silver clouds that disguise so much black.

Tim Murray

WATCH YOUR MOUTH---YOU ARE IN A CANADIAN UNIVERSITY NOW

2010-02-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

WATCH YOUR MOUTH---YOU ARE IN A CANADIAN UNIVERSITY NOW
PC Group-Think 101 a degree pre-requisite

Once upon a time a university could be described as an island oasis of free inquiry in a societal sea of intolerance. But in an age when cultural diversity has come at the cost of intellectual diversity, and ethnic harmony trumps free speech, the reverse is more true. You are likely to find more scope for dissenting opinions in a bar room debate than in these academic boot camps for political correctness. Journalism schools are among the worst. Carleton University's School of Journalism, for example, to use Dan Murray's characterization, seems little more than a farm team for the CBC (Commie Bull Crap). It would be a feat of immeasurable character for a young man or woman to enter a Canadian university with an independent mind, run the gauntlet of four years of PC indoctrination and then emerge with an independent mind at the end. By the time they are 22 years old, Canadian students have neural pathways that resemble concrete conduits, unable to think in alternative ways by mere virtue of lacking a vocabulary to frame the world differently than multicultural thought control allows. Case in point, York University. Take a look at this "coherent grouping of degree-credit courses" under the rubric of the Orwellian "Anti-Racist Research and Practice Certificate". Read on: (BOLDED highlighting mine)

In this certificate program, you will develop comprehensive knowledge about how to challenge systemic and institutional racism, with a special focus on addressing issues in the workplace, educational and health care sectors, immigration, law enforcement, media and the expressive arts. You will acquire a host of valuable skills including policy assessment and program planning, research design and implementation and critical/analytical skills.
The program's major international collaborative research initiative, Diaspora, Islam and Gender, provides opportunities to participate in research activities as work/study students. Through this you would learn excellent research, interviewing and computer skills. You will also have the opportunity to take part in our annual symposium – Women's Voices from the Middle East.

This is all so fascinating. Students will be taught "to challenge systemic and institutionalm racism" but not when native-born Canadian Caucasian males are subject to discrimination obviously. "Systemic racism" against white whipping-boys does not qualify as racism. So don't expect a phalanx of York university graduates to join the fight to "reverse" reverse discrimination. Police departments, fire halls and ivory towers can carry on their blatantly unwelcoming attitude to white male oppressors. Students will also acquire "critical/analytical skills". Where? At York University--or any Canadian university today----where historical revisionism, cultural relativism and ultra-feminism prevails? And you have to love this research initiative, "Diaspora, Islam and Gender". Excuse me, but isn't the Jews who have suffered the exile of disapora for the past couple of millenia? Will this symposium on "Women's Voices from the Middle East" give a podium to the voices of Israeli women too? The ones who have lost children to rocket attacks and family to terror bombings? Do only Palestinian women suffer in the Middle East? Don't bet on this symposium offering a balanced discussion. At York University and a hundred like it racism thrives under the banner of “anti-racism”, or sorry, “anti-Zionism”. This is the kind milieu in which future CBC reporters are educated. This is where future CBC producers learn their sense of fair play.

And remember, this is just one program among many, and in just one Canadian post-secondary institution. A glance at other liberal arts departments in other schools would reveal more or less the same approach. And notice the rainbow of faces that are presented in every picture on university websites. The sublimal message is, this ain't your place anymore---it is a global institution now and we serve a foreign clientele. Making them feel comfortable is priority number one. So watch your mouth.

http://futurestudents.yorku.ca/program/certificates/antiracist_research_and_practice

Tim Murray
November 23, 2009

REFUSE TO BE MANAGED

2010-02-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

"It seems that every group attracts potential politicians and that the trick is to keep these people under control: Unions, political parties, conservation groups, churches, media networks, corporations ...
Once you have given years of your life to a group, having chosen to associate with them because you think they are worthwhile, they become like your tribe. It is then very difficult for you to leave, if you find that the tribal spokesperson is not really singing the tune you joined to hear. Leaving means going out into the social wilderness and starting all over again, which is a big thing in our adult lives.
So many people stick with their tribes and try to rationalise what their rogue leaders are saying, or to influence the politics, only to discover that the power bases have been rigged". Sheila Newman

Sheila Newman's profound insight regarding our emotional incarceration through tribal bonds articulates a thought that I have had since I studied the history of the German Social Democratic Party in college. The SPD was almost like the Jehovah's Witnesses. It was not a political party so much as a subculture of German society. Leaving it or being expelled by it was a trauma of incomprehensible magnitude for its devotees. The SPD was their extended family. Members had their own theatrical and reading groups, their picnics, their dances, their sporting activities, and with this involvement, the party became their self-contained society. It monopolized friendships as well leisure time. Interaction with the "worldly" or bourgeois society became limited. But like the JWs, the SPD was at one time persecuted, even banned. This increased mutual dependence and cohesion. And the SPD was like the JWs in another respect. They spoke of a radically different society, but were anything but revolutionary in their behaviour. The SPD would not risk the loss of their treasury or their bureaucracy to challenge the state, preferring to focus on winning electoral victories to a parliament that did not even have the power to elect the executive. Their accommodation to the state was best exemplified at the outbreak of the First World War when they joined forces with their right wing parliamentary foes and voted for war credits to fund the Prussian war machine. Essentially then, what was the role of the SPD? Was it not to tame and channel revolutionary sentiments along harmless lines? To give dissension a safety-valve, and thereby contain it? Is that not the role of nearly every institution--- to "manage" people?

Is that not what environmental NGO's do? Decoy people toward fighting relatively inconsequential symptoms rather than challenge root causes? Why would they want to solve the root problems? If they did, their bureaucracy would be out of a job. By trying to "manage" growth rather than stop it, they keep the game going. Environmental degradation continues while pyrrhic victories like the designation of this or that land as natural reserve are tossed out like sops to vindicate their campaigning. But whenever land is "saved" for nature, the land outside park boundaries, where most of the endangered species live, is more intensively exploited, until one day, development knocks on the door of sacred parks until government opens it. In the context of a growth-economy, there is no durable sanctuary for wildlife, farmland, greenbelts, nor is there any virtue in per capita reductions in consumption or waste. So the never-ending cycle of growth and conservation continues, and the environmental NGOs can present themselves as saviours when in fact they are facilitators. The battle to save this river or that forest or that species yields more recruits and more donations. The green orgs gain financial sustenance and their supporters get to feel good about themselves. And do not most immigration reform organizations do the same thing? They offer people a vehicle for their frustrations, but make sure that those frustrations continue by "managing" immigration with zero-net-migration nostrums? An immigration moratorium would put them out of business.

If putatively radical or oppositional organizations "manage" people rather than mobilize and empower them, then are they not a force for the status quo? If that is true, then would it be paranoid to suspect that the status quo is feeding them? Setting them up as harmless lightening rods? Hasn't that been done before? Did not the Stalinists in the Soviet Bloc often set up political parties like the "Peasants Party" in fake opposition to the de-facto monopoly of the Communist Party? Did not Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of Lenin's secret police and intelligence agency, the Cheka, organize and fund a phony counter-revolutionary organization for White Russians to draw out those who opposed the revolution? Was it not so convincing that the British government even contributed money to it? It is much easier to control your enemies by bringing them to the surface and letting them spin their wheels uselessly within an organization whose bark is far worse than its bite. Let's take a look at the organizations we support. Are they really not doing just what the doctor ordered? That is, essentially nothing? They suck in our time and our money and have us believe that they are making a difference, when in fact they are only offering a venue for our self-indulgent exercise in ineffective venting. Have any of these population or immigration organizations been able to stop growth? Have I been able to stop a single immigrant from entering the country, or single baby from being born, or a single building permit from being issued? As the forces opposing growth seem to be gathering strength, growth continues at an even more frenetic pace. Dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

The practice of "managing" dissent is now down to a fine art. Corporations and media outlets have it down pat. What they do for angry customers, viewers or listeners is to offer a resolution "process". A process that is a long and winding road through interminable steps. When the first line of defence does not give you a satisfactory answer, you are advised to appeal to the flak above him, and then to the managing director of consumer affairs, or in the case of the CBC, "the ombudsman", whose verdict is typically unsatisfactory or evasive ("This matter is outside my province, you are best advised to refer it to the Minister"). The point of the exercise is to render the complainant frustrated, defeated, and exhausted to the point that further complaints will be deemed futile. The "managers" have achieved their goal. They bought time and ate up the clock by sending their opponents down a long detour. This is really what our famous "EARP" (Environmental Assessment Review Panels) are all about. It is Muhammed Ali's "rope-a-dope" strategy. Siphon off the energy of the opposition by encouraging them to throw all their punches in a constrained arena until they are spent. Let the environmentalists compose their reports and present their briefs and after a year of hearings, adjourn. Then later, their findings can be dismissed. Duty has been discharged. The opposition has had their day in court. But before it went to court, public rage was first corralled into an environmental organization that posed as its champion. Public rage was filtered and processed before it went through "the process". It was managed and we were humoured.

Once we recognize that we are being manipulated and used to build careers and feather bureaucratic nests, once we decide that we are not in business to promote the job security of those who talk a good game but are too heavily invested in the perks of pseudo-importance or in the illusory rapport they have established with the establishment---how do we make a break? What are the alternatives? Can we act as lone wolves or don't we need a political medium of some kind? The answer is that we can go it alone, but we don't. We don't for the reasons Sheila Newman expressed. We are pack animals and have been hard-wired with a pack mentality. Ostracism either self-imposed or inflicted is a very painful predicament. The experiments of Solomon Asch documented how very powerful peer pressure can be. If we are one of a closely knit group of ten people, and nine of them say that two plus two equals five, the inclination to agree with them is in most cases, too overwhelming to resist. Best to hang with the tribe and support the leader to the bitter end.

I have been told enumerable times to "soften" my message, to "tone it down", or stick with the points that I can "sell". But I have been inhibited by one observation. Those who compromise what they know to be true in order to pander to the sensibilities of a wider audience, over time, come to believe in their own half-truths and half-measures. A leader who once knew that only an immigration moratorium would provide enough respite for the environment, or ease unemployment or heal cultural fragmentation, comes to believe that "zero-net migration" will accomplish the same goals. Or he eventually believes that a "two-child per family" law would suffice to stabilize and reduce the population when he formerly was committed to a One-Child-Per-Family policy. Or a leader who once believed in socialism becomes, in his quest for power, a social democrat, and eventually a supporter of privatization. And with each permutation or compromise, incredibly, the membership follows in loyal lock-step.

We need to cut loose and become free agents. To stop working as foot soldiers for fossilized organizations but instead form provisional coalitions with people, groups or causes that serve as allies and vehicles of convenience Dump the tribe, grow up and go free-lance.

Tim Murray
December 28/09

CANADA IS THE WORLD'S BURGHER KING---WE ARE HERE TO SERVE YOU, NOT US

2010-02-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

Did you notice how the Canadian media described Governor-General Michaelle Jean’s tearful message to Haiti in the wake of this most devastating earthquake? They spoke of the earthquake as “the worst disaster to strike her homeland in two centuries.” Her “homeland”. Wait a second. This amazing lady of great accomplishment has spent 79% of her life as a Canadian citizen, and the PC press refers to Haiti, which she left as an 11 year old, as her “homeland”.

This is the legacy of almost four decades of Official Multiculturalism. Foreign-born Canadians are able to regard another country as their home, and the media collaborates in the project. It is interesting that while the Governor- General was pressured to drop her dual citizenship---she had a French passport as well---she nonetheless can be granted a dual emotional loyalty. That is Canada in a nutshell. Not only can crowds of New Canadians be seen at international soccer matches in Toronto or Vancouver cheering against Canada and waving the flag of their former country, even the Head of State can signal that her primary affections lie elsewhere in a public fashion. Or at least that is how the media frames it.
The Americans have a constitutional provision that requires their head of state to be American-born. The fact that Canadians don’t have a similar rule speaks volumes about the difference between our respective political cultures. While the United States is fragmenting along ethnic fault lines like Canada, at least there is a strong residual commitment to the concept of cohesion. The ideal of America as a melting pot still prevails, notwithstanding the reality of cultural balkanization that is unfolding nearly everywhere. Canadians have no such luck. Our political class not only disregards the importance of breaking done ethnic solitudes, it encourages them. Ethnic enclaves---that is Canada-speak for ‘ghettos’---are multiplying in number and strength in the nation’s major urban centres. A phenomena which our state broadcaster, the tax-payer funded CBC, finds reason to celebrate, even going so far as to claim, in numerous commentaries, that native-born Canadians have no right to “impose” Canadian core values on newcomers. After all, in the words of one protagonist of chaos, Canada is no longer “this white European place” where the citizens of European ancestry born and raised here have a right to set the rules. It is amazing what just 15%-18% of the population can dictate if it has the advantage of cohesion, state patronage and a vocal leadership that has no difficulty in obtaining a CBC microphone.

It is no wonder that the slogan judged by the National Post to be the most appropriate for the country on July 1, 2008 was “Canada---Home to the World”. It is no wonder that 7 of the 11 members of the Standing Committee on Immigration are foreign-born. It is no wonder that our Head of State was born in a foreign land. The message clearly is, “come in and make yourself at home” because fundamentally, the “homeowners” are to be regarded as squatters or provisional custodians. The message is that somehow, Canadian citizenship is everyone’s birth right, and that the purpose of Canada is not to serve the Canadians who live here but the Canadians who just arrived or hope to arrive. A club where anyone can claim club privileges without deference to club rules or club tradition.

Canada is the world’s Burgher King. We are here to serve you, not us. And the sick thing is, a great many Canadians are proud of that. “Canada—doormat to the world”.

Now that is a slogan that fits.

Tim Murray,
January16/09

WHO IS COERCING WHOM?

2010-02-09T10:17:00.000-08:00

I am frankly sick and tired of growth-promoters raising the spectre of “coercive population measures” whenever a suggestion is made that we must promote family planning or smaller families. Is there some sacred reason why fertility should not be limited if deemed necessary? In a world of 6.8 billion people going on 9 or 10 billion, or in any nation suffering from exponential population growth, there can be no “pro-creative” right.

This must not be confused with “reproductive” rights. Women should have the right not to have children. But they have no right, in the context of overshoot, to have as many children as they or their husbands want. The “right to choose” cannot be the right to abuse. Even the most jealously guarded right must be measured against equally fundamental rights, most especially the right of our species, and others, to live.

I have, at present, the ‘right’ to drive a car. But I do not have a right to drive it over the speed limit. And it is society that establishes that limit, not me. Indeed, if society determines that there are too many people driving cars, it has the moral right to impose petroleum taxes, restrict parking permits and spaces, put tolls on highways and bridges and employ an assortment of other measures to discourage me from driving. I similarly have the right to go fishing, but I don’t have the right to catch as many fish as I may like. In the face of shortages, we have come to accept that our collective right to achieve sustainability supersedes any individual “right”. The number of consumers who will compete for critically scarce resources is surely every bit as important as the number of people who go fishing and how many fish they catch. If there is a licence needed to fish, why should there not, in principle at least, be a licence required to inflict a child upon the rest of society? Am I advocating “coercion”? Absolutely. Coercion if necessary, but not necessarily coercion. Mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, if voluntary efforts, yet to be exhausted, prove ineffective. But would fertility controls represent the introduction of coercion where none presently exists? Absolutely not.

Let’s get real. A great many women in the undeveloped world at least, are having children precisely because they are coerced. Coerced by husbands, priests and mullahs to have more than the number they want. Coerced by their cultural programming to give male wishes greater priority than their own. Coerced by their lack of access to birth control information, and by the denial of educational opportunities. This is where coercion makes itself most present. Not in China. Not by communist bureaucrats and law-makers. But by the dictates of domestic and religious patriarchal power.

And what of my rights? What about my right not to see my share of non-renewable resources diminished by the “personal” decision of the couple down the street to have an unnecessary child? Did they consult me about their decision to conceive another Canadian, an earth-trampling shopping machine who emits 23 metric tonnes of carbon each year, consumes 40,000 pounds of metals and minerals and accounts for over 150 pounds of curb side waste each day? Did they submit an application to the local planning authority or town council for a permit to stress the environment even further than it is being stressed? Why is their “right” to create more life considered more fundamental than our right to sustain the life that is already here? Why should the human population level of a country or a planet be subject to the whimsy and haphazard “personal” decisions of fertile individuals? Why must they replicate their own genes? Why are so many children forced to live in orphanages, foster homes and on the squalid streets of sprawling cities to fend for themselves while irrational ego-trippers generate more children just because they want to raise someone with the same pair of ears or eyes as they have? Children do not have to share your genes to share your love.

I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone to have a child. So why would anyone tell me that I should move over for theirs? To paraphrase Hilary Clinton, it takes a whole ecosystem to raise a child, and as a charter member of it, I have the right to participate in the decisions that affect me. On an overloaded planet anybody’s pregnancy is everybody’s business. For every extra billion we grow in number, another 200 billion tonnes of Green House Gases are emitted, and to effectively reduce emissions, we must, among other things, reduce the number of emitters. Unfettered procreative rights are of little value on a dead planet. Beyond a certain point, parenthood is not a service but an imposition, not only upon humanity, but disproportionately upon the most disempowered and poorest part of it, the very people whom many Western feminists and human rights crusaders are most concerned with. How can an unsustainable population level enhance their rights? Can anyone seriously contend that the sum total of unplanned or unwanted pregnancies does not restrict personal autonomy more than the most intrusive family planning program? Or maintain that the absence of effective birth control is not the most coercive regime that women can suffer?

Just who is coercing whom?

Tim Murray

Too Dumb to Live: Malthusian Hubris

2010-02-09T10:12:00.000-08:00

“For humans, instincts are far more powerful than logic, facts and reason. Instincts include greed by those in power and the reproduction instinct of us pawns living under their growth-based pyramid scheme.” Brishen Hoff

This afternoon I committed an act of spontaneous futility. Upon hearing the news that in a nation suffering from the highest population growth rate in the G8 group, and despite the surplus of children needing adoption, a woman in my immediate social cirlce gave birth to a Canadian consumer, I spent the morning in a funk. Then as I passed a used clothing store, an idea flashed. I would find something in black, buy it, and make an armband. I bought the cheapest black tee shirt that I could select, then before a puzzled proprietor, used her scissors to cut off the left sleeve, and slide it up my arm. This action had the desired effect. It prompted her, and several others in the village to ask why I was wearing it. I told them that I was in mourning, and no, it wasn’t because Canada lost a gold medal hockey game to our sibling rivals, the Americans. It was because this woman I speak of did the unspeakable and added a human ecological footprint when nature is already burdened with far too many of them, some 216,000 born each and every day.

Why did this particular example of global self-indulgence affect me so much? Because for me more than any other planned pregnancy, hers underscored the failure of (allegedly) the most intelligent species to defeat or countermand instinct, as well as my phenomenal arrogance that I or anyone else like me could change that. Years of proselytizing had failed to persuade even of one the three people I feel closest to use her formidable intelligence and rationality to resist a primitive calling to reproduce herself. Despite her advanced education she proved to be yet another robotic replicator. She just had to have a child with the same pair of ears or eyes as she did. So how could I expect a different result or response from others? Even the most powerful religions have not mounted a frontal assault on human nature—on the contrary, they have accommodated to it and exploited it by channelling it more than suppressing it. Brishen Hoff was right. After fighting the good fight against growth, exhausted and dispirited, he had this to say:

“The same way that Julian Simon is guilty of hubris by saying that humans are smart enough to solve any problem through technology, many of us in the Neo-Malthusian movement are guilty of hubris by saying that unlike other animals, humans are smart enough to limit their numbers by limiting reproduction instead of waiting for nature to intervene brutally. I have come to the unfortunate realization that our numbers will be culled by nature. Therefore, I will put most of my effort from now on ensuring that I am not one of those who is culled.”

The answer does not lie in the stars, or in institutional arrangements and economic systems, or cultural engineering. It lies in our genetic re-programming. Slash the human population back to the 5-10 million of us who existed as hunter-gatherers for 99% of our existence and in less than a millennium we would be back to square one. Vastly over-populated. As presently designed, we are simply too dumb to live. Soap operas that model smaller families won’t suffice. Our brains must be modified and enhanced, or we will suffer the fate of any other extinct species that could not impose limits on its growth. We need a product re-call or another model needs to come off the assembly line. Quick.

Tim Murray
January 6/10

Rabbi's Penis Held Accountable for Coming Holocaust---Failing to understand the exponential function or failing Kant's moral litmus test?

2010-02-09T10:08:00.000-08:00

Jason Brent is a unique individual. By his early twenties he was he was a young man of astounding academic accomplishments, have earned both an MBA and a degree in engineering, and later on, the legal training to finish his working life as a judge. He is a dedicated Malthusian from Brooklyn who lost well over a hundred relatives in the Holocaust, and his draconian prescriptions for rapid population reduction to sustainable levels are rooted in a desire to avoid a holocaust inflicted by nature on a vaster scale failing our intervention. As such, Jason has a problem with Orthodox Rabbis who tell their flock to go forth and multiply and at the same time be good stewards of the earth. Viable biodiversity cannot co-exist with relentless human expansion. Moreover, as a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, he is all too aware that water shortages trump the tribal ambitions of orthodox Jews to win a breeding war with the Palestinians, whose wombs, according to the late Yassir Arafat, are their best weapon.

Mr. Brent also finds that one Rabbi Shanowitz is caught in another moral contradiction. He is in logical violation of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Namely, that one cannot will for himself, a privilege or a right which he would not accord to everyone else in the same situation. I cannot, for example, argue that it is acceptable for me to steal someone’s wallet without allowing everyone else the right to steal mine. Thus, if Rabbi Shanowitz is morally justified in siring 9 children, as he has, then he must permit everyone else the same privilege. What would be the consequences then, if those 9 children, and the 10 generations which followed them, modelled their reproductive behaviour on Rabbi Shanowitz’s example?
Mr. Brent answered that question by constructing a table consisting of 10 generations each separated by 35 years. He calculated that the number of the good rabbi’s descendents would rise exponentially from 9 in the first 35 years to 6,561 in 140 years, to 43,046,721 in 280 years, to over 3 billion Shanowitz products in 350 years. Then, he pointed out to the rabbi,
“ln just one more generation (11 generations), a total of less than 400 years, you would have in excess of 31 billion descendants. If this were to continue for just 100 generations or 3,500 years, your descendants would exceed the number of atoms in the entire universe. And by the number of atoms in the entire universe I include not only our sun and its planets, not only our galaxy, the Milky Way, with in excess of 100 billion stars, I include at least 100 billion galaxies with each having in excess of 100 billion stars and each of the stars having a number of atoms that you cannot conceive of. God himself could not cause the number of human beings to exceed the number of atoms in the entire universe in 3,500 years. To be more realistic, not even God himself could cause the earth, our planet, to support in excess of 31 billion human beings and your descendants would exceed 31 billion in under 400 years...Your descendants, based on the assumptions above, will destroy all of humanity substantially before 400 years by destroying the ability of the earth, our planet, to provide the resources needed by humankind to survive. And the previous statement does not take into consideration the descendants of any other person on the face of the earth.”

Mr. Brent then concludes that “Your descendants will cause resource wars, with or without weapons of mass destruction, concentration camps will make those of Nazi Germany look like a picnic, ethnic cleansing, massive rapes of innocent women, and deaths beyond your wildest imagination. Having nine children is an evil so monstrous that there aren’t any words in the English language to describe it. You and your penis will be responsible for more Jewish deaths and more deaths of humans than Adolf Hitler. Hitler killed six million Jews. (But) you and your penis will cause the death of every Jew on the face of the earth when the earth is no longer able to support the needs of humanity and humanity turns into wild beasts fighting for every scrap of resources to survive. Any person who advocates having a large number of children should be executed for crimes against humanity.”

Amen to that!

Tim Murray,
January 2/09

ALLIANCE FOR DEATH (aka "Alliance for Life")

2010-02-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

This TV ad takes the cake. Have you seen it? It is paid for by an organization that calls itself “Alliance for Life” (Ontario). http://www.allianceforlife.org It is a “provincial coordinating organization” of some 44 affiliates which, surprise surprise, includes seven Christian denominations, of which, another shocker, five are Catholic. Most interesting is an organization calling itself the “Population Research Institute”, founded of course by a priest, Father Paul Marx. Its mission? “...to expose the myth of overpopulation, to expose human rights abuses committed in population control programs.” http://pop.org/20090117800/who-we-are The Alliance, meanwhile, claims to present “a united voice for the dignity and worth of all human beings from conception/fertilization to natural death.” I can personally attest to the kind of dignity in death to which they are referring. My brother writhed in agony for months from terminal cancer, and repeatedly indicated that he wanted to die. But his Christian fundamentalist doctor was too concerned with his dignity to assist him in executing his wishes, and so my brother was forced to suffer without the ability to swallow or control his bowels. This conduct is sanctioned by the Alliance for “Life” as “morally and ethically acceptable”.http://www.allianceforlife.org/euthanasia.html And of course, the Criminal Code, built on this kind of “morality”, stands behind them. This is the cultural “heritage” which some Canadian anti-immigrationists are intent upon saving. They are the people who grasp at environmental reasons for limiting immigration, but then turn around and advocate more birth incentives for native-born Canadians, most of whom are self-described Christians. Their objective is an ancient one. “Grow the tribe and screw carrying capacity.” So how does the Alliance for Life present its case on television?

The ad features children playing, when in a stroke, one in four of them vanish from the screen. This is to simulate the number of “children” or “babies” destroyed since the abortion law was struck down in 1988. That’s right. After 20 years the Christian right still doesn’t get it. They don’t understand the difference between a baby and a feotus. Between a life and a potential life. I once bought a lottery ticket, and I discovered that there was a substantial difference between a ticket that had the potential of winning the jackpot and one that actually did. It only took one purchase for me to figure that out. But then my learning curve is rather shorter and higher than a Bible-thumper’s I think.

But the Alliance for “Life” , or more aptly, the Alliance for the Increased Quantity of Life (rather than Quality of Life) is animated by different logic. They claim that since one-quarter of all pregnancies were terminated in Canada since the abortion law was passed, young Canadians are “missing” 3 million of their friends. Think of what a difference they would have made, they ask. Over to you Julian Simon. Another Sydney Crosby, or 100 cancer researchers, or 10,000 teachers perhaps. Forget the extra criminals, dead beats and real estate speculators. The more “life” we have the better. After all, “people” are our greatest resource.
Yeah sure. But each Canadian member of that “resource” emits, on average, 23 metric tonnes of green house gas (GHG) per year, consumes 3 million tons of metals, minerals and fuel in a lifetime, and produces more than 150 pounds of waste annually as well. So what would those 3 million “missing” friends bring us? For starters, about 65% more GHG emissions than the tar sands produce, and about half the farmland that has been developed to accommodate the New Canadians that have arrived since the abortion law was enacted. And let us not forget the number of non-human species that would have been obliterated by the bulldozer to clear the way. Do you still miss those 3 million potential consumers now?

Each extra Canadian, whether he or she enters the country through the hospital or through the airport, diminishes the per capita share of non-renewable resources that existing Canadians enjoy. Even if the extra 3 million would have spurred more economic growth---a proposition refuted by two or three studies so far---that growth is still contingent on the supply of cheap fossil fuel and rapidly scarce minerals and metals upon which an industrial economy depends. More people does not mean a higher per capita GDP, and even if it did, the economic foundation upon which our inflated population rests is built on quicksand. The bigger we are, the harder we’ll fall. Triple digit oil will kill our transportation system and our ability to grow, harvest, transport and refrigerate our food. If we continue to grow our economy and grow our population, many more of us will starve, freeze and die, along with the flora and fauna we take down with us.

What is really required is an advertisement showing the number of various species on a screen, and those that disappear with each increment of the human population. Christians are fond of justifying the Biblical mandate for humans to exercise dominion over all God’s creatures by stressing our obligation to be wise stewards. That is a difficult task when the human population, to Catholic and evangelical cheerleading, has nearly tripled its size in my lifetime and is shrinking wildlife habitat relentlessly and mercilessly. Whether a primate’s life begins at conception or not, there are now fewer primates in existence than there are human beings born in any given day. If each one of God’s 214,000 miracles born each day is precious, what of the hundreds of thousands of non-human life forms that are murdered that day by our expansion? Each and every day we are breeding our life support system into the ground.

It is in this sense, then, that the Alliance for Life is the Alliance for Death.

Tim Murray
December 26/09
PS Happy New Year to Canada’s greatest and most effective environmentalist, Dr. Henry Morgenthaler.

Questions for the self-righteous climate-obsessed

2010-02-08T01:09:00.000-08:00

Local Sierrans held a vigil outside the local store one Saturday morning to register their impatience with lack of action on climate change. The following questions came to mind:

Why isn't there a vigil outside the store about this: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6041 Or do we not think stratosphere fossil fuel prices are imminent and will destroy our ability to feed more than a fraction of humanity?

Why isn't there a vigil outside the store about Peak Everything? About biodiversity loss? About what underlies all of it—overpopulation. About the dangerous problems right around the corner?

Why is global warming our obsession when the Canada Research Chair on Energy and the Environment, the much acclaimed Dr. David Keith, said recently that while climate change is very serious, "there is no credible science" to back up the belief that it is this "apocalyptic, existential threat" that must be addressed "in years rather than decades". http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/podcast.html

Why has climate change hijacked the environmental agenda? Was there no environmental degradation before Al Gore?

Why do environmentalists care so much about GHG emissions and nothing about the number of GHG emitters?

Why don't environmentalists realize that birth control is five times more cost-effective in reducing GHG emissions than green technology?

Why is it that the BC Sierra Club produced 10 "things you can do to fight global warming", the David Suzuki Foundation another 10 "ways to fight global warming" and Guy Dauncey 101 "solutions" to fight climate change, and not one of them, not one recommendation in a grand total of 121 tips to fight climate change, mentioned birth control? How can these green NGOs insist that climate change is a result of human activity when they apparently won't acknowledge that the number of "humans" has something to do with human activity? Why did they remain silent when an Abbotsford couple had their 18th child? Was that not a "teachable moment"? Is that at least as important as replacing incandescent bulbs? Who drives SUVs or generates waste? Chimpanzees? Gremlins? Ghosts?

It is it just a coincidence that between 1970 and 2004 America's population grew by 43% while its GHG emissions grew by 43%? Do environmentalists and politicians believe that there is a technological "fix" for unchecked growth and greed? Do they think that we can decouple GHG emissions and environmental damage from economic and population growth? That we can decouple ice cream consumption from weight gain and starvation from lack of food? That we can we reduce landfills while increasing the number of land-fillers? Hello?

Could it be that green NGO silence about population and economic growth (it's OK if it is "smart") has something to do with their corporate benefactors? Financial institutions who have a vested interest in growth? Do their members choose not to know? Do they not read the financial reports of the organizations they support? Are they wilfully blind? Or so lazy as to be satisfied with the spoon-fed filtered information they get from their club's newsletters? Is the name of the game attacking root causes or is it addressing symptoms? Is it about taking on taboos or just focusing on easy politically correct targets? Are symbolic protests and cosmetic lifestyle adjustments really about feeling good about yourself? Penitence perhaps for taking the carbon footprints you gave birth to or sired to Bali or Mexico by jet aircraft at Mother Nature’s expense.

Tim Murray
December 16/09

10 False Assumptions of the BC NDP (and leftist parties everywhere)

2010-02-08T01:02:00.000-08:00

1.We must “grow” our revenues

2.We need economic growth to grow our revenues or......

3.We can grow our revenues by taxing corporations and ‘making the rich pay their fair share’ or....

4.We can grow our revenues by both growing the economy and making the corporations pay more tax.

5.We can grow our limits. We can ignore the imminent loss of cheap fossil fuels and rely upon continued economic growth because miraculously, we can find alternative technology to scale up to the energy requirements of a growing economy and the superstructure of social services that rest upon it.

6.We can decouple economic and population growth from green house gas emissions.

7.Constant reductions of per capita consumption and per capita waste can offset
constant increases in total consumption that come with a growing population, ad infinitum.

8.We can nullify the ecological impact of a growing population by concentrating people into urban feed lots, by rezoning city land to increase infill housing, and by defending Greenfield acreage with strict land-use planning. We can pretend that land-use decisions are not made by local politicians who are owned by developers. And we can argue that because capitalism is bad for the environment, then by a magical feat of deductive reasoning, socialism must be better. Take away the profit motive, and institutions will work in our best interest. Case in point, the pristine, bucolic paradises of the late Soviet bloc, China, and the Sandinista regime that bought Catholic support by not instituting family planning so that the population levels could skyrocket.

9.Not only can we have infinite growth in a finite world, but infinite growth in the number of tax-payer funded services.

10.Government will always be there for you. As it was for the people of New Orleans and as it will be when our world is soon beset with a million Katrinas. Therefore, there is no reason to promote personal or community self-sufficiency. We can make people even more dependent on government than they are already. More daycare spaces. More child benefits. More funding for the arts. More subsidies for more services. Less individual responsibility. That is how elections are won. That was how the West Was Won. Pioneers got government funding and support for barn-raising, didn’t they? They must have, because without government help Canadians can’t do anything, can they? And whose fault is that? It is always someone else’s fault, isn’t it?

AS PRESENTLY CONSTITUTED, THIS CURRENT MODEL OF HUMAN WON'T DO

2010-02-08T00:56:00.000-08:00

"Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God." Benjamin Spock, pediatrician and author (1903-1998)

Count me in as one of those people who hates millions, no, billions of my own kind whom I have never seen. Farley Mowat once said, while standing before an audience in front of his microphone, that if he could press a button that would wipe out mankind, he would. I would not go that far because I want the human race to survive, or at least, to see its limited tenure on Earth extended. It is precisely because of that objective that I believe that probably all but 5 million of us require termination. Then again, there is no reason to believe that those five million would not give rise to the same behaviour which has led to the current crisis. As I have said before, our brains are not sufficiently developed, a deficit that cannot be remedied by "education" or moral improvement. We are hardwired for denial, we need unfounded optimism to get through the night. That is why religion and superstition will never be eradicated. We require comfort, not the cold truth. Even Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" needed a Hollywood ending. We have a limited tolerance for bad news. Remove mass advertising and media-spun delusions, and we are still left with an ineradicable human appetite for escape. We can't live with reality. It is too mundane, boring or awful. We need to be entertained with good stories. Soap operas, games and gossip were as much the signature of our species in our hunter gatherer guise as they are now.

It is really quite bizarre when you think about it. We face extinction and we spend our time talking about the Academy Awards or the Winter Olympics. What would alien pathologists and archaeologists conclude about our demise? Especially if they discover the archive of books and movies and documentaries that we produced that have warned us of the consequences of our folly. The best snapshot of human mentality can be found by recollections of so many Titanic passengers who continued to party well after the collision. The cheerful bimbos who tell me to "have a good day" or "stay positive" in the face of the gathering storm before us are little different than the women in evening gowns on April 12, 1912 who would point to their cocktail glass with punch listing at 30 degrees and say, "Look, the glass is half full". By what measure of acumen can we be rated as an intelligent species? How can we remain motivated to fight what, in the great scheme of things, can only be regarded as trivial pursuits? Almost any cause that we invest so much time and energy in can be likened to the hackneyed metaphor of changing deck chairs on the Titanic. Human rights, women's rights, rights for the handicapped, rights for minorities, social justice, wealth redistribution, urban planning, border control, save the poster species of the month----all of these things seem pathetically inconsequential in the context of the collapse that must come. To be objective, my efforts are nothing more than an exercise in therapeutic catharsis---dogs bark but the caravan moves on. Yet trying to do something about it is a more satisfying preoccupation than doing absolutely nothing.

I believe that we need genetic engineering or brain surgery on a mass scale. Seriously. Whatever it is that is causing a disconnect between our actions and the consequences of our actions must be identified and surgically or genetically removed. Jason Brent has argued for the development of a Master Race, a term that must not be confused with Hitlerian concepts of "race", but nevertheless will be. Differences of skin pigmentation or culture are irrelevant. What is important is that we are just not smart enough to continue our reign as king of the food chain. The present model of a hominid is defective.

Tim Murray,
December 1/09

PS Take a look at a 1970 movie entitled "The Forbin Project", then tell me that we would not be better governed by the competent and chilling rationality of a super-computer than the most benevolent rule of an omnipotent Mother Theresa. Just as war is too serious to be left to the generals, overpopulation is too serious to be left to the democratic wishes of a species that is congenitally incapable of acknowledging limits. Tim Flannery has proposed that immigration, a subset of population policy, be removed from the control of politicians and placed in the hands of a scientific body aloof from political pressure. A super-computer like "Collossus" in the movie that would command all military levers could act like a surgeon and global policeman to exact all the penalities and sacrifices necessary for humanity to survive. First-World wealth could be commandeered, consumption curtailed and mass sterilizations imposed instantly on pain of liquidation. Sounds good to me.

CLIMATE CATASTROPHE "OVERSTATED" SAYS ACCLAIMED CANADIAN 'HERO OF THE ENVIRONMENT"

2010-02-08T00:51:00.000-08:00

It is serious, but not that serious.

The climate change debate---and yes there still is one—provokes several questions that require answers for those committed to address the root cause of our crisis rather than the symptoms and manifestations of it. Those of us who accord central importance to human overpopulation must ask:

Is man-made climate change a reality?

If it is, how serious is it?

Does it deserve the prominence it receives from environmental groups and the media? Should it be our obsession too? Who then will speak out about overpopulation, biodiversity loss and the end of cheap energy?

Physicist Dr. David Keith of the University of Calgary, and Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment has something to say to help us to answer some of those questions. And who is Dr. David Keith? Is he just a crank in the blogisphere or a climate-change (AGW) denier? No quite. Check out his credentials:
--he was named by Time Magazine as one of the "Heroes of the Environment in 2009" http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1924149_1924154_1924428,00.html
--he was named as "Environmental Scientist of the Year" by Canadian Geographic in 2006, who called him one of the world's top energy-policy analysts
--he led a research group in energy and environmental systems at the University of Calgary in 2004
--he has served on the UK Royal Society's geo-engineering advisory panel, the IPCC and numerous Canadian 'blue ribbon' panels, and is an advisor to governments, and to Bill Gates
--he is an expert in climate-related energy technology and assessment
--he is author of at least ten major publications http://people.ucalgary.ca/~keith/Publications.html
--he is winner of the Martin Deutsch Prize at MIT (1989) and first prize in the Canadian Association of Physicists National University Exam
--his has been associated with Harvard and Carnegie Mellon Universities
--his CV is remarkable http://people.ucalgary.ca/-Keith/misc/DWK-CV-2008.pdf

In short, Dr. David Keith is brilliant, well accomplished and clearly "knows his stuff". Once more, he is quick to admit what he doesn't know, and what science does not yet know.

He was interviewed by Michael Enright on CBC radio's "Sunday Edition" on December 13, 2009. The interview can be heard at http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/podcast.html or from the attachment above.

In a nutshell, this was his verdict on climate change: it’s serious, but not that serious. Not what soft green climate-obsessives want to hear. In fact, there is enough in his message to disappoint and challenge everyone from deniers to alarmists alike. Dr. Keith believes that climate change is occurring at a pace that is too dramatic to be the result of a natural cycle, and that something must be done about it, or in one hundred years there will be shocking contrasts to life as we know it now. But he does not see such climate change as this “apocalyptic, existential threat” that must be addressed ”in years rather than decades.” There simply is “no credible science” to back this alarmism up. While he sees climate change as a dominant environmental problem, he declared that “If I had a dollar to spend in the next decade I put it into fighting poverty and disease in the undeveloped world.” Hasn’t Bjorn Lomborg been saying essentially the same thing?

No wonder Dr. Keith is advising Bill Gates of late. The only quibble that I would have would be that neither party seems to understand that population stability and reduction is key to solving poverty and disease, as well as slowing deforestation. Focusing on preventing death rather than preventing births is a wrong-headed strategy born out of misplaced compassion rather than empirical observation. Feeding today’s hungry mouths can only generate twice the number of hungry mouths in a generation, if family planning programs are not first put in place. Ethiopia is good case history of this development, and Kenya is showing us, that once again, “prosperity” is not necessarily the best contraceptive.

Does this mean that climate change should not be addressed, or is too costly to address? No, says Dr. Keith. Human beings are multi-taskers. We can tackle several problems at once. While he is quick to deny that solar radiation management can do anything more than complement a sharp reduction in emissions., as a physicist he is nevertheless afflicted with unwarranted technological optimism. “We can fix this problem with a small percentage of our GDP”, he confidently maintains. He believes that green technology “can make deep cuts in GHG emissions”, and that we can construct a “zero carbon energy” economy that will allow us to enjoy the fruits of civilization. The costs, he claims, would be relatively trivial, probably just about .7% of the GDP, or what was spent on implementing the Clean Energy Act. Then again, he dismissed as nonsense the belief that the benefits of so-called ‘green’ jobs will offset the costs of developing green technology.

But the bottom line is that climate change does not deserve to be on the front burner of our concerns. As Mike Folkerth, a retired bush pilot, remarked, it is folly to worry about your fuel reserves when you see that the engine is on fire. Like him, I wished that Green backseat driver on board would stop focusing on the fuel gauge and worry instead about saving the engine. If climate change is a serious problem, it is not the most pressing one. Our task is to address its cause. Too many emitters. First fix the engine.
Tim Murray

December 14/09

DID ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION BEGIN WITH AL GORE?

2010-02-08T00:44:00.002-08:00

Re: “A Heated Debate: Why Political Orthodoxy Must Not Silence Scientific Debate” Economist 26-11-09 http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14966227&subjectID=348924&fsrc=nwl

Finally someone has articulated the attitude that I have taken from the beginning in a way that walks the line between orthodoxy and scepticism that I have tried to find. I am quite uncomfortable with any "truth" that requires intimidation, ostracism, media censure and spin as weapons for its defence. In a fair and open contest of ideas, I believe truth will out. If one needs a justification for tolerance of the unorthodox and the unconventional, one need only recall the impassioned arguments that Carl Sagan, one of my personal heroes, made on behalf Velakovsky. Sagan stated that he found Velakovsky's theory untenable and unfounded, but he found the treatment meted out to Velakovsky by the scientific community even more unacceptable. We know that just as a good government needs a strong opposition to govern well, scientific truth gains more by the errors of iconoclastic challengers than the bleeting cant of its credulous adherents. But in the climate "debate", all sceptics are treated like shills of the oil companies. If that is the case, then Exxon and Shell don't pay their agents very well because I know a number of them in my circle who live on modest budgets. Seldom are AGW advocates subjected to the same test of mercenary motives.

How many desk jockeys in the $7 million a year David Suzuki Foundation make a living on beating the climate change drum? Al Gore's appearance reaped $100,000 for the DSF in one night. David Suzuki, like the leaders of so many mainstream environmental NGOs, fights to maintain and expand his market share in a very competitive market for green guilt money. If you primary goal is fundraising, you seize on the one issue that gains the most traction, just as political parties that fight successful elections seize on one or two themes at most, and hammer away on them. As Dr. Chris Chalquist has documented, the public has a limited tolerance for fear-mongering. They budget a certain mental space for pressing societal concerns, and beyond that, will suffer anxiety fatigue and tune you out. Denial is hardwired into our mentality. We need a large measure of unfounded optimism and apathy to get through the night. There is only a certain amount of concern that can be tapped on a range of environmental issues.

What makes climate change the most attractive horse to hitch our wagon to is that is sexy. Collapsing ice shelves and drowning polar bears excite our attention more than droughts and famines. And once it has achieved momentum, more and more green orgs jump on board because that is the hook to catch potential donor attention. The mere mention of birth control or immigration raises too many hackles, so there is a great temptation to let sleeping dogs lie, and shoot for easier targets. I notice that population groups have succumbed to this recruiting strategy. More and more of their commentary focuses on climate change. I am beginning to wonder, did acid rain, air pollution, hazardous waste, ozone depletion, water pollution, massive deforestation, habitat destruction, poaching or overpopulation cease to matter with the release of the "Inconvenient Truth" pm January 24th, 2006? Did environmental degradation begin with Al Gore’s documentary? Perhaps Obama should follow the precedents of Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII by commissioning the development of a new calendar. Instead of BCE and CE, perhaps we should mark time by BAG (Before Al Gore) and AAG (After Al Gore), with the Year 1 beginning on January 24, 2006. Then, like the Taliban, we should demolish any artifact that reminds people of the old religion and only tolerate shrines built to the new religion, Man-Made Climate Change (originally christened "global warming" until the inconvenient truth of recent global cooling came out). Let's pull down Nelson in Trafalgar Square and erect a Monbiot statue in its place, demolish Graceland and send pilgrams to Gore's mansion in Nashville.

I recall the late novelist Michael Crichton remarking once that it was his policy not to try to talk anyone out of his environmentalist beliefs, because they were essentially religious convictions rather than facts to be argued. In my conflict with Greens, social democrats and the Sierra Club, my experience would tend to confirm Chricton's cynicism. Soft green environmentalism, whose trademark is a refusal to acknowledge population growth as a crucial ingredient of environmental corruption, is all about religion, not science. Soft green environmentalism seems like a perfect reconfiguration of traditional Judeo-Christianity. We are all sinners in the white affluent north, doomed to perish, unless we seek salvation (sustainability), which somehow only involves reducing per capita consumption, and seek penance through cosmetic and trivial lifestyle changes that do nothing to confront the institutional agents of growth or its root causes.

I am not prepared at this point to argue that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. I suspect that it is real and it is serious. But not serious enough or certain enough to push all other environmental issues off the plate, especially population growth, which is the driving force behind both biodiversity loss and rising CO2 levels (whether you believe that CO2 affects the climate or not). I resent our persistent fixation on AGW. I thought we were in business to raise awareness about the costs of population growth, not the costs of climate change. If we don't, who will?

Tim Murray
November 27/09

AN INCONVENIENT FACTOID FOR GROWTHISTS

2010-02-08T00:44:00.001-08:00

An Inconvenient Factoid for Growthists:

According to the World Bank, the top ten wealthiest countries, as measured by per capita GDP, are, in order of wealth:

1. Luxembourg: 491,000 people.
2. Norway: 4.8 million people.
3. Singapore: 4.8 million people
4. USA: 306 million people
5. Ireland: 4.5 million people
6. Switzerland: 7.7 million people
7. Austria: 8.3 million people
8. Netherlands: 16 million
9. Iceland: 319,000 thousand people
10. Sweden: 9.1 million people.

Note that of the ten countries listed, all but one, the United States, have a smaller population than Canada, which does not even make the hit parade. And the United States, with a runaway population growth in the past two decades, has not been doing too well of late, have they? So what was that that Jack Chow, (or is it Olivia Layton ?), Elizabeth May, Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper have been saying about immigration being the key to our prosperity?
Someone should break the news to the political class and their media mouthpieces that” Bigger” is not “Better”, that a higher GDP does not mean a higher per capita GDP, and that population growth has meant productivity decline and less quality of life. And with the imminent arrival of triple digit oil prices, Hotel Hospitality (Canada) is already overbooked---lots of room but not enough in the kitchen to serve more than a handful of residents. It’s time that we hung out a “No Vacancy” sign and have room service---Canada Border Security---see that our guests with temporary visas and failed refugee claims be shown out the door.

Tim Murray
November 22, 2009.

THE UNBRIDGEABLE CHASM BETWEEN MALTHUSIANS AND ENVIRONMENTALISTS

2010-02-08T00:24:00.000-08:00

I once had a naive assumption. I assumed that environmental organizations are “environmental” organizations. That they are sincere individuals who just quite haven’ t “got it”, that if they would enter a dialogue with us they would gain a more comprehensive understanding of environmental degradation. After all, 40 years they all more or less accepted the IPAT equation. But as you know, the zeitgeist has changed since then.

Many commentators like Leon Kolankiewicz have written extensively about why they dropped the “P” from the equation and shifted their focus to human rights, womens rights and ‘environmental justice’ causes. By the mid-1990s they became ideologically resistant to suggestions of population control or reduction on a national or global scale. Elizabeth May, Carl Pope, Betsy Hartmann and George Monbiot exemplify this attitude.

The biggest marketing brainstorm yet devised was their appropriation of the label “green”---that alone is enough to win support from people who will not take the trouble to examine their actual policies. For if they do that, they would learn that environmental organizations and Green parties are not about stopping growth but managing it, or lubricating it. For that reason they have come to enjoy the financial support of major corporations like du Pont, Exxon, Weyerhauser, Nissau, General Electric and the big financial institutions---to name but a few. It is a symbiotic relationship. The corporations get the ecological dispensation that they are looking for and a cloak of good green citizenship that they can wear as they clearcut forests and cover farmland with subdivisions. And the green orgs, on the other hand, get the cash they need to support their growing bureaucracies. Chasing donor support and protecting it has replaced their original raison d’ etre. So while some green leaders like David Suzuki will privately agree that Canada must reduce its population dramatically or say so in Australia, they will never say so publicly in Canada. One of Suzuki’s most important benefactors is the Royal Bank of Canada, and their CEO Gordon Nixon has aggressively lobbied for a hike in immigration quotas of some 50%. A probe of their financial reports and a glance at their boards of directors would reveal how deeply the environmental organizations are in league with big corporations. Christine McDonald provides a scandalous snapshot of this in her book,” Green Inc”. So any attempt to make them see reason on population issues is likely to meet with the same success as approaching Philip Morris and other tobacco companies did in making them see the dangers of cigarette smoking.

Environmentalists are not our friends, friends who have temporarily lost their way and can be brought back into the fold with reasoned argument. They are bought and paid for, paid “not to understand”. We are not two players on the same team merely situated at different ends of the spectrum of sustainability concerns. Our objectives are fundamentally oppositional. While Malthusians attempt to manage population growth to accommodate the environment, environmentalists attempt to manage the environment to accommodate population growth. Therefore, calling an environmentalist “ an environmentalist” is like calling a predator control officer “a bear lover”---his job is to control a ‘problem’ that threatens human expansion when the ‘problem’ is human expansion. Bears must be shot in order that the cities of Banff, Jasper and Whistler can keep growing. The natural environment must be managed in order that human occupation can keep growing. Smart growth, vegetarian diets, recycling and conservation, more efficient technologies---all these green nostrums are just growth enablers. Instead of placing limits on our expansion, they just channel it (allegedly) out of harm’ s way or allow us to stuff more and more of our clothes into the closet by acquiring closet organizers. Our task should be to reduce or wardrobe, not find more space to grow it.

But planned, managed growth is still growth. And that is why CEOs like Gordon Nixon feel comfortable supporting the David Suzuki Foundation and Nature Conservancy, and the TD Bank joins in our beach clean-ups. Nixon and his like probably have Robert Bateman prints hanging in their board rooms as they plot the next housing development over farmland in the Fraser Valley or the GTA.

I see my role not as a collaborator but as a resister. A saboteur. My objective is fight growth, not make it asthetically pleasing or more efficient. As a personal statement, my intention is to raise my ecological footprint so as to stress the system and hasten its collapse, for each day it lives another 200 non-human species dies and another 214,000 of us are born to push them off the plate. By not mixing my garbage, I overburden land fills. By eating more meat, I deny land to grain production which would feed more people-breeders. By idling my engine and operating my generator, I use up fossil fuels that instead might one day be used to feed more people. And by supporting industrial activity near my local provincial park, I help to reduce tourism which has proven to be a much greater blight upon the land. If I was on a municipal water system, I would make it a point to take extra long showers and keep my sprinklers running full-time.

I am an implacable enemy of the so-called environmental movement and its agenda. I regard them in the same way that General De Gaulle regarded Marshall Petain. I will never “collaborate” with them, nor with organizations that do. To save the environment, environmental organizations must be swept away. They are the nightwatchmen who are asleep on the job but by their presence nevertheless gives us a false sense of security. Better to dismiss them and keep our own vigilance.

Here was my intial response to the OPT outreach proposal:

OUTREACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS

In my personal experience that best way to reach out to environmental organizations is to make them reach out to us. Like political parties, they only respond to strength, not weakness. At present they think we are marginal players, a whacky fringe that would cost them donor support if they catered to us. It was only after I hammered the Sierra Club for a year that they put out feelers to me. It was then that I made a grave tactical error. Instead of keeping up my attack, I held out an olive branch and offered them my support and assistance if they wanted to introduce the population issue to their membership. They took that as a sign of weakness. The Executive Director of the Sierra Club, took the time to write me twice that he was appreciative of the importance of population growth to environmental damage, and was hoping to introduce the topic to the membership. As soon as I offered to send him material for the Gabriola conference, he disappeared. I had shown that I was a paper tiger. All I needed was some soft soap to humour me.

Trade unions learned this fact the hard way. Once you drop your adversarial posture, the other side seems no longer interested in your input. When we asked Green Party candidates for their participation in our questionaire, the party they saw us as supplicants and ignored us. We need a membership base with enough financial resources to compete with theirs. At that point they will be all ears. Believe me.

Before they elected 2 MEPs to the European parliament, the BNP were an odius fringe group not to be taken seriously. Once they achieved electoral success though, they were still seen as an odius fringe group, but one that must be taken seriously enough to warrant attention, albeit abusive attention. But when and if they elect more MEPs and cost the Labour Party urban seats, it will not be enough just to denounce them. The mainstream parties will have to deal with them----or plagiarize their policies.
Tim

I regret to say that I think Tim is right. When (we) did a survey of about 35 environmental and social justice groups in about 1996, I had written a series of ten statements of a few sentences to a paragraph. For each question, the responders were supposed to say whether they strongly agreed, agreed, didn't know or had no opinon (I think), disagreed, or strongly disagreed. Of the minority that responded, many disagreed about many of the statements and/or made not so friendly comments. When I followed up with some phone calls, I also got some not so friendly responses. David Suzuki responded to my survey (sent to the Foundation, as I recall) with a handwritten letter....M.

BAD OPPOSITION PARTIES MAKE THE HARPER GOVERNMENT LOOK ALMOST REASONABLE

2010-02-08T00:15:00.000-08:00

When ever I become too angry at the Harper government, all I need to do is listen to somebody from the Liberals or the NDP. It puts things in some perspective. Case in point, the issue over Haiti.

Liberal leader Ignatieff has given us a window into how quickly Canada would be deluged with refugees if he was Prime Minister. He wants to broaden the categories of people who can be sponsored under family reunification so that Canadians from Haiti can sponser brothers, sisters, etc etc. Deportations of cheaters would cease and all applications would be expedited. Of course, this is an exceptional circumstance. Or is it? If the kind of open borders policies and rule changes that Ignatieff favours were implemented for Haiti, a precedent would be set. Disasters like this will come with increasing regularity when rising oill prices will spark food riots and resource wars. And who knows what global warming will bring. How could Canada say no to the Philippines, or Ethiopia or the Pacific Islanders if we it said "yes" to the Haitians??? And once society has passed an ethnic tipping point, who could marshall the political support to shut the door? Coming catastrophes could double Canada's population in a decade if the bleeding heart coalition assumes officy.

Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenny rightly pointed out that Ignatieff's proposed "ad hoc" changes cannot be permitted to substitute for policy. In the face of the culture war being waged by the CBC and its farm team, the Carleton School of Journalism and academic institutions across the country, Kenny seems to be intent on holding the line. He has been making intelligent noises in recent months about ethnic indigestion, that is, the fact that New Canadians not are not integrating into Canadian society and about the need to assert Canadian core values. There is some indication that reading beneath the lines, Kenny has some concept of developing policy that fits Canadian interests rather than the wants of the immigration industry. Our immigration levels are still far too high, but when you listen to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, or anyone in the NDP caucus, you realize how much worse they would be if the Liberals or New Democrats were running the show. God save us from proportional representation.

When Non-Violence is Suicide

2010-02-08T00:11:00.000-08:00

WHEN NON-VIOLENCE IS SUICIDE by Theodore Kaczynski http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/When_Non-Violence_is_Suicide

It’s the autumn of 2025 AD. The technoindustrial system fell apart a year ago, but you and your friends are doing alright. Your garden has flourished this past summer and in your cabin you have a good supply of dried vegetables, dried beans and other foodstuffs to get you through the coming winter. Just now you’re harvesting your potatoes. With your spades, you and your friends uproot one potato after another and pick the plump tubers out of the soil.

Suddenly the friend at your elbow nudges you and you look up. Uh-oh. A gang of mean-looking men is coming up your trail. They have guns. They look like trouble, but you stand firm. The leader of the gang walks up to you and says,
"Nice looking potatoes you got there."
"Yeah, you reply. "They’re nice-looking potatoes."
"We’re going to take them" says the gang leader.
"The hell you are!" you answer. "We spent a long summer of hard work growing those potatoes…"

The gang leader points his rifle at your face and says, "—— you, punk." To his men he adds, "Dick, Ziggy, check the cabin and see what kind of food they got. We might just move in and spend the winter here. Mick, grab that bitch over there before she gets away. She got a nice ass. We’ll all screw her tonight."
You get angry and start shouting, "You bastard! You can’t…"
The rifle goes BANG. You’re dead.

________________________________________

Nonviolence works only when you have the police to protect you. In the absence of police protection, nonviolence is very nearly the equivalent to suicide.
Admittedly this has not been true at all times and places. Among the African Pygmies as described by Colin Turnbull, deadly violence against humans was almost unknown. In other nomadic hunting and gathering societies people sometimes kill one another in fights, but they never conquer one another’s territory or systematically slaughter other tribes. Under these conditions, nonviolence is not inconsistent with survival.

But, realistically, these are not the conditions that will prevail if and when the technoindustrial system collapses. There are a lot of mean people out there: Nazis, Hell’s Angels, Ku Klux Klanners, the Mafia…many others do not belong to recognized groups. They aren’t going to disappear into thin air when the system falls apart. They will still be around. They probably wouldn't be successful at growing their own food even if they tried, and they won’t try, because people of that type will find it much more congenial to take someone else’s food than to grow their own. And since they are vicious, they may kill you or rape you just for the fun of it, even when they don’t need your food.

Many ordinary people, too, who under present conditions are peaceful and mild-mannered, may turn vicious when they are desperate for food or good agricultural land in which to grow it. Food shortages may not be critical in so-called "backward" areas of the world where the peasants are still relatively self-sufficient, but in the industrialized countries, where agriculture is completely dependent on pesticides, chemical fertilizers and fuel for tractors (among other things) and in which few people have the skill to grow their own food efficiently, food shortages are sure to be acute when the system collapses.

Let’s even assume for the sake of argument that industrialized countries have enough arable land so that all people will, in theory, be able to grow their own food by primitive methods. In the absence of a functioning government, there will no way of distributing the city dwellers over the countryside and systematically assigning each family its own plot of land. Consequently, there will be chaos and confusion. Some people will try to grab the most or the best land for themselves, other will oppose them and deadly fights will break out. Armed groups will organize themselves for their own protection or for aggressive purposes. If you want to survive the collapse of this system, you had better be armed yourself and prepared to use your weapon efficiently. This means being prepared psychologically as well as physically.
Being armed and prepared to fight in self defense will not only be a necessary condition for your own survival, it will be your duty. The Nazi’s, Hell’s Angels and the Ku Klux Klanners will not be the most dangerous enemies of freedom. Because these people are unruly, turbulent and lawless, they are unlikely to create large, efficient organizations. Far more dangerous will be the kind of people who form the backbone of the present system, the people who are adapted to life in disciplined organizations: the "bourgeois" types—the engineers, business executives, bureaucrats, military officers, some police and so forth. These people will be anxious to reestablish order, organization and the technological system as quickly as possible. Their methods will be less crude than those of the Nazis and Hell’s Angels but they won’t hesitate to use force and violence when these are necessary for the achievement of their objectives. You MUST be prepared to defend yourself physically against these people.

TELL ME WHY IT WON'T HAPPEN HERE----J. W. Rawles vision of socioeconomic collapse

2010-02-08T00:04:00.000-08:00

"Patriots"---A novel of survival in the coming collapse" by James Wesley Rawles

"America faces a full-scale socioeconomic collapse in the near future. The stock market plummets, hyperinflation cripples commerce and the mounting crisis passes the tipping point. Practically overnight, the fragile chains of supply and high-technology infrastructure fall, and wholesale rioting and looting grip every major city.

As hordes of refugees and looters pour out of the cities, a small group of friends living in the Midwest desperately tries to make their way to a safe-haven ranch in northern Idaho. The journey require all their skill and training since communication, commerce, transportation and law enforcement have all disappeared. Once at the ranch, the group fends off vicious attacks from outsiders and then looks to join other groups that are trying to restore true Constitutional law to the country.

Patriots is a thrilling narrative depicting fictional characters using authentic survivalist techniques to endure the collapse of American civilization. Reading this compelling, fast-paced novel could one day mean the difference between life and death."

Tell me why you think that a "soft landing" or a smooth transition to the fabled "sustainable, conserver" society is a more likely scenario to the one just described above. Take a look at the food rioting in Port au Prince today and remember the lawlessness in New Orleans and imagine an entire continent without affordable oil. No oil, no economy, and no tax revenues to pay enough law enforcement officers who, in any case, would be overwhelmed by the chaos and mayhem.

And tell me what the prospects for survival of this fictional group of friends from the Midwest would be if, instead of going to a ranch in Idaho, they instead went to a ranch in south-eastern BC? Think about it. What does Idaho have that BC doesn't? One guess. The Second Amendment---the right to carry firearms. For decades Canadians have voted for politicians who imposed unilateral disarmament on law-abiding citizens. They will be like lambs to the slaughter. The meek shall not inherit the earth, but only irrigate it with their blood.

IF ONLY WE HAD EQUAL TIME IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

2010-02-07T23:51:00.000-08:00

It is amazing how decades of growthist propaganda have been entrenched as conventional wisdom. (eg. "without immigration, where are are all the workers going to come from to pay for the services needed by our aging population.") If only we had equal time. If only we had mainstream media that would print such articles and or give a podium for our views. I believe that if we had that, we could rally a majority of people behind us to force the politicians to take heed of our concerns.

The CBC must take a large measure of the blame. Private media feed off commercial advertising, but the CBC should be accountable to the taxpayers who fund it. All taxpayers, not just the ones with PC views. Yet just two hours ago, CBC led off the noonday newscast with the "good" news that for the third consecutive month, they could report "positive" numbers about our economy. An economist was then offered a soundbite to say that our GDP was up by so many percentage points. For the CBC, this sufficed as a yardstick of reality. No mention was made of the per capita GDP, or whether the GDP measured everything that was important in life. There was no Toronto Stock Exchange index of lost biodiversity in the past fiscal quarter due to the continued paving of farmland or the clearcutting and strip mining of boreal forest. No quoted stat on the number of endangered species. No Happiness Index to record our personal well-being in this period. No, of course there wouldn't be, because the CBC sees the world through the lens of the Growth Lobby, and calls that world progressive, tolerant, diverse, vibrant, inclusive and positive. And it all must be true, because we heard it on the CBC, our trusted information source.

THE CBC'S "THE HOUR" REVEALS ITS BLATANT PARTISANSHIP

2010-02-07T23:47:00.000-08:00

On January 26/10 , the master of glib PC banter, the cocky George Strombopolous, once again showcased the CBC Mission---to attack the Consevative government . George launched into another of his routine rants against the Harper government, this time for not convening parliament. The problem you see, is that all those partisan groups that feed from the public trough are left to starve for want of "funding". Funding that must be approved by parliament. Particularly vexing is that Canada's noble white knights, "the environmental groups", will not be able to carry on their good and necessary work. But then, Strombopolous adds, the Conservatives are not noted for their environmental concerns. Yeah right. As if the opposition parties were. Oh, I know, Harper is responsible for that horrid blemish on Canada's reputation, the tarsands development, which last year poured out 40 million metric tonnes of C02 and despoiled a vast area of formerly boreal forest cover. But here is a newsflash. The five million immigrants who have been admitted to Canada have been responsible for four times as much Green House Gas emissions as the tarsands, and used up four times as much land, mostly prime farmland, to house them. And who would boost our immigration intake by 25%? The opposition parties. The folks who bleet about a "carbon neutral economy" that somehow can be decoupled from population and economic growth. Growth with out emissions. If they were diet counsellers we would no doubt be told that we can consume litres of ice cream without gaining calories.

Meanwhile the environmental NGOs remain silent about this ongoing ecological catastrophe, preferring to focus on the symptoms of immigrant-driven population growth---habitat and farmland loss---rather than offend their corporate donors by challenging it. A fact that escapes the scrutiny of both CBC journalists and those in the private media. Perhaps it would prove too traumatic for the public to learn that their white knights were in actuality the Green Collaborators, rendered mute by their quest for money from tainted sources. The environmental establishment enjoys the same immunity from media exposure that the Kennedys enjoyed during the Camelot era. David Suzuki was annointed by the CBC as a demi-god and selected as one the ten greatest Canadians of all time. But his outrageous off-camera behaviour remains the secret of frustrated onlookers who have witnessed it in a myriad of close encounters. It is amazing that our national icon can demand that politicans who dispute the theory of man-made climate change be jailed, while his foundation accepts money from the natural gas giant, Encana. Where is this vaunted tradition of investigative journalism that once graced the land? Obviously it died in the classrooms of the Carleton School of Journalism, Mother Corp's farm team. Exhuming politically incorrect facts is sacrilege in Canada, and most especially in the CBC, as witness its coverage of the Haitian disaster. According to them, no one ever died of overpopulation, and Canadian foreign aid has never played a role in promoting it. Poverty is the exclusive result of big bad corporations, corrupt governments and inequitable distribution. If Haitians or Ethiopians or Afghanis are having 5 children a piece, well, the answer is to send the surplus poor to Canada. Heaven forbid if we tied our aid to family planning and addressed the root cause of their misery. That might put our immigration industry out of work.

Of course, it is, our should be the duty of the media in an authentic democracy to "speak truth to power". The CBC should hold politicians "feet to the fire". But all politicians, not simply Conservative politicians. I have been cautioned, in the interests of impartiality, not to focus criticism on the NDP or the Greens for example. But the reality is this. The CBC has tilted the playing field in their favour. Should it not then by my duty to level by offsetting criticism of the sanctimonius centre-left?

Tim Murray
January 27/10
PS I still have not received a reply from the CBC regarding my previous complaint about biased coverage. Surprised?

WHY BOTHER FIGHTING AGAINST THE IRRESTIBLE FORCES OF GROWTH?

2010-02-07T23:33:00.000-08:00

The odds are that we are facing an economic and population crash of epic proportions. With the growth lobby firmly in control of the media and the environmental movement on the corporate take, there appears to be no impediment to our headlong rush toward toward the fatal iceberg. Those resources vital to industrial civilization will soon run out, or more be too expensive to recover. Renewable energy to meet more than a fraction of our current appetites is a pipedream. So the question then is, why bother? Why spend my precious last years in a hopeless battle against the inevitable or highly probable?

In the past three years, I have had the privilege of talking to quite a number of prominent people in the sustainability movement. Almost everyone, to a man, including Bill Rees, believes, in the words of Neil Dawe, the founder of the Qualicum Institute, that "We have bought the farm". If we are not finished as a species, our civilization is certainly doomed, and much death and misery will follow in its wake. Take Suzuki aside privately, or Rees or Clugston or Heinberg or almost anyone "in the know", and they will repeat the same sentiment. So why do they continue the fight? Why do they keep butting their head against the wall? My neighbour said it best: "We would be remiss in our moral duty if we did not try."

Why do I bother? What would you have me do, take up golf? If it turns your crank, why not vent? I think it is more therapeutic than sulking in silence. The odds of turning our Titanic around are Slim and None, and Slim just left town. But you don't throw away your lottery ticket despite the pathetically poor odds of winning. Most of us were not born "defeatist". We set up a website and weighed into the battle because lacked experience and knowledge. But as time went on, the scale of the impending disaster proved, upon investigation and interaction with others of like mind, far greater than we imagined. Like most, I accepted Paul Ehrlich's commonly held belief that our carrying capacity was 2 billion people globally. Then along came Lovelock and his 750 million. Then came Peter Salonius and famous essay, A 10,000 Year Misunderstanding, and suddenly we were thinking in terms of 300 million. Now Jack Alpert is making a case for 100 million or less. Brishen Hoff, in the meantime, made a logical argument for two and one half human survivors living as hunter gatherers. His thought was that we lived for 99% of our existence as 5 million hunter-gatherers but since we have degraded half of our environment, so only half that number would likely survive indefinitely. All these figures are speculatived of course. But have you noticed---the more we read, the more we probe, the more we debate, the figure keeps dropping. Pessimism is not the product of a bad mood---it is the consequence of objective research and an honest relationship with the evidence.

I know this. Delusional optimism and denial will only raise the casualty list. That is why my greatest contempt is not reserved for the wealthy and the powerful, but to green wing of the Self-Help Movement, the Culture of Positive "Thinking ", who want to dispense filtered information to their members like a Happy Pill, so that they may feel good about themselves. Buy a Hybrid car and go green and you can forget that rapid industrialization in China and India will wipe out your boy scout green living habits one hundred times over. Ignore growth and just keep doing your civic duty by cutting back on your personal consumption and waste. And keep on sending in those donations. To me, environmentalism is religion. Denialism. It is faith-based and not science-based. And faith is hope without evidence.People want escape. They want intellectual comfort food. Even the grimmest scenario must have a Hollywood ending---as Gore's documentary did. Keeping up morale is more important than facing up to the truth. Imagine your doctor fudging your blood tests to put a positive spin on your medical results. That is the environmental establishment in a nutshell.

When is foreign aid going to be made contingent on curtailing reproduction?

2010-02-07T23:27:00.000-08:00

On CNN last night, MOnday, Soledad O'Brien said that there were 380,000 babies & children in orphanages in Haiti BEFORE the earthquake.

Most of the world's Aid agencies had a presence in Haiti BEFORE the earthquake. It is clear then that they hve made no effort to link Aid with access to contraception. Haiti in other words was a breeding factory. The figures I have seen are that 80% of its peope are unemployed ( more time to breed)

Janet Napolitano has said ( in todays NYT) that Haitian children who are eligible for adoption will be allowed into the U.S.

When are we going to press these Agencies to make Aid contingent on curtailing reproduction???

mary delavalette

MY SENTIMENTS EXACTLY. The CBC reported this morning that one million Haitian children were now orphans---implying that this was the result of the earthquake. Well, now CNN says that one-third of Haitian children were already orphans. What is the greatest disaster---this quake or ongoing decades of overpopulation due to our birth incentive programs (aka as unconditional aid)? Many buildings came down because the country is too poor to adhere to strong building codes. Why are they too poor? Corruption? Incompetence? Lack of education? There are many factors, but the one factor that should be most obvious is overpopulation. Should be---- but isn't, at least not to the media. Overpopulation not only ravishes the environment but diverts spending toward providing infrastructure. What kind of compassion is it that throws money at a problem without addressing its root causes? "Christian" compassion. Human rights compassion. Misguided compassion. Is the object to solve the problem or feel good about yourself for making a donation? Don't answer that. That is what contemporary do-goodism is all about, or so it seems. That is what soft-green environmentalism and green living is largely about too.

REWARDING IRRESOPONSIBLE HAITIAN FECUNDITY: Senegal's President sounds like New Brunswick Population Secretariat

2010-02-07T23:21:00.000-08:00

I think President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal has potential. If his dream of offering his homeland to Haitians doesn't fly there, he could come to Canada and head New Brunswick's "Population Secretariat" or become Green Party leader Elizabeth May's advisor on population issues. Both May and the politicians who lead Canada's maritime provinces have this notion that many economically "stagnant" (Canadian parlance for "stable") regions in the country are underpopulated, and would thrive if we just injected a whole lot of people into them. Especially if those people possessed a culture completely at variance to the one that had evolved in the region for two hundred years. Migration in that case would make such regions both "dynamic" and "vibrant". The fact that there are not enough resources to justify more economic activity is a trivial objection. Jobs, as we know, can be conjured up out of thin air just by a little "quantitative easing", aka printing money. On 17th century Easter Island I think they called it a "green stimulus package". Something like that. Anyway, it worked like a charm, didn't it? We don't need primary and secondary industry after all. With cheap transportation costs guaranteed forever, we can keep on dismantling these industries in North America and relying on off-shore manufacturers to pick up the slack. I am sure that they will be glad to send them over here in perpetuity in exchange for worthless US currency. We can support an ever growing superstructure of social services on the firm foundation of an economy of paper-pushers, computer programmers, potters and painters flush with government grants.

Now some folks would point out that there already many unemployed and under-employed Canadians who would suffer even more from the competition of so many newcomers for jobs and housing. They would point out immigration currently imposes a net fiscal burden of perhaps $18-30 billion a year, and that while population growth may boost the GDP, it does not increase the per capita GDP. Moreover, they would argue, more people simply reduces the per capita share of non-renewable resources. But that is not the point. The point is that Canada would appear to be dynamic and vibrant, as well as tolerant, accepting, generous and noble and all those wonderful things that make Canadian cant the most nauseauting discourse in the world today.

So in the fine tradition of our low self-esteem, which makes us so desperately concerned about how we think the world perceives us, I think we should offer Senegal's President Abdlulaye Wade a job as Canada's Welcome Wagon. Especially to those nations which never made the slightest attempt to curb their runaway population growth and achieve sustainability. An earthquake that kills 50-100,000 people is a tragedy, but the ongoing tradegy of over-population that dwarfs it can be ignored and forgiven. Like Antartica, Canada has lots of room for lots of people.

What did Garrett Hardin say? Oh yeah, "There is nothing so dangerous as a compassionate shallow-thinking person." That's a good definition of a Canadian, I think.

MISPLACED COMPASSION WILL SWAMP OUR BOAT

2010-02-07T23:18:00.000-08:00

MISPLACED COMPASSION WILL SWAMP OUR BOAT

If you want to preview the history that is now unfolding, read Raspail's Camp of the Saints. If Haitians are admitted in any significant volume, the precedent will have established. The intellectual resistance to further waves of destitute humanity will have been broken.

Camp of the Saints: "Synopsis: The French media encourage compassion for a shipful of the poverty-stricken dregs of humanity from somewhere. Those most responsible for the government's welcoming the refugees to land and accept French benevolence make good their own escape to Switzerland. One boatload of refugees begets another. The French are over-run."

First out of the starting gate to open Canada's flood gates was Opposition and Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatief, ever mindful of the ethnic vote and playing to the Haitian peanut gallery in Quebec. He urged the government to expedite visas to Haitian visitors and most omnously, "end deportations". Who said cheaters never prosper? Successful revolutions are all about kicking down a rotten door. Our door was made rotten by decades of poltically correct curricula in the universities, colleges and journalism schools. Two generations of leaders, teachers, politicians and media commentators were schooled in the lies of cultural relativism, historical revisionism and western self-loathing. Ecological Sustainability 101 was not a prerequisite to their advancement. This ground has already been covered by Bloom, Kimball, Lind and many others. Just as the will to fight the Germans was weakened in France in the 30s, the will to defend our borders seems fatally absent---at least among those in power or influence. I despair at the prospect of an unimaginable deluge. Once within our gates, the drawbridge will remain down for incoming millions of so called "environmental " refugees, and the Greens will wave them through. Too late the slumbering masses will realize that Canada cannot be, as that winning slogan for the National Post said, "Home to the World". Finally awakened, it is doubtful that they will have the numbers or the organization savy to marshall an effective counter-attack. The ethno-cultural lobby can command a more cohesive vote than any lobby fashioned by native-born Canadians to advance their interests. Even now, our elected politicians bend to their will.

I should have been born two decades earlier. I don't want to live to witness this.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN IMMIGRATION-REFORMER RESPONDS TO STANDARD GREEN RACE-BAITING SMEAR TACTIC

2010-02-07T23:15:00.000-08:00

Leah Durant of the Progressives for Immigration Reform introduces a PC pea-brain to the concept of carrying capacity. The truth is, it is the population-deniers who are the "extremists", for they have an extreme disregard for an extremely serious environmental problem----overpopulation. And public opinion polls would suggest that it is those who deny the danger of runaway population growth who are on the margin of thinking. Ms. Durant's letter to Ms. Mehta and Imagine 2050 could serve as a generic response to any of the Green-Left McCarthyist ilk. To the human rights crusaders, the smear-artists of Southern Poverty Law Centre and the Sierra Club leadership who have tried to hide the elephant in the room behind a screen of falsehoods.

The truth is that a growing proportion of those whom they presume to speak for, the ethnic minorities, themselves favour immigration cut-backs. Just as Barbara Jordan fought to maintain African-American living standards against the competition of imported cheap labour, Cesar Chavez stood at the Mexican border to stop cheap labour from Mexico from undercutting the gains made by Mexican-Americans. And nearly half (46%) of Hispanics in Arizona voted in favor of Proposition 200 to deny government services to illegal aliens. Meanwhile, Yeh Ling-Ling, a Chinese-American, has worked within and without the Sierra Club to fashion a "diversity coalition" against mass immigration. More and more, the spectrum of opinion about immigration among ethnic voters and recent immigrants or children of recent immigrants is closely resembling the range of opinion among native born Americans of the mainstream culture. Ethnic separatists from La Raza to the white nationalists may come to realize, too late no doubt, that the balance of power between ethnic lobbies is largely irrelevant in a nation in serious overshoot. When aquifers are dry and the mined out soils of the farm belt cannot yield crops in the absence of fossil fuel based fertilizers, and living standards have collapsed, your standing in the ethnic pecking order will seem like a quaintly trivial concern. Under the rubble of Port-au-Prince, victims of African, European and Asian descent have discovered the fundamental equality that an ecological meltdown and energy shortfall will impose on all of us. The polarities of left and right, white and black, business and labour are largely meaningless in this context, except of course to those who wish to exploit them to deflect attention from the major task at hand: Getting the numbers down. (see correspondence below---note, feel free to respond to Mehta and Imagine 2050 with your own comment).

Don't Worry, Be Happy by Being Blessed and Stupid

2010-02-07T23:12:00.000-08:00

This from Mr. Nutrasweet, the smiling jackal of evangelical Christianity, Joel Osteen of the mega Lakewood Church in Houston:

"It's Your Time", read by Joel Osteen
#1 New York Times bestselling author Joel Osteen offers the inspirational truth that now is the time to activate your faith and accomplish your God-given dreams. You are closer than you think!

"It's Your Time to believe that God has solutions even before you have problems.

It's Your Time for favor, so understand that no matter where you stand in life, you never stand alone.

It's Your Time for restoration, so know that you will emerge from hard times with all you need to soar higher than ever before.

It's Your Time to trust and give your life over to God so that He can light the way for you.

It's Your Time to stretch and strengthen your faith.
Get your hopes up. Raise your expectations. Your best days are in front of you. In challenging times, it may be hard to see better days ahead. You may feel as though your struggles will never end. Yet, this is exactly the moment to put your faith into action and expect God's blessings. It's your time to declare your faith, to look for God's favor, and find fulfillment in His plans for you!"

Ah yes, God has plans for you. But could it involve your extinction along with that of the other 6.8 billion members of our chosen species? You know, the species that really isn't rooted in biology but is spirtual in nature? The one that can live outside of biophysical laws? The one with a God-given superior intelligence that makes it such brilliant stewards of God's creation? No, you don't have to worry about societal collapse ---- you can survive if only you believe in His Word. No matter how tough things get in the post carbon world, no matter how murderous the resource wars, the lawlessness, the rape and pillage and the starvation become, He will provide for you. Faith can give you $2 a gallon gasoline and $40 a barrel oil. Faith can restore extinct species and restock our fisheries. Faith can re-fill our aquifers and replenish our soils. Don't let a recession persuade you to give up your hopes. God wants to breath new life into your dreams. All you need to do is tune out those negative thoughts, the belief that you are never going to get out of debt or break your addiction to consumerism. With a new attitude, with a confidence in God's plan , you can make your business work or find another job. You can have that 3000 square foot home with a built-in vacuum , satellite TV and a swimming pool outside. Forget Heinberg and Catton and Clugston. Don't be a Prisoner of Fear but a Prisoner of Hope. Ignore the fact that the Chinese and the Indians will bid up the price of oil and compete for the scarce metals that underpin our industrial society. Faith will find will double our oil production or create a technology to replace it. Remember, God wants you to succeed. He wants you to "git out thar n' make a lot of money". So don't waste your energies trying to find collective solutions, because the goal is "Becoming a Better You" by following the Master's prescriptions. The Sierra Club translation for that is "feeling good about yourself". If you think happy thoughts, clean thoughts, green thoughts, you will be a "success". Yeah, I can see myself now. An old man struggling at the end of a plough in 2010 trying to till hard ground with muscle power and no fertilizer to feed the soil. A plough-horse, a plough-horse, my kingdom for a plough-horse! I may be emaciated, starving and wretched from the cold and the brutal tedium of subsistence living, but hey, I will be just bursting with self-esteem because Jesus loves me, even if he doesn't help me with the chores. If I am not saved by my religious convictions, I will thrive in the knowledge that I lived a pure, green, clean life. And that's what counts, my salvation. The world can go to hell, just as Revelations said it would.

Faith is a wonderful thing isn't? Hope without evidence. Science is such a downer.
Tim Murray

PS For a taste of Joel, sample an audio clip at http://books.simonandschuster.com/It's-Your-Time/Joel-Osteen/9780743596855 , but first take a gravol.

GROWTH BEGINS AT HOME---Short interview with anti-growth advocates highlights Canadian apathy

2010-02-07T23:08:00.000-08:00

“Populations, like potholes, are produced locally....” Garrett Hardin

You may have heard of "S.O.S." (Save our Suburbs), an anti-growth organization that has set up shop in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, Australia. You may even of heard of how Noosa Shire, Queensland had developed a vision of sustainability that involved capping their population level. But what about North America?

This is a 13 minute radio interview from Charlottesville, Virginia with Jack Marshall of ASAP (Advocates for a Sustainable Abermarle Population) and Brian Czech of CASSE (Centre for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy). http://www.cvillepodcast.com/2008/10/21/jack-marshall-and-brian-czech-discuss-limits-to-growth . Canadians like to think of themselves as more "progressive" and "enlightened" than Americans. Yet where are conversations like this taking place in Canada? There are or were groups like ASAP in Vermont, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon, California and Hawaii. Other than Qualicum Beach, BC and Okotoks, Alberta, or briefly, "Save Our Valley" in Chilliwack, BC, where is there a critical mass of citizens who have formed a strong anti-growth lobby in this country? This despite Canada having the highest population growth rate in the G8 group, with our major urban centres sprawling into greenbelts even while they densify, putting more than 500 species at risk and paving over one-fifth of our prime farmland. It is not a question of building "up" or building "out". We are just "building". Why aren't Canadians up in arms? We are pathetic and apathetic. And those of us who are not are muzzled, blacklisted and shunned by the media, staffed as it is by journalists schooled in political correctness and editors mindful of where advertising revenue comes from. There ain’t much money in giving a podium to growth-bashers.

To use Brian Czech's metaphor, we are building our house higher and higher by robbing its foundation of building materials. The foundation being finite natural capital. Yet every hick town and every major city, from Campbell River, BC to Vancouver to Saskatoon to Sudbury, Ontario and beyond is chalk full of mayors and councillors, elected by developer campaign funds, calling for more growth. Of course, it must come in the fashionable clothing of the time, that is, it must be "sustainable" or "green", complete with the necessary seal of approval from an environmental review process or ecological impact statement from the environment branch of the planning department. But all of that is cynical green wash, and those who are asked to file the impact statements clench their jaws in the knowledge that conservation and growth don't mix. And while they unleash the bulldozers these hypocrites on council are calling for more water and energy conservation, telling us to turn our computers off for an hour or stop watering our gardens while they issue more building permits, still unable to notice that tax revenues seldom recoup the infrastructure costs of the new subdivisions.

Granted, it is the federal government which controls immigration levels, enacts pro-natalist policies and effects stimulatory fiscal policies. But it is at the grass roots level, in city councils, real estate offices, chambers of commerce and planning departments where growth is born---that is the lair of the growth lobby. It isn't a monster in a distant boardroom, or the conspiracy of a bank chairman on Bay Street. It is the sinister gremlin of greed that hides behind the face of your friendly, smiling neighbourhood realtor, loans officer, mortgage broker or small town newspaper editor a half mile down the road on Main Street. Even college presidents and trade union bureaucrats are charter members of the growth club. More growth means more students and more revenue for the school, and more jobs for union members. MPs typically cut their teeth on local politics, and they build their careers as growth-boosters, flush with the cant of growthism. "Growth is good", "growth is necessary", "growth is inevitable". "We must have growth. That is the measure of our success. Why, people come from everywhere to live in our beautiful community, and who are we to say that they can't? Our greatest resource is our people....etc etc." Let me puke.

It is about time people were told the truth about growth. It is about time that politicians and environmental NGOs were told that is not sustainable, that it cannot be "managed" or rendered "smart". Is it going to take triple digit oil and $20 a gallon gasoline to send them that message? It looks that way, doesn't it?

It will be interesting to see how the Sierra Club and members of parliament screen out the apocalypse with their spam filters. "A power-down you say? Take me off your list!"

Tim Murray
January 1/10

CBC TELEVISION FEEDS OFF THE SLICK GREEN WASH OF CORPORATE ADVERTISING

2010-02-07T22:59:00.000-08:00

On the subject of cornucopian tripe, I would suspect that some of us watch "The Nature of Things" as I did by accident tonight. It is difficult to hold my supper down watching the commercials. One was by IBM, who presented an array of faces telling us what wonderful things their employees were working on to solve our coming energy crunch. They spoke of new imaging technology to find hitherto hidden oil cavaties and a way to extract more oil from existing wells, among other things. These various "solutions" were introduced by one premise. "Our energy demands will increase by 50% in the next 12 years so we must meet it." This is in keeping with conventional growthist wisdom. "There will be another 2 billion people in the world in x number of years so we must find a way to feed them." Why? Why must we meet the demands of an unsustainable population supported by an unsustainable economy? Would we "solve" our problems by succeeding in doing that (even if we could)? Or in fact would we not merely postpone the day of reckoning when the casualty list from collapse would be so much greater? These are the kinds of questions that the Suzuki-cult wouldn't dream of asking.

What is significant about these commercials is that they are being played on Suzuki's "The Nature of Things". The corporations who sell technological fixes know that the soft green audience of this show is exactly where their delusions can be safely planted and disseminated. And of course, it is obligatory that any slogan to capture a market today must include the word "smart". IBM's slogan? "Lets Build a Smarter World". Rather it should read "Lets Build an Even Bigger World on a small planet--- but do it in a smart way." The coup de grace followed with two other commercials that rounded out the polyanna promises of IBM. A company advised that their new smart furnace would use fuel more efficiently, and then a government initiative called "Return It" promoted responsible electronics recycling. So here's the formula folks: Promote runaway population growth, ignore its consquences, promise to meet its insatiable energy appetites with pie in the sky technology, and then stretch non-renewable resources ad infinitum with their more efficient use. And while we're growing and consuming ever more, albeit more "efficiently", we'll keep the place tidy by the "responsible" disposal of the tsunami of electronic junk soon rendered useless by obsolescence or minor breakdown. Bottom line--- it can be business as usual for ever and ever. Or as the "environmmentalists" in the Sierra Club, the David Suzuki Foundation, and Greenpeace say, "It is not whether we grow, but how we grow". Growth is good, growth is necessary, growth is possible. We just have to be "smart" about it.

I confess that I left the television on after Suzuki left the stage. The next CBC program was sponsored by "Hyundai". The word "smart' littered their spiel about a dozen times. Funny though, when I looked at the Hyundai on the screen, it still looked a car to me. It had rubber tires, glass headlights and a metal frame. I suppose the metal was smelted in a smart way from ore that was smartly mined and smartly transported to a smart factory by workers who used their wages to consume green products and dispose of them responsibly. Alternatively, it was processed and assembled in Korea or some such place in the conventional nasty and wasteful way but since it all that took place on the other side of the world, it doesn't blemish our clean environmental record here. Out of sight, out of mind.

Finally came our oracle of truth and integrity, presenter Peter Mansbridge on the flagship news program, "The National", the voice of Canada ---that is, the voice of the alumni of Ottawa's Carleton School of Journalism. The sponsor? The "Certified General Accountants" with a commercial that spoke of the need for something called "corporate sustainability". The environment can go to hell but it is important to keep corporations "sustainable". No, that isn't fair. The CGA wants "balance", that is, growth offset by the usual set of cosmetic and trivial green gestures that have little to do with sustainability and much to do with keeping the profit margins sustainable by wooing customers who need to feel "green". The National was then followed by "The Hour", where Mother Corp's icon of youthful trendyism George Strombopolous interviewed fiancial planner David Chilton. Chilton was bullish on Canada's future. "China, India and the world are going to need a lot of resources, and we've got them." And are you ready, Canada has a lot of smart people. Inguenity can solve any shortage, right?

It is interesting that so many of us defend the CBC because we believe that it offers a needed alternative to "commercial" broadcasting. But CBC television is nothing but a commercial pitch interrupted by the occasional "news" program which tells us what is not happening in the world today. And "non-commercial" CBC radio offers no relief. It is one long political commericial punctuated by interludes of culture. It is a medium of growthist, PC propaganda, and as Messrs. Dan Murray and Brishen Hoff have shown many times, it is immune to complaint despite its vaunted appeal process. The Ombudsman is just a fig leaf for a public-funded fiefdom of unaccountable immigration lobbyists masquerading as journalists. Reform it, scrap it or ignore it. What else can we do with the CBC?

Tim Murray
January 7/10

GET WITH THE PROGRAM, JACK---Canadian social democrats are falling out of step

2010-02-07T22:57:00.000-08:00

GET WITH THE PROGRAM, JACK--Canadian social democrats are falling out of step

Is Jack Layton going to be the odd man out in the Socialist International? Is he going to be the last of the politically correct Mohicans who deny that mass immigration is detrimental to the environment and to the living standards of the native working class whose interests the centre-left claims to represent? Look at the trend.

Bob Carr, the former Labor Premier of New South Wales, had this to say about Australia, which suffers from the Canadian delusion, that it is an empty land whose treasures can only be unlocked by the importation of more people:

“We can depend on economic growth that comes in an easy fashion driven by population growth (or)... on the other hand,we can sustain jobs and economic security by using our brains, by being a smart economy, by adding value to the products we produce here—the food and the fibre and the mineral products we produce here...that’s a smart Australia. It is not a lazy Australia, that depends on job growth by driving up population numbers and depending on the growth you get by building houses and shopping malls.” Now Labor MP Kelvin Thomson has taken up Carr’s cudgels by arguing that mass immigration will push Australia beyond its carrying capacity without bringing a net economic benefit.

Labour MP Frank Field in the United Kingdom has taken a similar tack. He warned that “the present scale of immigration ... is bound to have a negative aspect on many aspects of life of Britain... If the Labour government does not adopt the policy of balanced migration, or something close to it, our population is set to rise to a level to which the vast majority of people are strongly opposed.” He went on to point out that “Britain will need to build one house every 6 minutes just to meet the current scale of immigration. “ A year ago cabinet minister Phil Woolas had voiced similar misgivings, speaking of the need to restrict immigration in the interests of capping the country’s population level, but met with much abuse within party ranks, and Field himself was dutifully accused by the New Statesman of pandering to the “far right” British National Party. But now, even the Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in his own words, is beginning to “get it”. He conceded that it is not inherently “racist” to talk about immigration, and his call to cut back employment advertising overseas is proof that reality can eventually breech even the most fortified walls of politically correct left –wing dogma.

If his deathbed conversion to sanity is authentic, Brown would be joining some astute company. Former Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt admits, in retrospect, that immigration under his government was excessive and damaging to Germany. In a book published in 1982 he confessed that “with idealistic intentions, born out of our experience with the Third Reich, we brought in far too many foreigners.” Meanwhile one-time Dutch socialist leader Jan Marijnissen expressed his strong opposition to the practice of importing East European workers to undermine the position of Dutch workers. East Europeans were hired as “independent” contractors to circumvent labour law. Marijinssen wrote that “It is unacceptable that employers pay foreign workers 3 euros per hour and have them live in chicken coops as they were in competition in the nineteenth century of Dickens. The unfair competition and displacement of Dutch workers and small business is intolerable. Therefore we shouldn’t open the borders further, but set limits instead.” Now Walter Bos, the current leader of the Dutch Labor Party, affirming Milton Friedman’s observation, warned that “We must choose between a generous welfare state and restrictive immigration on the one hand and a restrictive welfare state and generous immigration on the other hand.”

Closer to home, the lone Democratic Socialist Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, wondered aloud, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.” He noted that thanks to outsourcing and lax immigration enforcement and policies, the Bush administration cost American workers 5 million jobs. In expressing these sentiments Sanders is following the traditional theme of American democratic socialism as established by such men as Socialist Party leader Victor Gerber and writer Jack London. The mandate of American socialists was to defend the living standards of American workers, not as is the policy of the AFL-CIO, to drop the American bird in the hand in order to chase two illegal Hispanic birds in the bush in a recruitment drive.

Canadian democratic socialism was rooted in a similar commitment. The much revered “saint” of Canadian politics and founder of the CCF—precursor to the NDP---J. S. Woodsworth, opposed immigration in the interwar period because there were not enough jobs. In his book “Strangers at the Gate”, he quoted Preston Hall in Hall’s exhaustive study of the labour market in the United States: “The general law seems to be that cheap labor tends to drive out higher-priced labor and lower the standards of living.” Woodsworth continued, “...the people with lower standards of living will drive out all competitors. The economic question becomes a social question. Can we afford, for the sake of immediate gain, to sacrifice those standards and ideals which we have most carefully cherished?” He even expressed concern that too many non-English speakers would threat social cohesion, evidence that once upon a time, Canadian socialists appreciated the need for some commonalities to glue a diverse social fabric together.

Where then does the NDP stand? That is best summarized by a statement made by Jack Layton’s wife and Immigration critic, Olivia Chow: “We need more immigrants because of our aging population. We need families and young people for productivity and economic growth.” Essentially a string of clichés that could have been lifted verbatim from any press release from the Conference Board of Canada or the local Home Builders Associaton. Cliches that have been consistently refuted by federally commissioned reports like those from the Economic Council of Canada and the C.D. Howe Institute. Some kind of “social democratic” party this. Chow apparently does not read this solid research or even the Statistics Canada material that has established a correlation between mass immigration and the decline of even professional wages (eg. Stats Can report of May 2007). The NDP leadership fails to evidence a grasp of the most elementary truths that socialist and labour leaders understood a century ago and are beginning to understand now. Namely, that there are limits. Limits to growth, limits to our carrying capacity, and limits to cultural diversity. J.S. Woodsworth knew that the best friend a worker has, more than any trade union or socialist party, is a tight labour market. Now more and more social democratic leaders are rediscovering the same axiom. So what is Layton’s excuse?

Get with the program, Jack.

Tim Murray,

December 8/09

WHY ISN'T THE NDP SPEAKING OUT AGAINST POPULATION GROWTH?

2010-02-07T22:53:00.000-08:00

Somebody please wake up the engineer and tell him to slow down this runaway train!

An Australian Labour MP, Kelvin Thomson, keeps speaking out against his government's policy of mass immigration. The question is, WHY IS NOT EVEN A SINGLE MEMBER OF THE FEDERAL NDP CAUCUS DOING THE SAME THING????? Canada is the mirror image of Australia. We have lots of room but little carrying capacity. Only 5% of our land is arable, and of that, only 20% is classified as prime, "Class One" farmland. Half of that prime farmland is found in Ontario, and 60,000 acres a year of it is lost to development. That is, for housing of which 70% is occupied by foreign born residents. In the post carbon Canada to come, transportation costs will be prohibitive. And soil productivity will plumment with the lack of oil-based fertilizers. We will be hard put to feed even a fraction of our current population. Growing food, transporting it and refrigerating it will be huge challenges. We cannot allow more of it to bee built upon, or more mouths to enter the airport as landed immigrants every day.

Write the NDP and ask them why? Why aren't they showing any of Kelvin Thomson's courage, or the courage of Labour MP Frank Field in Britain??? Why is there no retired NDP provincial premier like the former Labor premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr who will make a noise about our own overpopulation? Why won't a single MP on any side of the House call for the development of a Population Plan in Canada??? This was recommended as far back as 1997 by the federally commissioned Fraser Basin Eco-study headed by UBC Professor Michael Healey. Do any MPs read these reports???? Let's let them know how outrageous their ignorance and apathy is!!! We have the highest population growth rate in the G8 group, and the second highest per capita immigration rate in the world. Somebody wake up the engineer and tell him to slow down our runaway train!!!!

COMMENT BY KELVIN THOMSON
ON RECORD MIGRATION NUMBERS

· The record number of migrants is fuelling runaway population growth in Australia, and it’s time the skilled migration program and temporary entry work permits were seriously cut back.

· The ABS figures for the year to June show net overseas migration at 285,000. It should be cut back to 70,000. We can do this while increasing the refugee program and keeping family reunion relatively constant.

· Last year’s record population growth for Australia of over 440,000 is taking us down the road to environmental disaster. It is making a mockery of our obligation to pass on to our children a world, and an Australian way of life, in as good a condition as the one our parents gave to us.

· Two examples from the last couple of days – first the Penguin chicks at Phillip Island who starved because there is simply not enough fish in the sea for the adults to bring home to them. Second, the Reserve Bank’s interest rate rise this week. Interest rate rises are being fuelled by house price rises, and these are being fuelled by population growth. Housing affordability is falling, and our children are being denied the same opportunity to purchase a house that we had.

· Population growth is galloping along on all fronts – the number of migrants, students and long term workers is up 15% compared with last year, the number of departures is down, and the birth-rate is up – a record 300,000, with a fertility rate of 1.98%.

· This is putting pressure on water supplies, and upward pressure on food, water, petrol and energy prices. It is damaging the quality of life in our cities through traffic congestion and loss of open space. And everybody’s talking at the moment about how to cut our carbon emissions. It’s pretty hard to reduce your carbon footprint when you keep adding new feet.

· Friday 4th December, 2009

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION ANYONE?

2010-02-07T22:50:00.000-08:00

It is interesting that social democrats join the Green Party chorus by consistently demanding the implementation of "proportional representation", as if that would mean some kind of democratic revolution. But let's be clear. "Proportional" representation only means, according to their understanding, a "fair" distribution of seats between political parties as reflected in their popular vote. It does NOT mean a fair distribution of power in parliament as reflective of public opinion. That is, proportional representation as they promote it is all about the distribution of power between political parties, but NOT about the fair distribution of power between the poltical parties on the one hand, and the people on the other. Politicians of all stripes, but especially those on the left--- that is the enlightened ones who know so much better than the rest of us--- definitely don't want a political arrangement that would allow the people any direct control over their own affairs. Hence the bipartisan revulsion at the result of the Swiss plebiscite where the majority of people voted to ban minarets. The ignorant masses cannot be allowed to impose such things.

No issue better illustrates the fraud of proportional representation as a panacea for our ills than the issue of immigation. Think about it--- two-thirds of Canadians, and a similar percentage of Australians and Britons, have consistently, persistently and adamantly opposed mass immigration---certainly on the scale it has occured in recent decades. Yet just one MP in Australia and two MPs in the UK (to my knowledge) have been able to break from party ranks and echo public opinion in their call for major cutbacks in immigration intakes. There are 350 Labour MPs in the British House of Commons but only one of them has stood up against his governments criminal record of open immigration, an influx that has made Britain the most densely populated nation in Europe. This despite the fact that one poll done by Ipsos MORI established that some 81% of Labour supporters favour a strict limit on immigration numbers. Eighty-one percent ! So not only does Labour not represent the British people but they don't even represent Labour !! And what do Labour politcians and the New Statesmen do? Spend all their time bashing Nick Griffin and the BNP! Attacking immigration critics rather than owning up to their own disasterous and dictatorial policy! And notice that the Australian maverick crusader against mass immigration, Kelvin Thomson, is like Britain's Frank Field, a Labor MP at odds with a Labor administration!

In Canada it is certain that if two out of three voters are opposed to our stratospheric immigation levels, a great many of them are New Democratic Party (NDP) supporters. I would suspect that even a majority of NDP voters are opposed to the position that the NDP takes on this issue. Yet not a single one of the 39 members in the federal NDP caucus will take up their cause. There are no Frank Fields or Kelvin Thomsons in Canada's social democratic parliamentary herd.

How can NDP leader Jack Layton or any one of his trained seals make an ethical case for proportional representation between parties but not demand that his own party reflect the diversity of opinion among its own supporters, never mind the public at large? How can he claim that Stephen Harper's government is illegitimate because it was elected with a minority of votes while he himself was elected with a minority of votes in his own constituency? How could he stand up in the House and offer congratulations to the Nova Scotia NDP for winning the last provincial election when they were also elected with a minority of the popular vote, just as were the NDP in Manitoba and Saskatchewan--- whose legitimacy he never questioned. It is galling that the NDP, like social-democratic hypocrites the world over, present themselves as the paragons of principle when in fact they are the exponents of expediency.

If we are ever going to have proportional representation, then lets have the real deal. Let's have Swiss-style democracy. Then maybe we can turn the country "right" side up.

Tim Murray,
December 12/09

PIN-UP PIN-HEAD OF THE MONTH

2010-02-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

Each month I will nominate pin-head whose exemplary idiocy is a role-model for the politically correct everywhere. May I present Irene Mathyssen, the NDP MP for London-Fanshawe. Or is it the MP for the Third World? Her support for the cultural dismemberment of our country (multicultural-schism), anti-racism (ie. anti-visible majority-ism), equity (ie. quota hiring and affirmative discrimination against Canadian-born white males), runaway population growth (ie. open borders), affordable housing (made too expensive by immigrant-fed urban growth), and unconditional foreign aid (ie. birth incentives) to countries intent on doubling their populations, is de rigeur for New Democrats. Especially for those who keeping mouthing the word "sustainable" when they actually mean cosmetic lifestyle changes in tandem with unchecked economic and population growth.

What makes Irene special is that she best represents what Garrett Hardin described as a "compassionate, shallow" thinker (and that is usuing the term very loosely). When Brishen Hoff told her that stabilizing and reversing the global population was essential to saving the environment, she replied that she opposed that opton because, to use her words, "There is no way humane way to limit population." Interesting logic that. Imagine a surgeon telling you that there was no humane way to remove the tumour that is going to kill you because it would be inhumane to inflict the post-op pain that you would suffer. The concept that overpopulation itself is inhumane was beyond the comprehension of this trained seal.

WEBSITE
Irene Mathyssen
Member of Parliament, London–Fanshawe
Status of Women
Deputy Critic Public Safety

* Elected the Member of Parliament for London—Fanshawe in 2006
* Irene has served as an Ontario MPP and is a member of the Ontario Health Coalition
* She has worked to establish affordable housing, including working for a local tenant advocacy group
* She has worked to promote better childcare and not-for-profit daycare
* A committed community activist, she has been involved in the Pride and the London AIDS walk, the Women’s Community House, the London Coalition Against Pesticides and the Coalition of Canadian Immigrants
* A former English teacher, Irene supports student clubs and activities designed to educate and motivate students about multi-cultural, anti-racism and equity issues

Parliament Hill:
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON
K1A 0A6
Mathyssen.I@parl.gc.ca
Constituency:
1700 Dundas Street
London, Ontario
N5W 3C9
Telephone: (519) 685-4745
Fax: (519) 685-1462

Next to be profiled: Carol James, leader of the BC NDP, who declared that "we must grow our revenues" to pay for an endless shopping list of social programs in the teeth of the collapse of the fossil fuel economy which she doesn't see coming (you need to read to know that). The concept that we should instead slash spending and shrink government and encourage self-reliance and responsibility is an option outside of the ideological box. Growing government and increasing our dependence on it is the "progressive" agenda, don't you know. Government will always be there for us, as it was during Katrina.

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE DAVID GELBAUMS

2010-02-07T22:45:00.000-08:00

Green whores will find other sponsors

Re. The financial troubles of an egomaniacal billionaire patron
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/us/10aclu.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

So poor Mr. Moneybags finds himself in an "illiquid" position and can no longer pay hush money to the Sierra Club . That was $47 million in the last four years on top of the $100 million he paid them to remain mute about immigration some years before that. My heart bleeds for both of them.

The Sierra Club, north and south of the 49th parallel, is a corrupt money-grubbing corporate lackey, like other mainstream green NGOs, whose primary interest is securing and expanding their donor base on behalf of a self-serving bureaucracy. Their "environmental" agenda is prioritized according to what will entice financial support. Hence their now almost complete fixation on climate change at the expense of less sexy but more critically imminent problems like the collapse of biodiversity services and peak everything. Dramatic pictures of collapsing ice shelves and drowning polar bears provoke the interest of potential donors more than the mundane tribulations of species who are being bulldozed out of their homes or poached every day. And notice that the save-the-poster-child species of the month---the Great Spirit Bear, the Rocky Mountain Cariboo, etc.----are always so stunningly photogenic but the slimy and tiny critters of equal or greater importance to the eco-system are not put out by the shop window to be used as a recruiting or fund-raising tool. It is all about money.

Bottom line, take out the Godfather of Open Borders David Gelbaum and there is a ton of corporate money out there to take his place. Just take a look at Christine MacDonald's "Green Inc" and you will appreciate the scale of the corporate penetration of the environmental movement. These people are not environmentalists in any authentic sense. They are careerists and opportunists. Entrepeneurs who market themselves as Green Crusaders. They are the Marshall Petains of our cause, the green collaborators who turn a blind eye to the ecological impact of mass immigration in order to remain in the good books of their corporate benefactors. They are the Kapos who help to organize the wildlife holocaust. I reject the label of "environmentalist" for this reason.

An "environmentalist" attempts to manage the environment to accomodate a growing human population. But a Malthusian attempts to manage a growing human population to accomodate the environment. Environmental NGOs are growth-managers. And growth-managers are growth-enablers. Every dollar donated to an environmental organization is a dollar not donated to a population-reduction group. Every minute of time volunteered to a green quisling organization is a minute lost to the true cause of defending biodiversity.

The most dangerous enemy is not the one who faces us. Not the CEO in a three-piece suit, but the enemy at our backs. He is the self-righteous soft green politically correct hypocrite who decoys sincere dupes toward less consequential symptoms rather than the root cause of our ecological crisis---overpopulation. His proper place is not at the end of a CBC microphone but at the end of a noose of piano wire hung from a lamp post like Il Duce, or roasting on a spit glistening with the lacquer of my putrid piss. Traitors deserve nothing less.

Do you sense my rage and contempt?

THE GREEN BADGE OF COURAGE----a message for Dr. David Suzuki and other green celebrities

2010-02-07T22:40:00.000-08:00

"POPULARITY is the pocket change of life, COURAGE is the hard currency."
Charlton Heston

It takes little courage to take on easy targets.
It takes little courage to excuse the irresponsibilty of the poor by focusing upon the greed and excess of the rich.
It takes little courage to mine white guilt and blame the affluent 20% while absolving the reckless fecundity of the poor 80%.
It takes little courage to mount a pulpit and condemn us for our overconsumption but refuse to acknowledge our overpopulation.
It takes little courage to speak of some other country's overpopulation but remain silent about our own.
It takes little courage to argue the case for accepting millions of environmental refugees but not talk about their ecological impact.
It takes little courage to pretend that hard choices need not be made, and that with just distribution there would be enough to go around.
It takes little courage to join the call for African relief, but not insist it be made conditional on family planning.
It takes little courage to trumpet technological solutions, but not to admit that technological efficiences ultimately provoke more growth and consumpton.
It takes little courage to focus on our per capita consumption, but not admit that it is total consumption that matters---that is, the sum of 'per capitas'.
It takes little courage to plead for "smart growth" but not admit that it is still growth, and a fraudulent failure in the face of runaway immigration.
It takes little courage to plead for an end of "economic" growth but not admit that population growth is a critical component of it.
It takes little courage to concede that population growth is environmentally damaging to North America, but not mention that immigration is its main driver.
It takes little courage to argue for a steady state economy, but forget to say we must drastically shrink the economy (and the population) before we freeze it.
It takes little courage to argue against growth in the abstract, but accept corporate donations from institutions pushing growth.
It takes little courage to jump on the climate change bandwagon, but not object if it monopolizes the agenda and pushes overpopulation off the plate.
It takes little courage to resort to accusations of racism, but not accept that name-calling does not refute arguments or address overshoot.
It takes little courage to pose as a courageous green crusader but shy away from taboo topics (immigration, birth control and population growth).

In summary, it takes little courage to be a counterfeit environmenalist--- a soft green politically correct hypocritical phoney.

Tim Murray
December 10/2009

JUST WHO IS GUILTY OF NEGLIGENCE?

2010-02-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

> http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2009/12/02/CanadaEnvironmentCriminal/
> Is Canada Guilty of Climate Negligence?
>
> William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC
> UBC School of Community and Regional Planning
> 6333 Memorial Road, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z2
>
> In the lead-up to Copenhagen, the Canadian government’s (non)policy on global warming borders on the criminally negligent. This may seem an outrageous assertion, particularly to those lost in the thickening fog of deception churned out by climate change deniers, but please bear with me for a moment.
>
> First, climate change, particularly global warming, is an undisputed fact. The mean global temperature has increased by .8 C° over the last century.
>
> Second, while it is true that Earth’s climate is primarily determined by various non-human factors, including solar output and shifting ocean currents, there have been no changes in these sufficient to explain ongoing temperature increases.
>
> Third, by contrast, human activities have significantly increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Carbon dioxide is up 38% from a preindustrial 280 parts per million to 388 ppm today. Other GHGs have climbed proportionately even more—but the CO2 increases alone are more than sufficient to account for the observed warming.
>
> Fourth, increasingly severe weather events are already displacing or killing tens of thousands of people annually and this trend is likely to worsen. In 2007, ‘The Age of Consequences’ report by Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies argued that: “In the case of severe climate change, corresponding to an average increase in global temperature of 2.6 C° by 2040… nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change…” Contributing author Prof Leon Fuerth noted that rich countries could “go through a 30-year process of kicking people away from the lifeboat” as the world’s poorest face the worst environmental consequences. This with only 2.6° warming— estimates today suggest a truly catastrophic 4° to 6° increase is likely without dramatic preventative action.
>
> In this light, climate change deniers defend a position that will kill millions of people, destroy critical ecosystems and undermine prospects for global civilization. Common sense and social justice demand that the world’s nations move forcefully to prevent the anticipated wave of eco-violence. Failing to act renders foot-dragging governments guilty of moral negligence. Indeed, if this is really a global village, shouldn’t the world community be working to establish legal grounds for negligence actions?
>
> Canadian common law provides useful guidance. Environmental negligence suits focus on compensation for loss caused by unreasonable conduct that damages legally protected interests. Unreasonable conduct means doing something that a prudent or reasonable person would not do, or failing to do something that a reasonable person would do. The plaintiff must establish certain key elements of the tort— cause in fact and proximate cause, damages, legal duty, and breach of the standard of care. Note that fault may be found even in the case of unintended harm if it stems from unreasonable conduct.
>
> The Criminal Code (Section 219) is even clearer that lack of intent to harm is no defence if damage results from conscious acts performed in careless disregard for others: “Everyone is criminally negligent who (a) in doing anything, or (b) in omitting to do anything that it is his duty to do, shows wanton or reckless disregard for the lives or safety of other persons” (where ‘duty’ means a duty imposed by law). Significantly, Section 222(5)(b) states that “a person commits homicide when, directly or indirectly, by any means, he causes the death of a human being, by being negligent (emphasis added).”
>
> How might such reasoning apply to the international arena? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has established with greater than 90% certainty that GHG emissions from human activities have caused “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century” and climate change is clearly capable of causing catastrophic damage. The failure or refusal of major CO2 emitters to reduce their emissions therefore arguably breaches a reasonable standard of care. What is missing in international law is acknowledgment of the offense and the capacity to create and enforce a legal duty to act.
>
> There is no prima facie reason why the behavioural standards imposed by international law should not be as rigorous as those required by domestic law. If human-induced climate change is a cause of death and destruction, then Canada and the United States, countries with among the highest CO2 emissions per capita on the planet, are guilty of “wanton or reckless disregard for the lives or safety of other persons”. Pity that they seem poised once again to undermine the global community’s efforts to reach international agreement on serious GHG emissions reductions.

IS NOT THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT GUILTY OF NEGLIGLENCE?

Here we go again. Bill Rees is putting the goat horns on the Harper government for a criminally negligent non-policy of fighting climate change. Let's run with his assumptions. Let us assume that rising CO2 emssions drive climate change, and that climate change is the worst and most serious calamity ever to befall the human race.

Then the most morally negligent position would be that of Canada's three opposition parties--the Liberals, the NDP and the Greens.Why? Because none of them would actually commit to shutting down the tarsands project. They would only slow it down or freeze it a present production levels. Liberal leader Stephane Dion even stated, absurdly, that he would "green" it.

But the opposition parties would do something else. They would hike the Harper government's stratosphere immigration intake by 25% !!!! At the time of the October 2008 federal election, 3-4 years of business-as-usual immigration would cause GHG emissions equivalent to that of the entire tarsands project. In other words, thanks to our recklessly insane policy of mass immigration, we would be adding the equivalent of another tarsands project every 3-4 years. Put another way, according to John Meyer's calculations (Meyer was head of Zero Population Growth Canada and is a graduate in economics), the immigrants who came to Canada after this policy took off in 1990 have been collectively responsible for 3-4 times as much GHG emission as the tarsands, and have accounted for the transformation of farmland or forests into housing developments of an area the size of 3-4 Torontos. That is, 3-4 times the size of the boreal forest despoiled by the tarsands project. Therefore, the opposition parties by favouring a dramatic increase of immigration as they consistently have, would ACCELERATE the pace of our ruin. A pace even rendered even more quick by the admission of 150,000 more people each year on so-called "Temporary Visas" which always prove to be not so temporary.

Rees himself, after being pressed, will admit that immigration "should be reduced somewhat" from its present level. But incredibly, he would open the floodgates to millions upon millions of climate change refugees, as if they have no ecological footprint. Imagine the logic. We are a country that is "guilty" of high GHG emissions. A country where 40% of the land mass is north of the 60th parallel and the average annual temperature is minus 5.6 degrees. A nation with just 5% of its land arable, and 20% of that arable land classified as "prime class one", the very land that is being paved over due to immigrant-driven population growth the highest of G8 countries. Land that contrary to Rees' fantasies, cannot be defended by smart growth snake oil nostrums. To assert otherwise, as he always does, is a conceit of the planning mentality and intellectually dishonest. Why? Because land-use planning is in the hands of local governments. And what did Professor Robert MacDermid's report on local campaign financing demonstrate---something we all should know---successful local politicians are bought and paid for by developers. And the vast frozen tundras and taiga forests of Canada cannot be home to Rees' environmental refugees. Nor can immigrants be compelled to live in depopulated rural regions that Canadians themselves find unviable for good reason. Out of some "legal" requirement, he would make environmental refugees out of Canadians to accomodate the millions of refugees he forsees. Refugees who would be injected into a country of much higher GHG emissions! Kind of like a hair-of-the-dog cure for a hangover.

The Conservative government, with the worst of intentions, is in fact the "greenest" political party in Canada. That certanly damns it with faint praise. But while Harper is the guy with a lead foot on the gas pedal of our bus hurtling toward the cliff, his opponents would actually floor it if they were behind the wheel. They cannot decouple population and economic growth from environmental damage. We must shrink the economy, not stimulate it. And you can't do that by adding 340,000 foreign-born consumers to it each year, or encouraging higher fertility rates with more generous child benefits packages.

What amazes me is that the counterfeit greens spend so much time being enraged at "deniers"---all of whom should be silenced and jailed it seems. Yet they deny the most obvious fact in the room. Canada's overpopulation. Population growth is not even on their radar. Their mantra is "over-consumption, over-consumption". They would cut our per capita consumption in half but be oblivious if our population doubled in the process. One Sierra Club director told me that the connection between immigration and environmental degradation was "spurious". Green Party leader Elizabeth May says that immigration is a "trivial" component of our environmental problems, and that the immigrants who are doing the real damage are the oil companies involved in the tarsands project. Rees says that there is no reason why "greenfield" acreage cannot be preserved in the face of mass immigration and population growth---an assertion that experience everywhere disputes (Portland Oregon, Los Angeles, and even the greenbelts of the UK). Equally amazing is that people who have built their careers around defending endangered species in Canada or effecting concern about our ecological footprint would suddenly do an about-face at the first sign of a refugee flotilla. Or that they would not breath a word about population growth when the census report revealed how rampant it was , or use the birth of an 18th child to an Abbotsford BC couple as a "teachable moment" to link population growth to GHG emissions. These people are the real skeptics. They are the real deniers and ostriches. And given their acceptance of donations from corporations who have a vested interest in population growth, it is outrageous that environmental NGOs have the chutzpah to accuse climate skeptics of being on the take.

White mea culpas not suffice for solutions. You cannot absolve the poor of all responsibility by focusing exclusively on the greedy excesses of the rich. As Madeline Weld has said, the bottom billion of the world's population have caused as much environmental damage as the top billion. There is surely enough "bad behaviour" to go around. If we are all passengers in a global lifeboat, as open-borders greens maintain, we cannot allow the low footprint guys on one side of it to come over and sit on our laps. There is not much that is morally responsible about drowning everybody. Nature takes no notice of our political, legal or moral sensibilities. The politically correct rhetoric of human rights makes little impression on it. The reality is, the Law of Carrying Capacity trumps Canada's Criminal Code every time.

Tim Murray

QUESTION ABOUT CLIMATE-GATE

2010-02-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

Question: Will "climategate" ultimately have the same impact on true believers that Krushchev's revelations about Stalin in 1956? Or will most react to it as fellow travellers did to the Show Trials in the late 1930s? That is, with denial. My own experience as an observer of BC politics is not a happy one. I grew up in a family that believed that the political left, the CCF-NDP, not only represented the better policies, but had a monopoly on integrity, honesty and fair play. The other side was not only wrong, but greedy and corrupt. No one on the right could possibly be someone who just had an honest difference in perspective.

Along came former NDP finance minister Dave Stupich, the very image of rectitude in his impeccable three piece suit and gentile manner. Party supporters simply could not accept that a man like him in a party like theirs could possibly be guilty of such shocking corruption and grand theft. But thanks to the courage of one whistle-blower, the whole truth eventually came out. Stupich siphoned off charity bingo money into his own coffers. Hence, "Bingogate". For his efforts, the whistle-blower was initially accused of falsehood, treachery and disloyality. But even when he was fully vindicated, fellow party members never forgave him, and their ostracism drove him out. Call it the thin red line. Moral of the story--- true believers will hang in to the bitter end, and when the ugly truth comes out, they will blame the messenger not the instigator. Jimmy Swaggart is still in business, isn't he?

The fudging, falsification and misrepresentation at the Climate Research Unit should ring some bells. In my mind it does not necessarily discredit AGW theory, but it does discredit many of those who have advocated it. Must truth be defended with a bodyguard of lies? What kind of truth is that, then?

WHY ACADEMICS DO NOT CHALLENGE ORTHODOXY

2010-02-07T22:28:00.000-08:00

WHY ACADEMICS DO NOT CHALLENGE ORTHODOXY

“Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier. What I have experienced in my personal life during the last years makes me understand why most people choose not to speak out; job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent.... Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society. This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that demand a particular viewpoint...Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much misinformation exists in the supposed age of information.”The preceding quote came from a Canadian academic who is reviled for his scepticism regarding conventional climate science theory. But is not his experience the same for those who challenge the wisdom of population and economic growth, and particularly, the role that mass immigration plays in it? Shall we then feel comfortable as bystanders when sceptics like him are denounced as blind pariahs in the pay of sinister oil companies while we stay silent? Of what worth is freedom of expression if it only means freedom for those who agree with us? Why do the politically correct highlight the financial connection between such sceptics and the energy companies but ignore the money trail that leads from banks and corporations to environmental organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation, Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club of BC, to name but a few? Why does no one care to ask why the David Suzuki Foundation is accepting money from natural gas giant Encana Corporation and the Royal Bank of Canada? Why aren’t CBC journalists reading the financial reports of environmental NGOs and asking these kind of questions? What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Our political culture is permeated by careerism and corruption. Integrity is for hire. Much vaunted objective scientific detachment is largely a myth. Directly or indirectly, everyone is on the corporate or government payroll. Step over the party line, and you are blacklisted or isolated and sometimes unemployed. Today everyone one is a politician---“if you don’t like my principles I’ll find others for you”--- and only outcasts and hermits are truth-tellers. So much for all the cant on Remembrance Day about ours being a free society. Academic Babbitts in contemporary society are no more independent than the scientists who did research on the V2 rocket. And what of the great masses who toil in the real world? How many people think for themselves or do their own research rather they simply swallow the filtered news spoon-fed by their favourite political party, church, club or association? How many people read to challenge their belief system rather than simply shore it up? How many people who spin out the newsletters for these organizations ever have the fortitude to question one of their tenets? Why do we think “scientists” are endowed with a distinctive conscience when the society around them is on the take? We keep asking, why has no one broke ranks and spoken out? Why do people like David Attenborough, Jane Goddall and James Lovelock wait until one of their feet is in the grave before they break a taboo and identify human overpopulation as a dire threat? Why does David Suzuki not publicly declare that Canada is overpopulated when he has said so privately? Why is there not a single MP in Canada’s House of Commons who will stand up and say the same thing? The reasons are several, but peer pressure is arguably the most important of them, as well love of financial security.

It seems that just as you can’t be too rich or too thin, if you are a scientist on the public leash or corporate dole, you can’t be too timid obedient to your paymaster. There is a direct correlation between the source of research funding and the conclusions of that research, which never seem to displease the underwriters. But conformity is also dictated by the primeval fear of ostracism or banishment from one’s tribe. Orthodoxy comes in many forms and varies from time to place. Today, acceptance of AGW is but one ticket to group acceptance, support for open borders is another. As Australian sociologist Katherine Betts observed in defining “The New Class”, "The concept of immigration control has become contaminated in the minds of the new class by the ideas of racism, narrow self-seeking nationalism, and a bigoted preference for cultural homogeneity....Their enthusiasm for anti-racism and international humanitarianism is often sincere but there are also social pressures supporting this sincere commitment and making apostasy difficult... ideologically correct attitudes to immigration have offered the warmth of in-group acceptance to supporters and the cold face of exclusion to dissenters."

I think we can begin to broaden our understanding of Betts’ conception of the “New Class”, this smug intelligentsia of rootless globe-trotting cosmopolitans who belong to a mutual admiration society of academics, by taking note of their networking. It is very much an Old Boys Club. If one tries to bring one of them down, the rest of the fraternity will be sure to react in his defense, for after all, he is a fellow academic, not one of the great unwashed. And one cannot help but notice how much each “independent” voice for the cause can count on the endorsement of his other back-scratchers when he publishes a book. Tim Flannery endorses a book by David Suzuki and visa versa. Ditto Paul Ehrlich, who rewards Suzuki’s support with praise for a Suzuki book. Much in the way that local merchants will refer clients to each other in the hopes of reciprocation.

The greatest deficit in scientific thinking and political leadership is courage. Courage to break with falsehood at the cost of comfortable and rewarding alliances and friendships. It would be ironic that the one trait that has allowed humanity to prevail—our mutual support and cooperation, our tribalism---will be the trait that ultimately brings us down. Too much group-think and gemeinshchaft, too little iconoclasm and geschellshaft. Pack animals who squandered their intelligence in the pursuit of group membership and a secure rank in the club to become lemmings just when the rest of us relied upon them for leadership.

You may be bright, but if ya ain’t got guts, you’re no bloody use at all.

Tim Murray

December 2/09

ANY FRIEND OF THE CBC IS AN ENEMY OF MINE

2010-02-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

"Friends of Canadian Broadcasting" has sent me their latest bulletin, "Stephen Harper's secret plan to destroy the CBC". It must be read to be believed. Their name, of course, is a misnomer. In actuality the "Friends of Canadian Broadcasting" are "The Friends of the CBC". And the "Canadian" broadcasting they speak of, if one samples the CBC, is the voice of globalism. Canada as seen through the prism of New Canadians and the 5th columnists who pose as journalists and hosts. Their slogan says it all. "Hands Off our CBC!". Pardon me, "our" CBC? CBC Pravda? The mouthpiece of PC Multicultural Growthist propaganda?

These folks are in a lather because American programs are supplanting "Canadian" programs? Programs like "Little Mosque on the Prairie'? Or Mark Kelly's formulaic portraits of heroic failed refugee claimants on the lamb who are struggling to put food on the table while they undercut Canadian jobs? In the context of a massive cultural makeover by third world immigration, it is surreal that this politically correct lobby is carrying on their quaint crusade against "Americanization". Mass immigration is stealing Canadian culture from under their feet and they are training their pop guns on a target that was fashionable in the early 1970s but ridiculously irrlevant now. Why is "Jeapordy" or "The Wheel of Fortune" a bigger threat to my way of life than an installment from Radio Singapore or a South African soap opera? And why do we need a CRTC or any state funded agency to make our choices for us? If Canadian content is that good, why does it require protection? Artsy-fartsies raised a storm about Harper's cutbacks in arts funding before last year's election. But why should my tax dollars be spent subsidizing the art of a bohemian druggie or a struggling actor any more than subsidizing professional sport? Would it not be more just to reduce our taxes so that we may vote, with our extra cash, for the culture that we find worthy? Do we need a government bureaucrat to tell us what is or is not "art"? Real Canadian talent can thrive in any marketplace on its own steam.

Take a look at the programs which cable and satellite companies offer. We are not permitted to cherry pick just those channels which we prefer. Instead we must choose packages or bundles of channels. Within each package of 4-6 channels, there exists some that we prefer, and others that we do not. So for 90 channels that I did not want I paid $73 a month for the 10 that I did want. The satellite TV companies presented me with the same limited option. Why? Because of the CRTC's requirement for companies to meet Canadian content regulations, Canadian programs had to be dispersed amongst the 15 packages to ensure their exposure. So I terminated my TV reception.

Nevertheless, there are some Canadians who believe that without CRTC regulations and the CBC in particular, Canadian culture would die. Fair enough, then showcase Canadian culture on the CBC. But leave politics out of it. I fail to see why I should pay $35 a month so that the CBC can become an instrument of politically incorrect news misinformation and growthist propaganda.

The "Friends of Canadian Broadcasting" invites comment. Then let's give it to them. Let us recount, for their edification, our fruitless attempts to remedy CBC bias by playing according to their rules. That is, by running our complaints past brain-dead, politically correct producers, only to be referred to the CBC Omsbudsman. The object is to eat up the clock and our exhuast our patience. And it works.

The "Friends of Canadian Broadcasting" maintains that "Canadian" culture and the CBC", which they assume to be synomynous, are "worth fighting for". It must be kept strong against "Disney, Hollywood and our enemies within." But "our enemies from within" are found in the graduating classes of the Carleton School of Journalism and the like who serve as the farm time of cultural Quislings in the CBC who have turned a tax-payer funded broadcaster into the propaganda arm of the Immigration Industry. "Canada's Voice" is in fact the voice of imposed foreign colonization and growthism. Canada is not a merely the sum total of imported cultures or a microcosm of the United Nations, it is something home-grown and and native-born. But that is a constituency that these "Friends" and their politically correct mouthpiece, the CBC, will not represent.

Tim Murray
December 1/09

2010-02-07T22:19:00.000-08:00

CANADA'S ENVIRONMENT MUST BE OUR PRIMARY CONCERN Tim Murray, November 29/09

Australian Kelvin Thompson, once more demonstrates, by example, why it is vital that we present the ecological case against mass immigration. Mass immigration is NOT as Samuel Gompers said, fundamentally a "labor issue". Yes, the motive to grow our population has been primarily an economic one--cheap labour and more consumers. BUT the consequences are much more serious than job losses and depressed wages. Our environment, both national and global, is MUCH more critical in its importance than either the economy or our culture. Of course these issues are inter-related. But the ecological impact of immigration must NOT be shunted to the back of the bus in any immigration reform agenda. Canadian language--English or French, and Canadian culture (Judeo-Christian or western humanist) cannot survive in a nation that suffers an ecological meltdown. The nation itself would not endure. When the water you drink is polluted or inaccessible, when the farmland needed to provide Canadians food after international trade has collapsed with stratospheric fuel costs, when our forests are mowed down or our air is unfit to breath, the fact that a lot of people are wearing burkas or turbans and not talking to you will be the least of your worries.

Get real people. Get your priorities straight. I am not suggesting that economic and cultural concerns are not important. They are. That is why I spend much of my time attacking Official Multiculturalism, out-sourcing and the importation of cheap labour. But the environment comes first. It is the lifeboat that carries us. I would like the passengers of that lifeboat to be conversant in English and French, reconciled to Canadian core values, and for the most part, Canadian-born. But surely the most important thing is that the lifeboat remains afloat. I am opposed to mass immigration and an open refugee policy primarily because I believe that too many passengers will swamp it in the rough waters of the post-carbon world ahead.

The fact that the drowning swimmers clambering to get on board are fellow human beings, persecuted people, hungry people, handicapped people, deserving people, skilled people, environmental refugees or people of colour is completely irrelevant. Our obligation is to those already in the boat. And to make it clear to politicians and ordinary citizens alike, Canada is a lifeboat, not an aircraft carrier fitted to be "Home to the World" as the slogan goes. Our country is largely uninhabitable or unsustainable even with the numbers of people who currently live here. Forty per cent of our land mass is north of the 60th parallel. Our average year-round temperature is minus 5.6 degrees centigrade for God's sake. Only 5% of our land is arable and only one fifth of that is classified as "Class 1" prime farmland. And of the at Class 1 land nearly 20% of it is already covered by development. And it is situated precisely in those areas where immigrants choose to settle--within shouting range of the US border. Strict zoning laws will not protect green belts because developers finance the election campaigns of winning local politiicans, and they are the ones who make land-use decisions. That immigrants can be dispersed toward northern or colder localities is also a fantasy in the context of mobility rights defined by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If Canadians won't stay there, neither will New Canadians.

Canada has a false body image. We are reverse anorexics. We look in the mirror and see our selves as too thin and think that we can afford to put on more pounds. Well ,we can't. We are the Australia of the north. A big "little" country. We have room for more people but not the carrying capacity to support them. That is the difference. We need to shed weight and quickly. That other nations are have higher population densities is also irrelevant. Just because they over-booked their hotel is no reason that we have to over-book ours just to siphon off the excess population generated by their irresponsibility. Our obligation to the world is to preserve our biodiversity, not exterminate it to make room for more people on a planet that grows by 78 million people every year. The best favour that we can do for the world is to achieve sustainability for ourselves, as only a sustainable Canada will be in a position to offer international assistance. End of rant. Its off my chest. More about Thomson: (with thanks once more to Mark O'Connor for forwarding this article)

Populate and perish, warns Labor MP

By Ashley Hall for AM

AM | abc.net.au/am

Kelvin Thomson says it is hard to reduce the world's carbon footprint when it keeps adding more feet. (AAP Image: Alan Porritt, file photo)
* Audio: Labor MP claims increasing support for population freeze (AM)
* Related Story: Melting pot set for population boom
* Related Story: More Australian babies than ever before
* Related Story: Are we impotent to address population predicament?

A Federal Labor MP says the Government's push to reduce the size of Australia's environmental footprint is not being helped by its population policy, which is continually adding more feet.

Kelvin Thomson wants the Government to cap Australia's population at 26 million and he says failure to act will create an environmental disaster.

Mr Thomson stepped up his campaign with a speech to the Victorian branch of Sustainable Population Australia.

He says given the amount of emails he is receiving, his message is attracting a lot of support.

"People are concerned about our water supplies and our capacity to meet the food and water demands of a growing population," he said.

"They are concerned about urban sprawl and the quality of life in our cities. They raise issues about the impact on native wildlife. So a variety of concerns."

The catalyst for the feedback was a speech Mr Thomson gave in Parliament in August, calling on world leaders to stabilise the world's population.

He said the world's growing population was to blame for the food crisis, water shortages, housing affordability, the extinction of species and, of course, climate change.

"It is pretty hard to reduce your carbon footprint when you keep adding more feet, and that is true right around the globe.

"With the world on track to increase its population by 50 per cent by 2050, at the same time as scientists are saying we have to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent, clearly there is a problem. And I believe this does need to be discussed at Copenhagen."

The latest Treasury projections indicate that the Australian population could reach 35 million by 2049, and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd argues a population of that size would be good for Australia's long-term national security.

But Mr Thomson is having none of that.

"I don't accept the idea that because Australia is not overcrowded compared to other countries, that we should be copying these other countries," he said.

Mr Thomson's stance puts him in the opposite corner to the Prime Minister. But he says that is not by choice.

"I have said for quite some time that I believe that there is a problem in relation to global population levels," he said.

"If you look at issues to do with our water supplies, with our food supplies, with the pressure on our cities, all of these things suggest that we need to change course."

Mr Thomson says it will take a long time to change the minds of those policy makers who are committed to a bigger Australian population, because they have been lobbied by self-interested big business.

"It needs people to mobilise, to contact media, to contact their members of parliament and to raise these issues on the internet and the like so that there is an understanding both of what is at stake and of community views about this issue," he said.

WHY CAN'T CANADIANS HAVE SWISS DEMOCRACY?

2010-02-07T22:16:00.000-08:00

Re. Swiss vote to ban minarets
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/politics/Swiss-Voters-Approve-Ban-on-Minarets-78086882.html

Is it not outrageous that Canadians are not afforded the same democratic instrument as Switizerland? Citizen initiatives that can be put to a vote and the will of the people imposed on the traitorous political class? No wonder the elite does not want to see direct democracy in Canada. They know that their game plan for the country would be challenged and rejected.

Why is that only at the local level that plebiscites and referenda are routinely held? Why am I asked if I would approve an expenditure for a new ice arena or park development but I am denied the right to vote on how many zillions of people will be allowed to settle in my country? Are the people only to be trusted to govern themselves locally? How many decades more do we have to bear the burden of this elitist British model of government, born in an era when the propertied class shut the great masses of citizens out of the political process?

Every time we ask that parliament represent our interests, some self-serving politician trots out an ancient Burkean dictum about a member of parliament not owing us his opinions but rather "his good judgment". Well, we have seen what this "good judgment" has resulted in. The loss of our country. The trade-off between more direct democracy and representative "democracy" is not the cliched option of "rule by the incompetent many" vs. "rule of the corrupt few". Instead, representative democracy has come to mean "rule by the corrupt and incompetent few". I for one, do not need to be "represented". I can seek out my own information and come to my own conclusions about state policy, thank you very much. I don't need to delegate my independent thinking to a careerist or opportunist sitting in the House of Commons. These people may have an independent thought now and then, but they never act on it, behaving instead like trained seals who pop up like gophers when a vote is called in the House. Once in a blue moon, as with the recent vote regarding the gun registry, some brave souls will break ranks with their party and vote according to their own counsel. But 99% of the time they vote en bloc. They don't represent us, but their party machine. It is time the great majority of Canadians stood up to have their vote recorded, which would be a "no" not just to their "representatives" in parliament, but to the whole elitist system of "representative" democracy.

Tim Murray
November 29/09

WHY WE MUST STOP GROWTH---IN A NUTSHELL

2010-02-07T22:12:00.000-08:00

"More people means less for all. The plunder of Earth precludes sustainability. Resource drawdown portends collapse. We must stop the juggernaut of growth. Now."

Madeline Weld

WHO MADE THE MOST IDIOTIC REMARK IN 2009/

2010-02-07T22:04:00.000-08:00

The Vancouver Sun has commented on the auditor general's report. They conclude that immigration needs an overhaul. But their recommendations rest on this fatally obsolete conception: "we need a clearer mission. What kind of immigrants should we be seeking to keep our economy growing?" http://www.vancouversun.com/news/immigration+policy+procedures+need+overhaul/2196114/story.html

More economic growth? Have these people heard of climate change, biodiversity loss and peak oil? Do they really think that economic growth can continue---or must continue---ad infitum? Yes, sadly they do, along with all political parties, the Conference Board of Canada, and every Chamber of Commerce in the country.

As we are but seven weeks from the New Year, I would propose a contest. Let's pool our archive of idiotic remarks made in 2009 from as many jurisdictions as we can and award a trophy to the winner. Lets make December 28th the deadline for submissions. Here is mine:

Campaigning against the new comprehensive goods and services tax introduced by BC Premier Gordon Campbell, the "HST", NDP Opposition leader Carole James stood on a stage alongside a former nemesis, right-wing populist and former Premier Bill Vander Zalm, and declared to a raucous crowd, "The Campbell government's HST tax will slow economic growth at the very worst time." Which begs the questions, "Is there ever a bad time to slow economic growth? Is it good to re-fuel a runaway train so that it can resume its reckless speed toward the cliff? Should we try to "fix" the system, or change it?"

The NDP answer was given by federal leader Jack Layton last year in a speech in Toronto, "growth is good, so long as it is shared." But rather than working to share growth, it would best if social democrats would work to see that people would equally share unemployment in the form of a shorter work week. People would work less, buy less and pollute less. Full employment, poverty reduction and environmental protection can be all be accomplished without economic growth, which is failing to achieve those goals and failing badly.

Tim Murray
November 7/09

IS ELIZABETH MAY A CBC MOUTHPIECE OR IS IT THE OTHER WAY AROUND?

2010-02-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

IS CANADA'S GREEN GAULEITER A CBC MOUTHPIECE OR IS THE CBC THE MEDIA ARM OF ELIZABETH MAY?

Check this out: http://kerstenskolumn.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/elizabeth-may-to-run-in-saanich-and-would-happily-become-environment-minister-in-a-liberal-government

Elizabeth May, the parachute Green Party candidate for North Saanich and the Islands, declared that she would be happy to serve as an Environment Minister in a Liberal government. (Was there ever a better reason for voting Conservative?)

This makes sense for several reasons. First, she is above all else a careerist and an opportunist. Getting elected and achieving office are her paramount concerns. No surprise there. She is after all a politician and politicians tend to want to get elected. But the Green Party was to be something else, something different than the other parties, not just a mainstream party with a green hue, and certainly not a wing of the Liberal Party. It was to be a grassroots party with a minimum of hierarchy, where decisions were made consensually rather than from a brute contest of power. "Winner take all" was not to be their approach to democracy, either within the party or without. That is what made May's unilateral willingness to join a Liberal cabinet shocking. Or was it? The fact is, power in the Green Party is centralized around her leadership--she lent impetus to a trend that was evident even before her election, for despite their pereniel call for democratic electoral reform, the Green power brokers around May do not believe in proportional representation in their own party.They really do not want to allow grassroots Green Party sentiments to prevail on a policy level. Case in point. In the fall of 2004, the federal Green Party tinkered with a democratic experiment. They permitted on-line voting by members on policy proposals. Some 56% of voting members favoured a policy which would restrict immigration in the interests of achieving population stability in Canada. Repeat-- a clear majority of participating Green Party members voted to restrict immigration. One insider who played a role in the process remarked that the winning percentage would have been a full two-thirds of the vote if the resolution had excluded specific mention of immigration and talked instead of simply stabilizing the country's population level, which is a function of net migration and fertility rates. That in itself would have been a rebuke of every thing May and her clique now stands for. And that is why the democratic experiment in on-line democracy was scrapped. Green members spoke and the clique didn't like what they heard. So now the Green Party is guided by a sustainability strategy of absurd contraditions.

On the one hand she May often repeated Paul Ehrlich's famous remark that "growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". Yet on the other she has consistently and stridently argued for a stratospheric immigration intake that would exceed the present levels, which even now is the second highest in the world on a per capita basis, and gave us the highest--- that is the worst--- populaton growth rate of the G8 group. It is evident that Ms. May regards economic growth as cancerous, but population growth as quite OK. In fact, she has called muliticulural immigration "Canada's great project", as if the objective of fragmenting the culture is a holy crusade that justifies the subdivision of farmland, urban overcrowding pollution and the loss of biodiversity. More fascinating is the implied concept that Canada could ingest her immigration quota of 330,000 consumers every year--or 1% of the population---and not grow the economy. Or that this population and economic growth can be decoupled from urban sprawl and Green house gas emissions.

Other than intellectual dishonesty, political ambition and an anti-democratic impulse, Elizabeth May's true colours are revealed by the wardrobe she wore as a hamburger flipper at the Green Party fundraiser last summer. Take a look. Le Vrai Chef is wearing a cowbay and an apron in Canadian red, with, wouldn't you know, the CBC emblem featured prominently on the front. That says it all, doesn't it? Elizabeth May a walking billboard for CBC Pravda. A tag team of misrepresentation and denial. One wonders though. Who is shilling for who? Is Elizabeth May playing Charlie McCarthy or Edgar Bergen? Is the CBC the mouthpiece of her mushy soft green, cultural relativist open borders mentality, or is Elizabeth May the mouthpiece of CBC corporate ideology? Will CBC Omsbudsman Vince Carlin be joining her in Ignatieff's cabinet too?

Maybe then Canada will no longer be referred to as the True North, Strong and Free, but the True North, Strong and Muzzled. A nation that proudly respects your right to an opinion, but will make damn sure that no one else hears it. A land of cultural diversity and intellectual conformity. A nation that is "Home to the World" but not to those who were born in it.

Tim Murray
November 27/09

WHY THE ECONOMY MIGHT NEVER GROW AGAIN

2010-02-07T21:55:00.000-08:00

This recession could be a permanent one. Don't believe me? Ever hear of peak oil?

The economy (or dollars spent on all goods and services consumed) is an approximation of how much natural resources are exhausted by humans.

The size of the economy is sometimes referred to as the GDP.

If the economy isn't growing, it is referred to as a recession.

The men behind the curtain (elite bankers) controlling their media puppets know that fossil fuel energy is running out.

They know that we cannot extract energy any faster even if we wanted to because fossil fuels are drying up.

The economy requires energy. Every transaction of a good or service requires energy. Without increasing the rate of energy extraction, the economy cannot grow.

When the economy lacks sufficient energy to grow, the human footprint cannot expand.

If the population grows when the human footprint or GDP doesn't, then each person is forced to make do with less.

The men behind the curtain want you to believe that:

a) energy is unlimited and that overpopulation is not a problem
b) if the economy doesn't grow it isn't due to lack of energy, it is due to poor financial management or some political bad actor
c) humans are changing the climate by burning fossil fuels
d) greenhouse gas emissions are growing and this growth needs to be stopped and can be stopped without reducing population growth or economic growth

All four of these media messages are false.

So the inevitable future is that the men behind the curtain will impose a carbon tax on you.

They will use their media to tell you that the carbon tax is necessary to save the world from climate warming and increased parts per million of C02.

Nevermind the fact that as CO2 increases, plant life flourishes.

Nevermind the fact that a warmer climate can support more bioproductivity.

Nevermind the fact that the media has not yet shown any real evidence that the earth's climate is warming instead of cooling.

The men behind the curtain will attempt to hide the fact that peak oil will force you to pay more to consume less.

The media will try to conceal overpopulation and energy depletion.

They'll say that the reason most people's standard of living has gone down is because we must save the planet by reducing atmospheric C02.

Then you can feel good about shivering in your house when you are unable to afford enough natural gas to keep warm in the winter.

Because after all, you are helping to avoid reaching a tipping-point level of CO2, right?

Brishen Hoff

© November 25, 2009

WHY DO WE PLAY GOD BY HELPING PEOPLE LIVE IN MISERY?

2010-02-07T21:51:00.000-08:00

"We summarize the situation by saying: 'There is a shortage of food.' Why don't we say, 'There is a longage of people'? Garrett Hardin

Once more there is a clarion call to send food aid to Ethiopia, which is suffering its fifth major famine since 1958. As always, the remedy is thought to be the immediate provision of food by foreign sources, just as it was 25 years ago when Bob Geldoff led an international crusade to save starving children and adults in that foresaken nation. As a consequence, the population has since doubled from 40 to 81 million people, and now we are told that if we don't act now, 6.2 million Ethiopians will die of starvation before the New Year. Dr. Russell Hopfenberg has documented the validity of the Malthusian and Hardian insight that human beings, like the species Darwin observed, only grow their numbers when food is made more available, postponing the day of reckoning until an even greater number of people will return to exhaust food resources and then die. But the following observation confirms that comprehension is not exclusive to scientists. People with half a brain and a pair of functioning eyeballs can come to similar conclusions. Unless of course, their rational, scientific judgment and vision is impaired by religious obscurantism and soppy (in)'humane-itarianism'. Lo Fleming is one individual with a clear head:

"In a small rural village in Mexico they traditionally had many children, but because of the limited in advance in medicine most of the children would die. This was their culture. When their children would die the villagers would have beautiful funerals. It was sad, but beautiful and because of this there would be enough food for everyone in the village.

Years pass…the US steps in and they are horrified at the dying children. The funerals make everyone sad so the US decides to “help” the people in this small rural village, but they still have the same amount of children. Of course you can deduct what happened. There are too many people and not enough food. And so what do we in the US do again, we “fix it” by giving them food…

I don’t know…that story always seemed very cruel to me. If people had just left things alone, but how can you leave things alone. I think in America there is this thing that we feel we have to help everyone to be just like us, but we do it in this very half assed way.

It always seems to make things worse.

We always think we’re being nicer by saving people from death regardless of the quality of life. I would never want to play God with people, but who are we to play God by helping them live in misery."

Tim Murray, November 11/09

PS

I would rather be operated on by a cold calculating bastard of a surgeon with a heart of stone and steady hands, than a clumsy Good Samaritan gushing with good intentions who would cripple or kill me with his compassion. God save us from those with high-minded motives.

Canada's ultimatum to Africa, Afghanistan, Haiti and the Philippines, among others, should be: "No condoms, no food. Take it or leave it. We'll take our philanthropy elsewhere, to nations like Thailand or Madagascar who are serious about helping themselves. Get with the program or get off the gravy train!" And to Monbiot and the Green apologists: "Stop focusing on the greedy excesses of the rich in order to excuse the irresponsibility of the poor. Blame belongs to all of us. Climate change is not the only game in town. Habitat destruction, poaching and deforestation by the desperate billion rivals our sins of 'emission' in the affluent millions." TM

THE BBC BETRAYED ITS MANDATE

2009-10-25T20:13:00.000-07:00

THE BBC BETRAYED ITS MANDATE

So what else is new in state broadcasting?

According to those polled by an ICM survey conducted on October 23rd and 24th, following the grilling of British National Party leader Nick Griffin on a BBC television show the previous day, fully one third of the 504 respondents support the BNP policy that “UK-born ethnic minorities should lose all benefits to pay for them to leave.” And two-thirds felt that the mainstream parties had no credible policies on immigration. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8324455.stm

Yet the BBC engineered a panel and a packed London audience that excluded such sentiments in what may be termed as a premeditated verbal lynching of Griffin and his party. It is ironic that the BBC and the stacked deck they presented on stage are no doubt stridently supportive of preferential hiring practices that would secure employment in every institution for ethnic or racial minorities in the proportion to their numbers in the general population. For it is obvious that neither they nor the political elite favour proportional representation for politically incorrect views. It may be argued that they discharged their democratic duty merely by having Griffin appear on a television “interview”. But an interview should not consist of one man facing the vitriolic and unanimous hostility of a mob, including the presenter. Rather, it should consist of an impartial moderator who referees a balanced exchange of ideas. What Nick Griffin said or did not say in the past should not be the exclusive fixation of an interviewer or those ranged against him. What he or his party say about the future in a broad range of policies is at least of equivalent interest.

In the fine tradition of state broadcasters like the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), the BBC betrayed its mandate. According to its own guidelines as articulated in 2001: “Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All BBC programmes and services should be open-minded, fair and show a respect for the truth. No significant strand of thought should go unreflected or under represented on the BBC.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/editorial/prodgl/index.shtml And clearly, the poll results from IMC research and the recent election of two BNP politicians, including Nick Griffin indicates that Griffin’s views constitute a “significant strand of thought” in British society. Call them odious, disgusting, vile or deceitful if you may, but given the evidence, you cannot call them uncommon or un-British. In fact a poll reported by the Daily Telegraph revealed that support for the BNP rose after Griffin’s inquisition, and some 22% are actually prepared to vote for the BNP. So the question then is, on what basis can the Welsh secretary or any other politician or commentator demand that in a democratic society a citizen cannot give voice to opinions that reflect those of one to two-thirds of the electorate? Proscribing views that one judges “racist”, “hateful” or un-British presumes that objective criteria exist for those sins and that those who can identify them are qualified to make those judgments. And rigging a debate so that those views cannot be presented in coherent and comprehensive way is tantamount to censorship. More than that, it is a presumptuous violation of the rights of those who should have the opportunity to hear proscribed views. In an authentic democracy, the people have a right to hear or read reputedly “racist” remarks and make their own judgments. If they are not to be trusted with that right, then elections are of dubious merit.

Whether Griffin’s contribution is helpful or not is a matter of opinion. Some of those who oppose the BNP say that the broadcast was beneficial in that it allowed people to see Griffin’s true colours as, in the words of Lord Carey, “a squalid racist”. Other opponents, including Carey, lamented that the BBC made a mistake and that the interview was a gift to the BNP. In my view, Griffin is to be credited for putting immigration on the front burner. Without the threat of losing support to the BNP, what incentive exists for any of the main parties to satisfy the wishes of the majority of Briton in this area?

It is however, very unfortunate that Griffin, and Enoch Powell before him, have framed the issue in racial terms, giving growthists the home field advantage of tapping into public antipathy to racial discrimination. The most critically relevant debate should be fought on the more neutral battleground of population growth and its impact on sustainability. That is, first and foremost, the discussion should revolve around the optimum number of citizens rather than their pigmentation or composition, and then on culture, as distinct from race, as it may or may not affect social cohesion or fertility rates. Culture matters, but numbers matter more, and race shouldn’t matter at all. Try getting the BBC, the CBC or the ABS to understand that.

Tim Murray

October 25/09

KIWI PROFESSORS DEAD WRONG--the carbon footprint of an SUV is 11 times greater than a dog

2009-10-25T00:33:00.000-07:00

KIWI PROFESSORS DEAD WRONG
The Carbon Footprint of an SUV is more than 11 times that of a dog

Professors Brenda and Robert Vale argue that dogs have such a large carbon footprint that they are twice as damaging as driving an SUV. Their recommendation? Give up pet ownership for less environmentally impactful and more edible proteins like rabbits, hamsters and fish. According to this logic, eating dogs would be climate-friendly. http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/2987848/Save-the-planet-time-to-eat-dog

But according to Helmut Burkhardt, their calculations are dead wrong:
“I am afraid the numbers are out of wack. Here is a ‘Fermi Calculation’ , a rough estimate.
A car driven by 100 kW power for 100 h to cover 10 000 km would use 10 000 kWh/year.
A dog ‘driven’ by 100 W food power for 24 hours would use 2.4 kWh/day, or 876 kWh/year.”
In other words, an SUV costs more than eleven times as much energy as a dog. I personally think that if drivers traded their SUVs in for a rickshaw or sled led by a dog team, the EROI for dogs would be superior to the EROI for SUVs. And that is not factoring in the energy that dogs provide you in mental health benefits. In fact the EROI ratio for dogs is most probably better than for wives in that area. (Ask Mickey Rooney or Paul McCartney. Experiment: Lock your dog and your wife in the trunk (boot) of your car and walk away for an hour, then return and open it up. Which one is happier to see you?)

One option seldom considered is cannibalism, a proven instrument for those Polynesians who achieved a sustainable population for centuries. To test the market, I would suggest that Britain’s four million vegetarians be fed to the 57 million omnivores on that crowded island, who feeling as claustrophobic as they do, should be happy to digest and compact them. If butchered efficiently, British vegetarians could supply the protein needs of British meat-eaters for the best part of a year, and reduce carbon emissions in the bargain. Sir Paul McCartney could be served up on a buffet with baby seal meat just to kick off the campaign, and his estate could be seized by the government and its proceeds used to provide free condoms for every male on the planet --- a more cost-effective prophylactic against climate change than any budget for a transition to green technology. Perhaps Sir Bob Geldoff could be included in the menu too, thereby reducing the protein requirements of Africa that his philanthropy generates.

Tim Murray
October 25/09

DOG WALKS OUT ON CHURCH SERMON--Was he making a Malthusian statement?

2009-10-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

DOG WALKS OUT ON CHURCH SERMON
Was he making a Malthusian statement?

On Sunday, October 18th, 2009, my yellow Labrador Retriever, “Barney”, turned his back on Jesus and took four steps toward Eternal Damnation. For it was on that day in my small island community that the United Church of Canada opened its doors to dogs so that they could receive a blessing on what they designated as “St. Francis of Assisi Day”.

St. Francis, as you probably know, was an early pioneer of “Green Living”, a man who gave up all his wealth to the poor, dedicating his life the virtues of simplicity and the love of all of God’s creatures, including our beloved pets. He lived simply so that others could simply live, and thus was obviously not a favourite of the financial planning industry.

The minister, “Mimi”, made note of the fact that the letters in the word “dog” were the same as the letters for the word for our Lord “God”. (For dyslexic Christian dog-lovers, a kind of Holy Duality I suppose). This, she maintained, was no accident, for dogs were sent here to be our divine role-models. Their unconditional love for us showcased the unconditional love that we should give to our Holy Father. Her dearly departed dog, a beautiful young Dutch Sheppard named “Sarah”, treated her daughter like a god, and it was this example of uninhibited love and loyalty that strengthened their faith. Sarah had served a purpose in her brief life, and that was as a teacher.

Mimi then read biblical passages in memory of St. Francis, and then called my lab forward for a blessing. (This was perhaps disappointing for Barney, for as a lab he might have preferred baptism.)Until this point Barney had been lying passively at my feet in the front row, just ten feet from the minister. All were impressed by his decorum and his quiet veneration of the sacred venue, a small church almost a century old with an inviting stain glass window that allowed the mid-morning sun to highlight the glistening dark lacquered wainscoting and pews, and a spotless bright blue carpet that Barney didn’t dare stain.

When he was beckoned Barney perked his ears and fixed his gaze on her outstretched hand, believing that it might hold a communion wafer, until he apparently realized that this minister was affiliated to the wrong Christian denomination and that wafers were not on offer. So he remained stationary and skeptical, no doubt in the hope that she might sweeten the pot of friendship with something more substantial than a mere blessing. Eventually I had to stand up and remand him to her custody by leash. He then dutifully sat down beside her as she laid her hand upon him and gave him the Lord’s blessing, followed by the Lord’s prayer, which was recited by all those present, saving the dogs that is.

It was at this moment that I thought that Barney was amenable to moral instruction, but as the sermon began, he rolled over and ignored her. It had been my forlorn hope that his homosexual fantasies might be cured by prayer and bible study, but it soon became apparent that the prospect of redemption was not a sufficient incentive to dissuade him from following his wicked course. Finally, he grew restive and broke from my grasp, running down the aisle in hot pursuit of a (male) black poodle, “Inka”. When I separated them, he made for the door and flopped down in front of it, obviously positioned for the earliest exit. He was content to remain in his default position—that of a semi-comatose Sphinx---until the minister began talking about what Christ demanded of us in response to the world’s problems.

Her theme was that instead of blaming institutions, we should, by our personal conduct, lead by example, and thereby inspire others to follow our path. If we love the environment, we should re-cycle, consume less and strive to live as St. Francis did----simply. It was a message fully in concert with the culture and religion of the island, a syncretistic blend of mushy New Age feel-goodism, soft green environmentalism, Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism, with David Suzuki and the Delai Lama as god-heads forming a duet of denial. In short, the very antithesis of my ethical orientation.

It was when Mimi spoke of the global food crisis and how sharing our bounty and our love would address it, that Barney whined to be let out. He couldn’t take it anymore either. Unlike the humans present, he knew that he was a pack animal, and that as such, when you are presented with a feeding opportunity, you wolf it down and then subsequently share it as vomit with the pack. Teenagers display this instinct on occasion too, I have observed, with their ritual of fast food followed by strong drink.

It seems that Barney had silently absorbed my “lifeboat ethics” and knew instinctively that when there is not enough to go around, its family first, and that reducing his paw-print would not compensate for the ever expanding number of paws. It was at that moment that I had an epiphany: it was in his gesture of defiance that Barney was acting as my teacher, showing the way. He turned his back on Jesus, and pulled me like a sled dog back to toward The Gospel of St. Garrett of Hardin, and together we walked for hours in the forest where shafts of sunlight pierced through tall conifers to fall on maples of golden leaves which illuminated our passage. Heathens both, it seemed upon reflection fitting that in the same fashion as my late brother Al, my ashes will one day be scattered on Barney’s grave, to symbolize the fact that our respective species have exactly the same cosmological significance.

On that point, both Darwin and St. Francis would be in probable agreement.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
October 18/09

The Good Shepherd Is Calling Me Home

2009-10-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

The Good Shepherd is Calling me Home

I was a sheep who lost his way but now the Good Shepherd is calling me home.

At last, at long last, I have found it. After decades of aimless wandering, of searching for answers to unanswerable questions, I broke down, fell on my knees and begged for forgiveness. Then I invited Charles Darwin into my heart. It was at that moment that I surrendered my fate to His will. In return He has given me the strength I needed to roll over and surrender to my fate as an inconsequential member of a doomed species on a doomed planet in a universe that will implode and compress everything into an infinitesimally small hole. I think cosmologists are calling it “smart growth”. High density living—an environmentalist’s dream---will finally be realized.

My Lord Darwin made me realize that like the rest of humanity, I am at a crossroads. One road leads to my imminent extinction, while the other leads to total despair. I know that Charles Darwin will inspire me to make the right choice. I feel rejuvenated, born again. With a renewed sense of meaninglessness and lack of purpose, I feel impelled to go out in the world and share the Good News that there is no hope, no durable legacy. All of my good works and all the artifacts of civilization will be reduced to nothing. The pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Mona Lisa and everything I said to my Aunt Monica will be no more and no evidence will exist that they actually existed.. Ground to dust and incinerated by the supernova to come. That’s if a thermonuclear war, another K 2 event, climate change or peak everything doesn’t get to us first. We will take our place in the fossil record of failed prototypes, and then even those imprints will be wiped from memory by a cataclysmic event.

Yes, it is all beginning to make no sense to me now. Everything is as clear as mud. My life has served no good (or bad) purpose. And neither has yours either, you miserable and insignificant worm---- so relax and feel at one with an eventually collapsing universe beyond your pitifully feeble comprehension.

Hallelujah, peace at last, peace at last. Thank an imaginary God in heaven--- peace at last!

Tim Murray
October 23/09

PS Unfortunately my evangelism will need funding. I am not interested in your money, so don’t bother to forward any of it to Box 433, Hamilton, Bermuda. I will repeat that, don’t send your money to Box 433, Hamilton, Bermuda. But I should point out that Darwin takes Visa or Master Card, and He will be temporarily resident at the above address.

©copyright 2009 TM

HOW TO TELL CANADIANS FROM AMERICANS: A Guide Book for the Unwary

2009-10-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

How To Tell Canadians From Americans
A Guide Book for the Unwary

Too many people in the Commonwealth, and outside of it as well, fail to differentiate between Canadians and Americans. Canadians find that very insulting. I know I do.

It must be conceded though that, from afar, the Canadian English dialect is not unalike many American dialects to the untrained ear, and to those not intimately acquainted with North American life our conduct and appearance would indeed seem indistinguishable from Americans. Sure, Americans drink watered-down beer, play boring 4-down football, don’t live for ice hockey, say “huh” instead of “eh” and don’t know what an adverb is. But other than that, we blend in. Especially when a Canadian becomes a movie star or a comedian. Then to Americans, he always was an American. Nevertheless, I would assert that there is a distinctive Canadian personality, and it can be evidenced by our respective attitudes to freedom and national pride. Attitudes that can be illustrated by contrasting the following statements:

American: “Give me liberty or give me death.” (Patrick Henry)
Canadian: “Give me an entitlement or I will vote you out of office.”

American: (Quoting Voltaire) “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Canadian: “I don’t agree with what you have to say so take me off your email list.”

American: “It’s a First Amendment issue”.
Canadian: “It’s a Human Rights issue.”

American: “I want to be free.”
Canadian: “I want to be safe.”

American: “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Canadian: “Peace, Order and Good Government.”

American: “God helps those who help themselves.”
Canadian: “I need government funding for this.”

CNN (American): “We welcome your views,”
CBC (Canadian): “We welcome your views but we will make damn sure no one else will hear them.”

American: “Everyone has a right to their day in court.”
Canadian: “Send everyone to Kangaroo Court (The Human Rights Tribunal) and watch the defendants file for bankruptcy while the taxpayers pick up the complainants’ costs.”

American: “I can’t argue with you there man, I think you’ve made a good point”.
Canadian: “Racist!”

American: (Quoting Descartes) “I think, therefore I am.”
Canadian: “It must be true, I heard it on the CBC this morning.”

American (Quoting JFK) “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge truth and falsehood in an open market of ideas is a nation afraid of its people.”
Canadian: (Quoting any Canadian politician) “We can’t talk about immigration because there are too many bigots out there. “

American: (Quoting Thomas Jefferson): “The only school for liberty is liberty”
Canadian: “You can’t have freedom without responsibility. The people must be educated.” (by the CBC of course).

American: “Let’s put this question to a referendum” (ie. a proposition or initiative).
Canadian: (Quoting Edmund Burke) “A member of parliament owes his constituents not his opinion but his good judgment (ie. the good judgment of the party whip).” Modern translation: “Government knows best”.

American: “Let it all hang out”
Canadian: “This editor will not accept submissions that are racist, sexist, homophobic. ethnocentric, or disrespectful to transgendered dwarfs who are differently abled.”

American: “The Second Amendment guarantees the First Amendment.”
Canadian: “Guns kill people.” (Matches cause arson).

American: “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”.
Canadian: “If guns are outlawed, criminals won’t use them, because it would be against the law for them to do so.”

American postman: “Through rain, sleet or hail, the mail will always get through”
Canadian postman: “That’s not in the contract.”

American (firefighter): “Get the hell out of here NOW! MOVE IT!”
Canadian (firefighter): “ Uh, ahem….Excuse me sir, but could you possibly consider forgetting about saving your CD collection and leaving your house rather imminently, if that is at all possible? I am sorry if I am offending you but I do think you might be negligent in putting your possessions above the safety of your children. Unless your cultural values clash with mine, that is, then of course you are perfectly within your right to ignore my advice and practice your customs which I will celebrate at your funeral service as having enriched my life. I think we can negotiate a peaceful solution to our differences here, if we are sensitive to them. I am sorry to have to convey this information in English, but all 52 of our translators are presently preoccupied, and our fire brigade is not yet inclusive of the entire United Nations whose absence must be a result of systemic racism and not the fact that most foreign-born applicants are 90 pound weaklings who can’t navigate 5 steps up or down a ladder with anything heavier than a 5 kilogram bag of sugar on their backs.”

American: “Hello, this is customer service, can I help you?”
Canadian: “ Yeah, this is customer service but I’m on my coffee break right now…can you phone back in another half-hour maybe?”
Customer then demands, “Let me speak to your manager. Hello, are you the manager”?
Canadian manager replies: تعلم اللغة العربية
Canadian customer answers, “I am sorry sir, I didn’t mean to offend you by speaking to you in one of our official languages, or in a communication style that affronts your cultural sensibilities. May I offer an apology for all the historical wrongs that were committed by people with my skin pigmentation long before I was born but whose actions I am nevertheless responsible for? Would a generous compensation package to accompany my groveling English-Canadian apology heal the scars of the trauma that my phone call has put you through? I don’t understand Arabic yet, but I did make out the words “Human Rights Tribunal”. I must congratulate you sir, on your ambition and success in acquiring precisely those words in our language which will allow for your smooth integration into our society. You have met me halfway, so now it is up to me to bow down to your great prophet, Muhammad. Allah Akbar and have a nice day!” Then he hangs up the phone, and mutters bitterly, “That goddam camel-pumper!”, and then reflexively looks over his shoulder in panic that someone overheard him or the Thought Police had planted a bug in his room. Now that’s nation-building!

American customer’s response: “Look buddy, the language here is English, get it? You either serve me in English and to my satisfaction or I’m getting a refund and taking my business elsewhere. Do you hear me Bin Laden? And BTW, I want to see Christmas decorations up in your store this December. Those are our traditions and you knew that coming in.”

Tim Murray,
October 18/09

By Subsisting on Air, We can DOUBLE our populationh

2009-10-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

By Subsisting on Air, We can DOUBLE our population

Proponents of 'green living" tell me that by adopting spartan habits and living like Ghandi, we could make room for many more billions of human beings. Makes a lot of sense. Squeeze together more tightly so that more people can fill in the gap. Then repeat the process ad infinitum. But how could we feed such a population? Vegan proselytizers argue that we could do that by abstaining from meat consumption, thereby freeing up more resources to feed more people, who of course, will breed more people who will in turn inflict even greater ecological damage than ever before. Gotta love those efficiency paradoxes! But why stop at veganism? Why not a permanent fast, modeled on the lifestyle of cultists who claim to be drawing nourishment exclusively from oxygen?
Perhaps we could become a race of 15 billion “breatharians” who simply subsist on air in a world where thirst is decoupled from water use and hunger is decoupled from food use. As our population grows, so grows the pool of our ideas. As Julian Simon hypothesized, the law of averages would dictate that twice the number of people would double our chance of finding a genius who could invented a technology that would resurrect extinct species and replenish the soil without fossil fuel fertilizers. Failing that, we could experience a decoupling of our temporal existence entirely from a new extemporal life as disembodied spirits. A thermonuclear war over the desperate competition for scarce resources, the collapse of biodiversity services or searing temperature rises would do that for us. Freed from our earthly moorings, we would then be free from all ecological constraints, a state of being which growthists have already attained---in their imagination. The sky is the limit!

Tim Murray

"SMART GROWTH" A TEMPORARY SOLUTION AT BEST

2009-10-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

“SMART GROWTH” A TEMPORARY SOLUTION AT BEST

The prime cause of the affordable-housing shortage, long commutes and worsening traffic in the Bay area and elsewhere is the "incessant population growth," writes veteran of Earth Day 1971,B. Meredith Burke in the San Francisco Chronicle. Calling even the best "smart growth" planning a temporary solution, he says that the only way to stop sprawl and ensure sufficient affordable housing is to halt population growth. 8/1/1998

So how do we stop population growth. Birth control or border control? BOTH.

SMART GROWTH CANNOT BE AN EXCUSE FOR MASS IMMIGRATION

2009-10-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

Script for the Frosty Wooldridge radio program of Sept. 30/09:

Frosty this will be a short program so I can’t afford to be too ambitious in covering too many facets of our immigration crisis. So I want to take 10 minutes here to focus on one fundamental assertion, that is, mass immigration threatens our food security.

Now this may come as a shock to some but most of Canada consists of permafrost tundra, mountains, wetlands and boreal forest hostile to human habitation. We have a large land capacity but not a large carrying capacity. Canada is what Mark O’Connor said of Australia, “a big little country”. Yet we have this false body image. To quote myself from O’Connor’s book, “Overloading Australia”, “Australia and Canada are like “two bulimics who look in the mirror and see Twiggy with lots of room to grow.” We see Canada as a big 5-star hotel when we are more like a cheap one-room flophouse. In fact, there is no room at our ecological Inn.

The critical limiting factor for us is that only about 5% of our land base is capable of the sustained production of field crops. And over half of this prime farmland lies in one province, Ontario.

What is alarming is that since the policy of hyper-immigration was implemented in late 1990, the loss of farmland to development in the following five years increased 33% in the Greater Toronto Area or GTA to 10,000 acres a year. And in the province as a whole between 1996 and 2006 the rate of farmland losses to development was 8 times higher than in recent decades previously -- an incredible 60,000 acres every year, according to Stats Canada data cited by Ontario Farmland Trust.

Of course, Green organizations and politicians blame bad planning rather than rampant population growth for urban sprawl. But they ignore American studies which document that population growth drives at least half of that sprawl and believe we can shoe-horn half the global population into the country as long as strict planning controls are in place.

But the problem is, those controls are not yet in place and never likely will be, given the distribution of power in Canadian society. In Canada, land-use planning is in the hands of local governments, and local governments are bought and paid for by developers. That shouldn’t be surprising because, after all, real estate development is the prime fixation of municipal politics and property taxes are the principal source of revenue.

Professor Robert MacDermid of York University recently studied 10 municipalities in the GTA and discovered that incumbents win civic elections 78% of the time and that they acquire 71% of their funding from corporations. One third of those incumbents reported that corporate campaign funds accounted for more than 75% of their war chest.

The problem for challengers is that many of them run against pro-development incumbents.
In Chilliwack, BC, for example growth control advocate Norm Smith faced a developer in his bid for the mayor’s chair and was outspent 10 to 1. Predictably, the fox was elected to guard the hen house. There are but two towns in Canada where a slate of growth-control candidates were able to win control of city council, but lately one of them, in Qualicum Beach, BC, was turfed out by well-financed pro-development candidates.
Just having a comment printed in the local community paper is a challenge for anti-growth activists. Such papers derive perhaps half their advertising revenue from realtors, and there is simply no money in editors printing anti-growth letters or articles that might bite the hand that feeds them. MacDermid’s study was just a case history in story that is universal to North American local jurisdictions. Developers are key constituents in Canada’s Growth Lobby and overpopulation, as Garrett Hardin declared, is like potholes, a local issue.

Given this political fact of life, those who argue that tight zoning laws can make mass immigration ecologically benign are intellectually dishonest. Smart growth doesn’t work.
It didn’t work in Portland, Oregon when rigorous controls could not stop the urbanization of rural land because the city absorbed 146,000 more people in one decade. Urban growth boundaries also failed to hold the fort in 241 other cities in Oregon.

Los Angeles, California, a showcase of smart growth, also could not contain the 3.1 million residents, mostly immigrants, who could not be confined within the prescribed boundaries and sprawled over some 394 acres beyond the line.

Now let’s take a look at North America’s greatest achievement in land-use planning, British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve (the ALR) established in 1973 to protect farmland. Smart growth boosters boast that 30 years later, the ALR retains the same amount of acres in the bank as ever before. But they confuse quantity with quality. Prime farmland secured in the ALR that is close to the city is being traded for new acquisitons in northern lands with soil of poorer quality by an Agricultural Land Commission that has been decentralized to make it more vulnerable to local developer representation. Notwithstanding any flaw in the planning process, without the pressure of population growth, there would be no incentive to profit from farmland.

Still, environmentalists believe that growth can be “managed”. But we don’t manage growth, growth manages us.

They also believe that if we cram everyone into an urban feedlot, we’ll lessen their ecological impact. Wrong again.Consider this:

Vancouver and Toronto have an ecological footprint more than 200 times their size.

The food and energy requirements for dense urban developments and suburban subdivisions are virtually the same.

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, highrises square foot for square foot, consume more energy than single family homes. Ever see a clothes line coming out of the 10th storey? Or elevators with cables that were hauled up manually? David Suzuki once remarked that an apartment dweller in Shanghai uses 2 ½ times as more energy than he would have if had stayed in rural China.

Let me quote Brishen Hoff:

“How is it environmentally positive to concentrate people into highrise apartment complexes where it takes massive energy inputs to treat their drinking water and sewage, run their elevators, maintain their multi-storey parking garages, power their artificial indoor fitness club environment and bring food and resources from distances that grow in proportion to their population size, giving them no hope of growing their own food to survive the end of the cheap energy era?”

Here Brishen brings us to the question of what happens to our growing mega cities when fossil fuel becomes too expensive. James Kunstler has said that eventuality will bring our fantasies about immigration to a cruel end, and Canadian author Richard Embleton says that a post-carbon Canada could not likely support cities larger than 20-80,000 people.

Smart growth cannot be an excuse for mass immigration. It is not sustainable and there is no permanent sanctuary for farmland, wetlands or nature reserves in the face of runaway population growth. Brishen can elaborate on that.

Tim Murray

Canadians Should Be Embarrassed and Humiliated by David Suzuki

2009-10-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

CANADIANS SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED AND HUMILIATED BY DAVID SUZUKI

So David Suzuki, after receiving the “Right Livelihood Award” by the Swedish parliament, says that he is “humiliated” that Canada has become a pariah for not dealing with climate change. And he is frustrated that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has failed to acknowledge the seriousness of the issue. Know the feeling.

I am embarrassed that Suzuki has not dealt with a key driver of climate change---immigrant-driven population growth. It is a major problem in Australia, the United States and Canada—the three worst offenders in terms of per capita green house gas emissions. According to a report authored by Leon Kolankiewicz and Bryan Griffith for the Centre for Immigration Studies released in August of 2008, on average, each immigrant quadruples his GHG emissions upon his arrival to the United States, thereby accelerating the timetable of our global demise, if anthropogenic climate theory is correct. In fact the total GHG emitted by immigrants is equivalent to the total GHG emissions of Great Britain and Sweden combined. http://www.cis.org/greenhousegasemissionsvideo And a study done in Australia by Clive Hamilton and Hal Turton of the Australia Institute concluded that if their country had adopted a “zero net migration” policy in 1999 instead of blindly following the current insane pace of immigration, the highest per capita rate in the world, GHG emissions would be 16% less by the year 2020. They also found that immigrants to Australia come from countries that emit, on average, just 42% of what Australia does. http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/An_Optimal_Population_for_Australia.pdf

In Canada the Green Party and the environmental establishment paint the Alberta Tar sands oil development as the bogeyman, claiming that immigration is a trivial agent of environmental degradation. They are dead wrong, and Suzuki knows it. John Meyer of Newform Research has calculated that immigrants who have come to Canada since the Kyoto Accord was signed in 1990 have contributed four times as much GHG emissions as the entire tar sands project to date, and through the urban sprawl, created by the need to house them, have despoiled an area four times greater than the area of boreal forest affected by the tar sands. Currently, 3-4 years of “business-as-usual” immigration results in as much GHG emissions as the tar sands operation. Clearly mass immigration is a serious issue, not only to Canada, but to the entire world.

Suzuki complains that he has “repeatedly tried to meet with Harper, but has been turned down each time”. Well, we have repeatedly tried to make the David Suzuki Foundation account for Suzuki’s failure to publicly address the importance of mass immigration as a factor in driving climate change, endangering species, and threatening Canada’s food security through the housing developments that sweep over precious farmlands. Still no reply. And why should Suzuki make Harper the scapegoat? Believe it or not, during the 2008 election, upon closer examination, Harper’s program was more environmentally friendly than the program of the four opposition parties, who only proposed to “freeze further development of the tar sands project, while advocating an immigration quota that was 38% higher than the Conservative government’s. That is, a policy which would cause environment losses 38 % times greater than the Harper government was causing. Yet Harper is everyone’s punching bag, rating a failing “F” grade on the Sierra Club report card. Let’s give them an “F” for poor research and politically correct omission.

Suzuki justifies his activism by saying that “When I’m dying, I want to be able to look at my grandchildren and say ‘I did the best I could’.” I rather think that when he is dying, he should want to be able to look at his many grandchildren and say that he was not a liar, at least by Mark Twain’s definition. He should not tell the “silent lie”, when someone knows the truth, but will not share it. Publicly that is. Privately David Suzuki has told people on at least two occasions that allowing immigration to Canada was “nuts” in that people from countries of very much lower ecological footprints were being injected into a “hyper-consumer” society. Industrialized countries, he also confided, are “way” overpopulated. And Suzuki has made a personal contribution to that too, siring 5 children from two marriages with a crop of grandchildren yet to be tallied. Each will come at an ecological price of 23 metric tons of GHG emissions a piece, if they follow the present Canadian average. Suzuki is not the green role model people believe him to be.

Why are we Canadians not humiliated by his conduct? Why aren’t the Swedes embarrassed by their government’s credulity? Why aren’t journalists reporting the truth about him? Will no one follow the money trail and ask why the Royal Bank of Canada, the most stridently public advocate for increased immigration, is a conspicuous benefactor of the David Suzuki Foundation? http://suzukiwatch.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/david-suzuki-caught-lying-about-corporate-donations Can no one see that the Emperor has no clothes? Or don’t they want to see?

Tim Murray,
Biodiversity First
October 14/09

© copyright

QUESTIONS FOR NEW BRUNSWICK

2009-10-23T07:32:00.000-07:00

Why does the government of New Brunswick:

Want to increase its population

Want to increase its franocophone population

Think that Africans who happen to speak a dialect of French will integrate well into a French Canadian community whose French is quite different from anything spoken in Africa and whose culture, not defined by language, is light years apart than the culture of native born francophones?

http://canadianimmigrant.ca/settlingincanada/newsitems/article/5211

SHOCKING DISCOVERY ON EASTER ISLAND

2009-10-23T07:30:00.000-07:00

SHOCKING DISCOVERY ON EASTER ISLAND
Canadians among early settlers, archaelogists reveal

New archeological research commissioned by the Heritage Canada Foundation has revealed startling evidence that challenges conventional theories regarding the origin of settlers on Easter Island and the decline of its complex society. A society that once offered universal and free access to a two year waiting period at medical clinics overwhelmed by a growing population, and tight controls on bows, arrows and axes that still failed to thwart the outbreak of violence. And where forests were denuded to serve an inflated housing market generated by greedy developers and a burgeoning population of homebuyers created by generous child benefit tax credits and immigrant recruitment.

Among the finds of the research team from Dartmouth College was a “rosetta stone” in a kind of mutated rongorongo script this is punctuated by numerous ‘eh’ s. It was crucial in helping to explain the existence of a stone foundation of what was apparently a hockey arena, together with a replica of a zamboni and pebble shaped like a puck. The foundation is carbon dated around 1600 AD, when it was believed that Canadian colonists, mainly politicians from New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, attempted to revive a flagging economy with a rapidly declining population by trying to lure a major league hockey franchise to their Polynesia backwater.

Skeletons found near the site matched the same DNA now found in Sidney Crosby and Brad Richards, as well as New Brunswick Business Minister Greg Byrne. There were also the remains of a skeleton found buried underneath the stadium that tests show shares the same genetic markers as Jimmy Hoffa.

Thor Heyerdahl of course famously contended that the population was a composite of early colonists from the Americas, “the long ears”, and invaders from the west, “the short ears”. But now evidence suggest that those “Americans” were in fact Canadian politicians, “the no ears”, along with a dependent bureaucracy, some classical economists, hockey coaches and loggers who came to deforest the island, over-fish and over-govern as well foment interminable jurisdictional disputes between various levels of government. The discovery of the fossilized remains of a lumberjack wearing a toque, spiked boots, a plaid shirt and a hard hat imprinted with the logo of the Acadia Timber Company has lent credence to this hypothesis. It is obvious that he was a lumberjack who wasn’t alright, though he worked all day and he slept all night. Malnutrition was his apparent undoing as Alexander Keith India Pale Ale did not suffice to offset the caloric deprivation from crops that failed from the loss of soil nutrients washed away by logging.

In the wake of these revelations a more coherent narrative of the island’s demographic collapse is now emerging. The loss of timber led to a catastrophic unemployment rate in the forest sector, so 600 giant stone statues were erected facing the ocean as a public works project to beckon potential immigrants who would revitalize the economy by diminishing the per capita share of resources and per capita GDP.

A “Population Secretariat” was formed to develop an economic stimulus strategy that included an immigrant funding program and immigrant “welcoming centres” lavishly endowed with food forcibly extracted from residents struggling to survive on a subsistence diet. Starving protesters were told that they could always eat the “cultural diversity” that immigrants would bring to the island. In fact, creating more “cultural diversity” was the rationale for much of the strategy, for as Canadians the politicians didn’t believe they had a culture worthy of pride and protection.

The claim by skeptics that jobs could not be conjured up out of thin air when the island was bereft of wood, of rich soils swept away by rain falling on the newly barren landscape and accessible fish (whose absence the politicians blamed on Spanish trawlers) was dismissed as nativist pessimism by cornucopians who argued that human ingenuity would come to the rescue. They reasoned that the larger the pool of people the greater the chance that a genius would emerge with a technological breakthrough.

The result of this policy is manifest today. Except to the “no-ears” of course.

Tim Murray
September 19/09

THE POPULATION BOMB IS TICKING HERE TOO

2009-10-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

The Population Bomb is Ticking Here Too

Editor, Simcoe Reformer,

Plaudits to Monte Sollenberg for giving readers the facts of life. (“Another Mouth to Feed” , Sept 24/09). Both climate change and the loss of biodiversity services---which is the more dangerously imminent but under-publicized threat to humanity---are driven by population growth. But it is the migration of people from nations of low ecological footprints to nations of high footprints that is most critical. One typical immigrant to the United States, for example, quadruples his green house gas emissions upon arrival, and thereby hastens the timetable of our collective demise.

Sermonizing about our excessive consumption does not address the reality that inhabitants of a cold country like Canada, cannot reduce their energy consumption ad infinitum. Reversing population growth in Canada--- dependent on fossil fuels to grow crops on less than 5% of its land base--- is even more urgent than pursuing that goal abroad. Only a sustainable Canada will be in a position to assist more unfortunate countries. And we can’t achieve sustainability by cutting our per capita consumption in half and then doubling our population.

Tim Murray
September 24/09

Why Population Control is NEVER going to be an environmental priority

2009-10-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

Why Population Control Is NEVER going to be an environmental priority

I never said that population control ALONE was sufficient to solve our problems. The reason I got involved in this effort in December of 2006---other than the fact that I just learned how to use a computer----was to lobby the environmental movement to put the “P” back into the Ehrlich-Holdren “IPAT” formula. That is all. I never argued that the “P” should replace the “A” and the “T”. Just that leaving it out made nonsense of any comprehensive understanding of our crisis. Then I asked, “WHY have they left it out?” For a year I believed that it was just a matter of political correctness and cowardice. But by Januarry 2008, I realized that something even more compelling was at play. Environmental organizations have fallen prey to Michels “Iron Law of Oligarchy”, formulated at the turn of the century.

Roberto Michels was a European sociologist who observed that revolutionary socialist parties ineluctably evolved into moderate organizations who kept their radical rhetoric but in reality pursued timid and compromising agendas. More than that, they betrayed their democratic ideals by vesting power in a strong leader and his cronies. The best example of this phenomena was the German Social Democratic Party, whom Bismarck thought so subversive that he banned for decades. But by 1914, this “revolutionary” and internationalist party reached the point that it could vote for war credits for the German ruling class’s war effort. Following the vote, the Chancellor looked upon the socialists in the Reichstag, sitting across from their “opponents” and said, “I see only Germans”.

Michels said that when even a radical movement with revolutionary goals becomes an organization, the emphasis shifts to preserving the bureaucracy of that organization, even when the bureacracy’s interest runs contrary to the original aims of the movement. Civil Rights activist Saul Alinsky recognized the truth of Michels’ observations 50 years later. In his “Rules for Radicals”, Alinsky said that he would have to return to a town that he visited two years earlier so that he could set up an organization to fight the organization that he had set up previously. My belief is that all political parties and NGOs should carry an expiry date. After so many years, it would automatically be dissolved so that the cause could cleanse itself of vested interests. Environmental NGOs are obsessed with chasing donations and retaining their donor base. Their pressing need is to keep their staff in gainful employment. And as the money rolls in, the bureaucracy grows and more and more projects demand more and more money. Evangelical churches evidence the same cycle. No matter how much these preachers are funded, the donations only fuel a greater appetite for cash, and we are constantly witness to even more urgent appeals to empty our wallets just months after the last emergency bail-out. How many times does the Sierra Club, the DSF, Nature Conservancy or even the Sea Shepherd Society sound the alarm bell for the poster-species-of the-month? As soon as the Rocky Mountain Cariboo is “saved” by the announcement of a provincial park, another endangered species pops up for urgent salvation. I have seen this movie over and over again. But the root problem remains. Growth.

The question is, does the environmental movement have a sincere interest in solving it? More specifically, does their bureaucracies have a genuine interest in solving it? Next question: Why would they WANT to solve it? Would firefighters really like the prospect of never ever having fires occur again? Would the BC College of Physicians like the possibility of everyone finding the Fountain of Eternal Youth? Would environmental organizations really like sustainability to break out across the land? Sierra Club Directors react with outrage at such a suggestion. They speak of their legions of tireless “volunteers” who work with extreme dedication to fight for the environment. But what they won’t do is tell us how much their directors are paid, or make their financial reports easily accessible. If we demand that our political parties open their books, why is it illegitimate that environmental organizations be required to do the same thing.? The BC Sierra Club is infested with New Democrats and Greens. Many Sierran and NDP activists wear two hats. Is it not incongruous that as New Democratic members or supporters, these people stridently oppose the option of the NDP accepting corporate donations, but are completely tolerant of the Sierra Club accepting this kind of dirty money? If they are aware that corporate donations can and have corrupted political parties and twisted their programs to thwart the public interest, why can’t they see the same malevolent interest influencing environmental NGOs? Are they oblivious of these donations? Or willfully and deliberately ignorant? I find it most ironic that these kind of people typically express scorn at Christian congregations who are hoodwinked by corruption, but blind to their own complicity and acceptance of bribery. Why don’t Sierrans demand that their beloved club refuse donations from the TD Bank and the Van City mortgage empire, to name but two examples? Why don’t they ask WHY these corporations are wanting to buy their silence, and what things they want environmental organizations to be silent about??? Why are financial institutions paying the Green piper? What tune do they want played, or NOT played? The answer should be obvious. But apparently not to Sierrans, or the dupes of the Suzuki Cult. They don’t know or care to know about the involvement of the Royal Bank with the DSF, or that evil energy companies like Encana, the natural gas giant, donate to their favourite crusaders. They don’t see the hypocrisy of Dr. Suzuki demanding that climate change deniers in parliament be jailed but he himself denying that energy companies contribute to his efforts. Who is shilling for whom?

So while I began with a demand that environmental organizations put the “P” be put back into the IPAT formula, I ended with the realization that such organizations have an ineradicable interest in keeping it out. I came to the conclusion that in order to save the environment, environmental organizations must be swept away. They are cops on the corporate take, whose presence only gives the innocents a false sense of security. Better that we had to fend for ourselves, as we are in fact doing.

The behaviour of these organizations has led me to reject the label of “environmentalist”. I am not an “environmentalist”, but a “Malthusian”. What is the essential difference? An “environmentalist” attempts to control the environment to accommodate a growing human population. But a Malthusian attempts to control the human population to accommodate the environment. That does not mean that I ignore other variables, only that my objective is to serve the interests of the environment rather than the interests of this socio-economic system. A system which, as Christine MacDonald shows in her book, “Green Inc.”, the leading environmental organizations depend on to perpetuate themselves. They are not potential allies or friends who have lost their way, or who simply have an alternative view of achieving the same goal. They are my mortal enemies who must be defeated with even greater zeal than those in the boardrooms. A “friend” with a knife at my back is more to be feared than an enemy whom I face frontally. That is how I plot the ideological and political landscape. It is an ethical gulf that cannot be crossed. The gulf that exists between principle and compromise with corruption.

Tim Murray

October 4/09

GREEN ICONS MUST WALK THE TALK

2009-10-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

GREEN ICONS MUST WALK THE TALK
In a letter dated April 29, 2009, Rob Dietz of the Centre for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy (CASSE) writes,

“The CASSE position, a document that can be signed by individuals and endorsed by organizations, recognizes the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. It proposes the steady state economy, characterized by stable population and per capita consumption, as a desirable alternative to continued growth.
Many leading sustainability thinkers have signed this position, including David Suzuki, Vandana Shiva, David Orr, Bill McKibben, Herman Daly, Caroline Lucas, Gus Speth, and Wendell Berry. Dozens of organizations have endorsed the position, and it has been used as a model for professional scientific societies to adopt their own positions on economic growth….To find evidence that our leaders are mired in the old paradigm, we need look no further than the bank bailouts. Stimulus spending to get the economy growing is not the change we need…. Many policy changes can help us establish financial systems and an economy that are sustainable.” http://transitionnetworknews.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/jumpstarting-the-transition-to-a-better-economy/

Note the words that I have highlighted by bold lettering.
A stable population is a key element of a steady state economy. In the Anglophone countries of Canada, the United States, Australia and the UK at least, the main driver of population growth is immigration. That is right, the ugly “P” and “I” words that so many in our movement are terrified of mentioning. Unfortunately, our environmental crisis is of such severity that we haven’t the luxury of tip-toeing around politically incorrect facts. Yet so many of us do, including some of the signatories of the CASSE document. The presence of their names do nothing to strength the credibility of the declaration. A preacher found to be cruising the red light district does not bring respectability to his church or to his sermons. Environmental leaders must denounce growth in all its manifestations, not shroud it in the clothing of trendy green euphemisms or ignore it altogether.

Historically, economic power has been exceedingly concentrated in Canada, with five major banks playing a pivotal role in shaping the direction of the country. Leading the parade has been the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). Like all financial institutions, it makes its living from growth, for only growth can generate the income borrowers need to pay back the interest on loans that banks provide. Growth is what banks are all about, and the more growth, the merrier. RBC is arguably the most potent player in Canada’s Growth Lobby, as its Chairman Gordon Nixon has publicly and stridently advocated that the federal government of Canada increase its stratosphere immigration quota by 50% or 135-150 thousand “permanent” residents per year to a grand total of 400,000. In addition to this figure, at least another 100,000 would enter on a “temporary” Visa, and as the saying goes, “nothing is so permanent as a temporary immigrant.” As the latest census of March 2007 revealed, Canada already has the highest population growth rate in the G8 group. And a backlog of nearly a million approved applications for entry have yet to be processed.

The most confounding aspect of this development is that Canada’s environmental organizations have remained silent about this growth. They were mute about the Census report, mute about pro-natalist policies, and mute about a per capita immigration rate that ranks with Australia in its reckless irresponsibility. They spin out the same greenwash that politicians do that somehow population growth is not a critical component of economic growth, or that growth can be decoupled from GHG emissions and environmental degradation. Growth can be ecologically benign by being “managed” or steered out of harm’s way. It can be made “smart”. Smart growth? Smart clear-cuts, smart extinctions, smart pollution? What other oxymoronic concoctions are on the draft board? Growth is growth, and even a ‘green’ stimulus package exacts ecological costs. Is it that environmentalists don’t understand or are paid NOT to understand?

I think both. The Royal Bank of Canada has endowed the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF) handsomely and bestowed an honour on David Suzuki, as well as to hold out a tin cup for the Nature of Conservancy Canada. Other financial institutions have made similar arrangements---the Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, is a benefactor of the Sierra Club of BC. It is a symbiotic relationship. The green NGOs are so hungry for cash that securing and expanding their donor base seems to be a greater fixation than their campaigns. At the same time, the banks gain much needed ecological dispensation in the same way as rich patrons bought indulgences from medieval popes. So while they underwrite the housing developments that sprawl across our precious farmland, the banks coat themselves with green paint by “greening” their offices according to the presciptions of the DSF, and the TD Bank organizes litter clean-ups on the beaches. In effect, the DSF, the Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace and the rest of the green establishment act as Pied Pipers decoying concerned innocents away from root causes to chase one symptom after another. Environmental volunteers and subscribers are like a fire brigade run ragged by dashing around putting out one brush fire after another, but without dealing with the major conflagration---growth.

Private pronouncements are not enough. David Suzuki has confided on not just one occasion that Canada’s mass immigration policy is, to use his word, “nuts”. But to create that ‘critical mass’ that Rob Dietz talks about, we need green leaders to summon the same courage that famous wildlife artist and environmental activist Robert Bateman has. Bateman has publicly declared his opposition to population growth in Canada and has severed his support for the myopic, timid and corrupt environmental NGOs that I have alluded to. One can’t creditably assert, as Green Party leader Elizabeth May has, that, quoting Paul Ehrlich, “growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”, but then turn around and advocate a 25% increase in our immigration intake, as well as an open-door refugee policy. And signing the CASSE document while doing so is hypocrisy in the extreme.

Green icons must walk the talk.

Sincerely,
Tim Murray
Vice President,
Biodiversity First

HOW CAN WE DEFEND A COUNTRY WITH NO RECOGNIZED CULTURE, HERITAGE OR RIGHTS?

2009-10-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Murray.
My name is Jose (name witheld) I am the son of a Spanish Immigrant. My father fled Spain in his youth from the tyranny of General Franco. I am at times sure that I`m losing my mind when I read articles such as yours about the CBC or as I prefer to call it Communist Bull Crap.
It gets me so angry listening to these twits talk about Canadian Culture. Having been to Spain I know without a doubt that I`m not a Spaniard like my father, I share some eating habits and maybe some cultural idiosyncrasies with the Spanish that my Canadian country men don`t have. But trust me I`m Canadian. I`ve travelled to Egypt, United Arab Emirates and to Holland as well as various US states. I have lived in Vancouver and well seen most of our Nation. If CBC and the ``liberal`` twits don`t know what Canadian culture is it`s for two reasons; they don`t want to or they are fools and don`t talk to the locals at home, or abroad.
Keep up the good work defending our shared history and pride.

HOW CAN WE DEFEND A COUNTRY WITH NO RECOGNIZED CULTURE, HERITAGE, OR RIGHTS ?

Letters from Canadians like Jose have come to me from across Canada, thanks to Peter Brimelow and Vdare. They echo the same sentiments that I heard from immigrants who wrote in support of my articles in Canada Free Press against Official Multiculturalism and the purpose it served (swelling corporate profits). Immigrants and the sons of immigrants once clearly acknowledged the existence of a uniquely “Canadian” culture. Until recent decades, their attitude has been to unreservedly embrace it---in the same fashion that my mother’s side of the family did. But third world immigrants have been told by governments, employers and the media that they need not adapt, integrate or assimilate, because our culture is only a mosaic of imported values. In fact, we as native Canadians have no right to “impose” any standards or requirements upon those who, one might have thought, tacitly accepted the rules of the game by willingly coming here. After all, post-1990 immigrants were not dragged here from slave ships.

More offensive than the arrogant attitudes of contemporary immigrant services advocates and multiculturalists though, is the attitude of politicians from whom they take their cue. The message of Official Multiculturalism is that people long resident in Canada have no right to determine the course of their country. In effect, we are not a sovereign nation, but “Home to the World”, where newcomers will not only be made to feel at home but set the house rules as well. And the media and the school curricula have been recruited in the propaganda effort to inculcate defeatism and acceptance among the younger generations. How then, in such a political climate, can we construct any policies that are designed to serve Canadian interests, when Canadians are indoctrinated to believe that there is no “Canada” or “Canadianism”? “What is a Canadian anyway?” is now a standard phrase in our national dictionary. How can we “stand on guard” for a country that is only a fiction, or lock the door on a house that, we are led to believe, belongs to the whole neighbourhood? How can we achieve sustainability when, according to the Ministry of Relative Truth---the CBC---we have no moral right to limit our numbers?

Tim Murray

CANADA DIES HERE: How the CBC Has Become the Mouthpiece of Colonial Occupation

2009-10-23T07:12:00.000-07:00

Canada Dies Here
How the CBC has become the mouthpiece of colonial occupation

In the annals of media bias, the Friday October 2/09 edition of CBC Radio’s “The Current” should be promoted to the Hall of Shame. The lead-off topic revolved around an incident where Canadian officials in Kenya confiscated the passport of a Canadian citizen whom they suspected of faking her identity after she failed to correctly answer elementary questions about the city and country she had lived in for many years. DNA testing subsequently vindicated her contentions.

The issue for the discussion panel was “cultural competence”—“What should a Canadian be expected to know?” Or as the interviewer, veteran CBC journalist Jan Wong framed it, “Whether it is fair to assume that there is a common set of cultural reference points” that Canadians relate to.

As one would expect, the verdict was “No”---exactly the answer that Ms. Wong had engineered with loaded questions and a loaded panel, all of whom were members of visible minorities, like Wong, and all of whom were foreign-born, excepting Wong. The only missing ingredient in this classic formula for manufactured consent was a sound track for the usual “rent-a-crowd” that forms the cheer-leading section for politically correct pronouncements.

Jan Wong made no pretence of neutrality or objectivity. Thoughout the discussion, she consistently offered excuses for Suuad Hagi Mohamud’s memory lapses. So what if the woman struggled to remember what a T-4 slip was, or that she didn’t remember the date of her son’s birthday. “She was only off by two days”, she exclaimed, and besides, “not every culture uses the same calendar.” And why would anyone have to name the transit stops on their way to work? And how many Canadians know who the Prime Minister is? As for forgetting who her employer was, heck, it was just a courier company after all.

Wong even played her own victim card for emotional impact. She intimated that she too was wrongly detained by customs officials in Toronto after returning home from her assignment at the Atlanta Olympics. She was “thrown in a pen with illegal immigrants” and felt “powerless” and fearful. No matter what knowledge she acquired, people would always make assumptions about her from her appearance, not knowing that her family’s Canadian roots went back to 1880. Wong didn’t reflect that all of us are judged by our appearance in one fashion or another. That is why we dress formally at job interviews, or why those in wheelchairs are assumed to be without capabilities, or seniors are often patronized like children. But not everyone nurses these grievances to score verbal points or angle for sympathy.

Wong made a point to ridicule the comments of a representative of an immigrant settlement centre who argued that to be successful, immigrants must acquire so-called “soft skills” like making eye contact and shaking hands upon greeting people, which are common to our culture. She turned to her main witness for the prosecution, Debbie Douglas, the Executive Director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Servicing Immigrants, and remarked sarcastically, “Actually, Debbie, with the threat of the H1N1 virus, we are told not to shake hands. What is acceptable culture?” Silly question, according to the CBC and their champions, Canada doesn’t have a culture, at least not of the home-grown variety.

It is a measure of the CBC’s “stacked deck” strategy of rigging an “open” debate that it was left to panelist Nick Noorani, editor of Canadian Immigration Magazine, a man not normally known for his objectivity, to defend the importance of learning soft skills. “If I moved to Japan, I would learn to bow and leave my shoes outside at the door.” But Debbie Douglas interjected that learning soft skills were only necessary within the culture of institutions, but there was no general set of soft skills external to them in this new and wonderfully diverse Canada of ours. Lending emphasis to a point that she made a few times during the discussion, Canada is no longer “this white, Western, European place---we need to move away from this whole notion of what ‘Canadianism’ means.” It is a mistake, she asserted, to assume that there are “basic cultural reference points…we are as diverse as the rest of the world.” And why, Douglas asked, “should immigrants have a heavier burden of having this knowledge than Canadians themselves don’t have?”

But Mr. Noorani felt moved to draw a line. “Is that what we really want, to have immigrants still oblivious to what is going around them even after having lived in the country for 10 years?” Ms. Izumi Sakamoto, a Professor of Social Work at the University of Toronto, came to the rescue with another of her excuses. She cited the case of a Greek who had not had a vacation for ten years because like so many immigrants was too busy working to put food on the table and hadn’t the luxury of taking the time to explore his environment. Debbie Douglas concurred—“it is a class issue for everyone”. Douglas concluded the debate by stating that the conversation should be about “How do we get our communities engaged.”

Precisely. Should the question also not be “If there is in fact no longer ‘a common set of cultural reference points’, should we not set about to re-establish them?” Can a viable nation function without any cultural cohesion, a shared cultural vocabulary and a common knowledge of a shared history? Or are we to become merely an amalgam of ethnic solitudes more psychologically connected to foreign homelands than to other Canadians? Is Canada just, as Debbie Douglas would argue, just a microcosm of the United Nations? Is it already a “done deal’?

That seems to the CBC message. Their motto is “Canada lives here”, but the reality is that on the CBC, “Canada dies here”. Their advice is for traditionalists is to throw in the towel and park their nostalgia. Give it up. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated into the global shopping mall culture. We will never again be the country you yearn for. We are diverse, and getting more diverse with each passing day.

Sorry Mother Corp—the news of our death is greatly exaggerated. Eighty per cent of Canadians are not immigrants, and 83% are not visible minorities, 60% of whom congregate in just two major cities. Believe it or not, there is a world outside of Toronto, even of Ontario. A world where the real Canada still is alive and kicking, and not defeatist. You haven’t heard the last of us yet.

Tim Murray

October 7/09

TOWARDS A PERFECT CURRENCY by John Meyer

2009-10-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

Towards a Perfect Currency

Environmentalists measure in real physical units, not monetary units.
Money was developed to facilitate the trade of disparate real goods across a broad range of distances where direct exchange of goods was impractical. But money has many shortcomings in representing the full, real wealth creation process and assets especially over time.
Environmentalists have waited patiently for the commercial economics side of the real wealth creation process to develop monetary measurements which will capture the stocks and flows of environmental processes and non-renewable resource assets.

Without such common measurements, no broad based and unified initiatives on our planets many environmental challenges can easily take place.
There will continue to be strong resistance from the commercial economics sector to any environmental sector efforts to make radical policy changes based on factors which do not show up in their monetary based accounting system.

If we wait for commercial economists to develop a unit of measure which clearly represents all processes, we will wait in vain as it is not in the interests of the finance sector to change. It is up to the science community to provide a monetary basis which will adequately represent both human and natural processes.

Fortunately there is now an opportunity to combine the real wealth creation sectors demand for a representative currency with the need of the commercial economics sector to change the currency used as the basis for international trade.

As the international standard of commerce, the American dollar has had its day.

The proposal by Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China’s central bank, in March 2009, to establish an international financial reserve currency based on a basket of national currencies is only the start of the process to replace the US dollar as the medium of trade and finance.

But a basket based currency, even if it is more stable, also adds more complexity. It is still based on printed money valuations and incorporates all of the other weaknesses inherent in currencies which are not hard asset based.

Even though the Chinese proposal was widely rejected, the need for a stable international trading currency is clear and is the subject of ongoing discussion. But why settle for another fabricated currency? The opportunity exists to advance to a real and stable standard.

Upon which bedrock can an upgraded currency be based to facilitate accurate valuations, stability, fluidity to represent any scale of asset or transaction and offer resistance to speculation? Gold is limited by scarcity and scalability. Although it can dampen the gyrations of national currencies, it doesn’t represent in and of itself, the real wealth creation process.

There is only one commodity which is universally produced and consumed with both the scale and resolution to represent the full scope of any human endeavour. We already measure it in tremendous detail and it is central to every economy and process.

Energy based currency would represent real wealth creation potential and would not be subject to the shifting valuation issues to which every national currency is prone. Energy represents the value of work already done as well as the potential of work which can be done.

Some 800 years ago, the Mongols avoided inflationary pressures on their currency by performing inventories of their assets and matching the money supply to it. The Mongol empire did not suffer from the boom and bust cycle generated by the currency inflation which has plagued other monetary economies. Energy based currency would eliminate this cycle by representing constant real product and illuminating actual input costs.

Energy underwrites all commercial and environmental activity. It is the most widely measured, consumed and produced commodity on the planet. In contrast to the gold producing club, every nation produces energy from a wide variety of sources.

Energy currency? Fine. But which units should be used? A barrel of oil in raw energy numbers, contains 5.9 million btus, 1729 kilowatt hours,
6.2 billion joules or 1.49 billion calories. Awkward, to say the least.
Currently a US dollar (at $50/bbl of oil) translates to about 120,000 btus, 35kw hours, 120 million joules and 30 million calories. Kilowatt hours is the best known and the most widely used measurement.

The closest thing to being a round number while having roughly the same magnitude as the current US dollar would be 100,000 btus or 100 million joules. Will we settle on “beatees”, “julies” or “watties” as the base currency unit?

Scientists could help monetary experts decide. That would be a new partnership. The first of many paradigm shifts necessary in the integration of real world physical accounting and the representation of commercial economic activity.

A kilowatt hour (or BTU, joule, calorie) is the same in Canada as it is in Kazakstan. It represents the same potential now as it would have centuries ago or will centuries into the future. As a scientific unit of measure, there will be no speculation about what a kilowatt will be worth in 10 years.

“Speculating”, “hedging”, “converting”, “runs against” - these would be superfluous activities of the past. Energy currency is elemental, timeless and universal; three qualities which arbitrary currencies or other commodity based currencies do not possess.

In moving to energy based currency, we will have made a huge step forward in stabilizing and rationalizing the economic process at every level. And when the technology is ready in 30 or 300 years, we can step easily from energy based currency to energy actually being the currency.

If energy storage technology can be developed to the point at which several thousand kilowatt hours can (safely) be carried on something the size of a credit card, then we will have developed the perfect currency.

Commodities, services and goods will always fluctuate in relation to energy but those fluctuations would be no longer be speculatively driven on the monetary side - they would be real cost and real demand driven.
And there would never be a stampede away from energy. To what? Time?

Our current national policy focus on monetary flows is one of the prime reasons for the disconnect between policy makers and environmentalists. The GDP/monetary metric simply does not represent the physical processes or the assets of the real world which environmentalists see as essential, uncounted and rapidly degrading.

Energy currency very readily yields energy accounting which can provide a more comprehensive description of real output and resource consumption. Compared to monetary analysis, it is a 3D catscan for programs associated with alternative energy and carbon emissions. These issues need energy accounting to avoid negative sum game red-herrings like corn ethanol at northern latitudes which can survive only in the fog of our current monetary system.

In contrast to adopting energy currency, the process of dumping the US dollar in favour of a spectrum of other national currencies is a political minefield loaded with huge implications for the many players.

No matter who champions it, no one nation will own energy based money.
It will be the first truly international, non-political currency base.
No nation will be able to manipulate it to avoid the consequences of its own economic mis-steps or to beggar its neighbours.

The recent Chinese efforts to promote the creation of a new standard for international financial reserves have not produced results although the reasons for the proposal remain obvious and valid. A move to energy based currency offers a graceful and non-political avenue of monetary reform as a logical step forward not an abandonment of a failure.

Despite the rejection of Mr. Zhou’s initiative, the ball is still in his court and will remain there until a successor to the US dollar is found.

In the face of rapidly deteriorating environmental conditions as well as the necessity of retooling international finance, change must come to our monetary system. Conversion to an energy standard will take full advantage of this opportunity.

John Meyer
October 11/09

DEBT COMPELS GROWTH

2009-10-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

DEBT COMPELS GROWTH
Why the Numbers are Stacked Against Steady State Policies

Lesson number one, Economics 101:

Credit institutions make a living by charging interest on the money they lend you. It is not a gift---they lend it. And they want it back one day. But in the meantime you must pay a sum of money to rent it. How do you keep up your interest payments and pay back your balance-owing? By earning income. You get income from working for it, or you let your assets do your working for you and use the interest or rent they earn to pay off your loan.

How do you work for that income? You have a job, and jobs are less secure in a shrinking economy, as is rental, pension or other investment income. The return on stocks, bonds and other investment instruments require the same economic momentum that banks require to see their loans repaid. The vast majority of us are all, to one degree or another, “hooked” on growth. The growth-economy is like a dog forever chasing its tail, and with so many caught in the cycle, the growth lobby will always be irresistible. How many politicians will dare to retract the economy in the name of resource limits or ecological barriers that their advisors, the high priests of classic economics, will not acknowledge? No wonder the medieval church identified usury as a cardinal sin, the agent that could unravel a stable society where even merchants did not venture much beyond their accorded place.

Economic growth relies on debt to push all the players in a market economy toward behaviour that encourages growth. No debt, no growth, and no income or durable assets to generate the income to service that debt. But is most important, the greater the debt, the greater the pressure to stimulate more growth. That being the case, you are invited to review a snapshot of the US economy, as it stood on Saturday, October 10th, at approximately 3:15 PM PDT. The figures were as they appeared on the “Debt Clock”, and in the instant the numbers were recorded, greater numbers replaced them with terrifying rapidity. A glance at the Debt Clock a day or even an hour later would make the data look quite dated.

Take a look at this:

GDP per person $34, 764
Debt per person $38,802

GDP per worker $ 76,792
Debt per taxpayer $118,000 (changing too quickly to record)

Private debt per person $54,247
Personal savings per adult $ 1, 996

Liabilities per citizen $349,180
Assets per citizen $237,178

In round numbers, these were the expenditures in 2008-9:

Military $618 billion
Social Security $499 billion
Subsidies $ 51 billion
Medicare/Medicaid $643 billion
Interest on the debt $369 billion
Sub-total appox. $ 2.5 trillion

Government bailouts $11.5 trillion

When the world’s supreme economy cannot generate enough income to cover its debt obligations, it will be like a vortex that sucks the global economy down with it. The trillions thrown at consumers to ‘fix’ a system that is not broken but fatally flawed will not suffice in the long run to rescue it from the body-blow of rising fuel prices. And the kind of money needed to shift to renewable energy solutions dwarfs what has been spent or can ever be spent in the coming decade. The US government has shot its bolt, thrown most of the chips on the table. Expanding the money supply will be the last fatal gambit. It is through hyperinflation that interest on debt payments can be diminished when growth hits the brick wall of resource shortages. Expect foreign debt holders, currently clutching $3.5 trillion in IOUs, to pull the plug completely, and the real free-fall will begin in earnest. In retrospect, the current “downturn” will look like a peak, and the hope riding on this fake recovery will be likened to the brief relief Titanic passengers felt when the ship broke in two and for a short while leveled off.

Whatever fiscal rabbits they pull out of the hat, the brutal fact remains. Ours is an economy predicated on growth, but growth ultimately does not rely on imaginary wealth, but the supply of cheap energy, productive soil, accessible and abundant water and a resilient natural environment. As the Romans discovered in the last century of their crumbling empire, money is a fiction, not an elixir. People will stop believing in it when they come face to face with a reality that can’t be fooled by confidence tricks and greenwash. When that realization hits, my hope is that they will look for scapegoats, and find them in the financial industry, the universities, the think tanks, the journalism schools, parliament, the media, and last but not least, the offices of environmental NGOs. Let the victims be hung from the lamp-posts as Mussolini was, like a slab of meat on a hook in an abattoir, as befits liars and quislings. To paraphrase Diderot, I would not rest content until the last politician is strangled by the entrails of the last environmentalist---too busy sucking on corporate tits to alert us to the perils ahead, trying to “manage” growth rather than stop it.

Tim Murray October 10/09

QUESTION FOR CLIMATE CHANGE MINISTER PENNY WONG

2009-10-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

QUESTION FOR CLIMATE CHANGE MINISTER PENNY WONG

I understand that Australia, if it keeps to its present course, is projected to grow its population by some 14 million people, or 65%, in just 25 years. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong of the growthist Labor administration of Kevin Rudd, was asked this question on September 21/09:
Interviewer:
"Minister, Australia's population is projected to increase by 65% to the level of 30m people by 2050. During that same period, the government is committed to cutting our carbon emissions by 60%. Aren't those goals or those facts mutually exclusive? How are we going to massively cut carbon as our population continues to massively grow?"
Penny Wong:
"Well, absolutely not, because the key issue with reducing emissions is that we have to de-link our levels of carbon pollution from economic growth and population growth. We have to ... Whereas the last few hundred years emissions growth - that is, growth in our carbon pollution - has essentially tracked our population and economic growth, we have to break that link and that the whole world has to break that link and so does Australia. So the key issue here is breaking that link, not, not trying to reduce population." http://candobetter.org/SheilaNewman
Letter to the Minister:

Penny, I have a weight problem. My doctor tells me that if I persist in eating a litre of ice-cream every day, I will increase my weight by 65% in just 25 months. But since it is chocolate ice-cream, I feel it is racist to pin the blame for my growing girth on it. I also feel that it is possible to “de-couple” my weight gain from my caloric intake.

In fact, while I now wolf down 4,000 calories a day, I believe that I should look forward to doubling that intake by 2035. I need a caloric stimulus package that will kick-start my body and brain from its current slow-down. I can compensate for any negative consequences by metabolizing the ice cream more efficiently. I call it “smart gluttony”, and already the environmental movement is wanting to adopt the phrase as a slogan for their “green living” tips.

If I buy green-coloured ice cream, lime-flavoured, it would be a symbolic statement of my fresh approach to a sustainable future for my body. As we know, cosmetic labeling in and of itself usually suffices for a substantive policy shift.

Ms. Wong, I must congratulate you for your faith in human ingenuity. Julian Simon was right. Malthusians chronically underestimate our intelligence. With enough brainpower, we can have our cake (or ice cream) and eat it too. Ice cream that doesn’t consist of calories. Growth that doesn’t result in carbon emissions. The Peter Pan School of Greenwash. Make a wish that growth will have no ecological cost, and that wish will make it true. Pure magic. Hey, I have seen that trick played in Canada too. We signed on to the Kyoto accords in 1990 with the promise that we would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 6% by 2012 but by 2006 we were 22% beyond our emissions level in 1990. Of course, that had nothing to do with the fact that immigrant-driven growth has increased our population level by 22% (27.7 to 33.7 million today). Like the environmental establishment, we simply ‘de-coupled’ our imagination from reality. Population growth, where? Who cares? Perhaps we could become a race of 15 billion “breatharians” who simply subsist on air in a world where thirst is decoupled from water use and hunger is decoupled from food use. As our population grows, so grows the pool of our ideas. The sky is the limit!

Oh to be young again. Hopeful, credulous and cornucopian.

Tim Murray
September 25/09

POPULATION GROWTH IN AUSTRALIA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

2009-10-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

POPULATION GROWTH IN AUSTRALIA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNh6ApXa_KM Bob Carr, former Premier NSW, introducing “Overloading Australia” by Mark O’Connor and William Lines. Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FtoSqStdTU&feature=related Bob Carr introducing “Overloading Australia” Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J7BAGdS_3k&feature=related Mark O’Connor speaking on “Overloading Australia” Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J7BAGdS_3k&feature=related Mark O’Connor speaking on “Overloading Australia” Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQKNouysjKE&feature=related Clive Hamilton on Population, Peak Oil and climate change Part 1 at a SPA conference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmX8Mv-sBIU&NR=1 Clive Hamilton on Population, Peak Oil and climate change Part 2 at a SPA conference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO92kV6Z6HE&feature=related Clive Hamilton on Population, Peak Oil and climate change Part 3 at a SPA conference

These seven you-tubes demonstrate that, at least in Canada, we are not making effective use of this medium. People are weighted down with text, and can’t budget enough time to read what they aspire to read. One speaker here, Clive Hamilton, expressed his disappointment that his audience consisted of mostly “baby boomers”. We must therefore embrace the media that the young generation, with shorter attention spans, favours. A 4-10 minute you-tube can make quite an impact, and is more enticing to our target audience.

Unfortunately, many of the other SPA videos, although valuable in content, suffer from poor audio quality, so were not included here. But these are outstanding, and are of great relevance to Canada.

My instinct is to forward these, not to interested parties, but those who are paid by taxpayers to be interested, but aren’t. Specifically politicians of the centre-left like Canada’s NDP leader Jack Layton and the rest of his terminally stupid caucus. Attached would be some questions. Questions like “Why do you think Canada’s population overshoot is any less serious than Australia”s?” Or, “Do you even know what ‘carrying capacity’ means?” Or “Why is it that social democrats like Bob Carr and Kelvin Thomson grasp the concept but you and your brain-dead colleagues don’t?”. Or “Why is a so-called social democrat like you buying into the corporate agenda of expanding Canada’s population base?” Or “Are you the MP for Toronto-Danforth” or the MP for the United Nations?” But alas these questions would be directed to the wrong address, Parliament Hill. The place where people take no time to do their own research or thinking. The kind of people who only count votes and pander to the identity groups they believe deliver the votes for them. No, the people who need to see these you-tubes are the public at large, the electorate. Only the grass roots can form a constituency large enough to force MPs to listen.

Tim Murray
October 8/09

CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE U.S. POPULATION MOVEMENT

2009-10-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

Chronological History of the U.S. and N.E. Population Movement* By George Plumb

September, 2009

The population movement has a long and complicated history. This brief document is intended to provide a snapshot of important events, when they happened, and their broader meanings.

1839 – With the vulcanization of rubber by Goodyear, rubber condoms became available for use.

1900 – The U.S. population was 76 million.

1910 – Emma Goldman began to speak out on the necessity of effective birth control.

1915 – Margaret Sanger brought the diaphragm from the Netherlands to the U.S. It was the first truly effective birth control device under the control of women. In 1916 she organized the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. She was jailed at one time for her activities by Anthony Comstock of Connecticut, author of the Comstock Laws prohibiting birth control and human sexuality education. In 1925 Sanger’s second husband financed the first manufacturing of the diaphragm in the U.S.

1954 - The Hugh Moore Fund first used the term “population bomb” on their published pamphlet. He was a philanthropist from Pennsylvania. His mantra was “Your cause is a lost cause unless you support family planning.”

1960 – The “pill” was invented and became available to women for contraception.

1965 – Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, ending four decades of restricted immigration. This law, while removing limits based on country of origin, included provisions for family reunification, opening the door to “chain migration.”

1965 – The U.S. Supreme Court decision of Buxton and Griswold vs. Conn. legalized birth control for married couples offering “privacy of the bedroom.”

1967 – U.S. population reached 200 million.

1968 - The Population Bomb, by Paul R. Ehrlich was published by the Sierra Club. This book laid the foundation for widespread concern about population growth among environmentalists and others that followed in the early years of the 1970’s. The Sierra Club distributed the film “No Room for Wilderness.”

1968 - The organization Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was formed. There were dozens of local chapters throughout the country. With some 600 members, Burlington, Vermont had the largest per capita chapter in the country. In 2003 ZPG changed its name to Population Connection and its focus to world population growth with the object of educating school age young people. In subsequent years many other population organizations formed including Negative Population Growth (NPG) in 1972, Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) the first state population organization in 1979, and Numbers USA (NUSA) in 1996.

1970 - Earth Day was declared with population growth a major issue on the agenda. Dr. Mary Steichen Calderon, past medical director of the PPFA, established the Sex, Information and Education Council (SIECUS).

1972 – The Commission on Population and the American Future report, chaired by John D. Rockefeller III, stated “We have looked for, and have not found, any convincing economic argument for continued population growth. The health of our economy does not depend upon it, nor does the vitality of business, nor the welfare of the average person.” President Richard Nixon supported this and the National Security Study Memorandum 200 on population, both of which were defeated by Congress.

1973 – The U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade affirmed a women’s the right to abortion.

1973 – The Vt. Natural Resources Council published the Population Policy Report. As far as is known Vermont was the only state to publish such a report during that era. Today the VNRC, as with some other environmental organizations, refuses to publicly acknowledge any connection between population growth and the environment.

1974 - The Population Activist’s Handbook was published by The Population Institute. It is now out of print but used copies can still be purchased.

1974 – The first United Nation International Conference on Population was held in Bucharest, Romania, bringing thousands from around the world to concentrate on this issue. It produced a Plan of Action. John D. Rockefeller III was the American leader.

1977 – Steady-State Economics was published by Herman Daly. This was the first book to prominently link the destructiveness of the growth economy with ever increasing growth in population and consumption. The Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy was founded in 2004.

1980’s – Environmental organizations and leaders began their retreat from dealing with the population issue. They were now large professional organizations, instead of volunteer organizations, and being largely dependent on fund raising, eschewed being labeled as racist, pro-abortion, or against immigration and/or large families.

1984 – President Ronald Reagan commissioned Senator James Buckley of New York State to carry his anti-abortion message called The Mexico City Policy to the United Nations International Conference on Population, the second of its kind.

1986 – Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act granting amnesty to almost three million illegal immigrants. It included provisions for workplace enforcement of immigration status requirements, but with mixed results. A new wave of illegal immigration followed.

1990 – Congress passed a law, in response to warnings of an “impending labor shortage”, which essentially doubled legal immigration into the U.S. This led to unprecedented growth in the U.S. population.

1991 – The New Hampshire Citizens for Sustainable Population was organized by that state’s environmental champion Annette Cottrell. This was the first New England state to have a state level population organization. In 1994 Vermont followed suit with Vermont Citizens for Sustainable Population founded by George Plumb, Barbara Duncan, Kathy Kashanski, and Douglas Kivet-Kylar. In 1998 Barbara Duncan was hired as the first part time executive director. It became the Vt. Earth Institute (VEI) in 1999 and shifted its focus to sustainable living.

1994 – The third and last United Nations International Conference on Population and Development was held in Cairo, Egypt, resulting in its Programme of Action calling for the education of women.

1996 – The New England Coalition for a Sustainable Population (NECSP) was organized by Anita King and Barbara Duncan. In 1996 Annie Faulker volunteered as coordinator and raised funds for her salary and NECSP. In 2006, thanks to the Boston Foundation, Joe Bish and Rachael Zegarius were hired as its part time staff. In 2007 Joe was appointed Executive Director. In 2008 the New Hampshire Citizens for a Sustainable Population elected the board members of the NECSP to its own board and changed its name to the New England Coalition for a Sustainable Population. In 2008 the Massachusetts Slow Growth Initiative became a project of NECSP.

1998 - The Population Media Center was founded by Bill Ryerson with its main offices in Shelburne, Vt. The organization produces family planning soap operas for the developing world.

1999 – The Center for the Environment and Population (CEP) was formed by Victoria Markham in New Hampshire. Its office is now in New Canaan, Ct.

2005 - Vermonters for Sustainable Population (VSP) was organized by George Plumb, Phil Dodd, Thomas McKenna, and Mark Powell to continue the work which VEI dropped.

2006 - The Population Fix: Breaking America’s Addiction to Population Growth, by Edward C. Hartman was published by Think Population Press. Mr. Hartman later traveled across the country to deliver the population message, speaking all over New England.

2006 – U.S. population reached 300 million.

2009 – The Montpelier Bridge newspaper held a public forum on population and followed this with a special supplement titled Speaking Out on Population. As far as is known this is the first time any newspaper in the world has done either of these activities.

2009 - The first full time executive director of the NECSP was hired, thanks to the generous gift from an anonymous donor.

2039 - The U.S. Census Bureau projects the population will reach 400 million if present trends continue.

_______________

* Compiled by George Plumb, Chair of NECSP and Executive Director of VSP. If you have any suggested additions/corrections please send to gplumb@pshift.com.

Borlaug Failed To Get It Right

2009-10-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

Borlaug failed to get it right

George Bernhard Shaw once remarked that although Napoleon was no doubt a great man, it would have been better for the world if he had never been born. Notwithstanding his more noble motives and aspirations, the same could be said for Norman Borlaug. His “green revolution’, by tripling world food production merely allowed human population to triple. The damage that the extra 4 ½ billion people has wrought, as manifest in habitat loss, deforestation, the collapse of world fisheries and climate change, among other calamities, is damage that threatens the very existence of our species and misery and death on a scale far greater than starvation would have inflicted before Borlaug’s innovations were introduced.

Is it truly compassionate or sensible to keep feeding any species that given an abundant food source, will not stop over-breeding? Borlaug himself lamented that increased food production was not matched by population control, but that should have been anticipated. Does one introduce cars to a new highway before traffic controls are in place?

First the cart, then the horse. Family planning then food expansion.

Tim Murray,

Question about Norman Borlaug

2009-10-23T06:48:00.000-07:00

I will put it to you. Would it not have been better if Norman Borlaug had never been born? Ditto the architects of cruel compassion like Geldoff and Christian overseas charities? If Mother Nature had the franchise, would she cast her vote for the Borlaug-Geldoff ticket or the Hitler-Stalin (or Mao-Pol Pot or Genghis Khan-Ivan the Terrible ticket?) Is this lethal combination of do-goodism and technological advance the best result for humanity, ultimately? When we go to a city park, we are enjoined “Not to feed the animals”. Is it truly compassionate to keep feeding any species that, given an abundant food source, will not stop over-breeding? How about signs that read, “ Attention Oxfam, Don’t Feed Humans.” “Don’t mow down trees and fill in wetlands to grow more food to feed more human breeders”????

Nature is our life-support system, screw with it, and it comes back to bite you, big time.

I know what my answer is, and it is unequivocal. What is yours?

Tim

THE NDP NOW A MERCENARY ARMY

2009-10-23T06:44:00.000-07:00

It was a short summer. It seems like only yesterday that the federal NDP phoned me to ask for money. In fact, it has been three months, and come to think of it, it has become a three month ritual now. A hack phones me long distance from Toronto to ask me if I would “once again” support the New Democratic Party, “as I have so generously in the past”. Where do they retrieve these records, from the Smithsonian? Or maybe it was a commitment made by my doppelganger in a parallel universe. For the fourth time now, I surprised the caller by saying that I do not support the NDP, and don’t plan to anytime in the future. But this time the caller surprised me. She didn’t ask me why or contest my arguments. I was disappointed. I hadn’t harangued anyone for a week now and I needed a fix of nasty.

There was another thing that surprised me too. She had a thick Chinese accent. Something was amiss. I door-knocked for a dozen elections in Vancouver and I know that Chinese with an accent that pronounced are not typically fans of social democracy. Notwithstanding a handful of high profile examples, Chinese faces at an NDP general meeting are as rare as hen’s teeth. Hong Kong, where the vast majority of Vancouver’s Chinese population hails from, is not a socialist hotbed.

I couldn’t resist. I asked her, “I am curious, are you yourself a member of the NDP, do you work for them as a volunteer or did they hire you to phone me? Are you even going to vote NDP?” She answered that she couldn’t vote because she was an immigrant, and not a citizen, and that yes, she was hired to do the phoning on the party’s behalf. This is a significant find. The NDP, and the CCF before them, were characterized by the unrivalled devotion that their vast army of volunteers had for the cause. That volunteerism was their saving grace. Now other party could match it. They could only outspend the NDP by a wide margin.

But times they a-changin’ . The NDP still cries poor, but there is no longer this fabled gap between them and the old line parties in financial resources. Maybe that is because they themselves are now “old-line”. They spin the line of “sustainable growth” just like the Liberals and Conservatives. “Growth is good”, Jack Layton said in 2008, “as long as its benefits are equally shared”. And as long as the NDP can throw some green paint over its growthism. No wonder yuppies love them. They can see their portfolios rise again and carry on living the good life in clear conscience, because growth will continue as ever before.

But gone is that grassroots conviction, that fire that touched so many people and motivated them to pour their energy into the party. It turns out that their kind of social democracy is nothing to write home about. It seems that it is not worth defending. So now the NDP has the dough to fight another day. Enough money to hire someone just out of the airport to due their bidding.

After she concluded telling me that she was still an immigrant, and that was calling from Vancouver, I felt compelled to implore her to vote NDP when she is qualified for citizenship. After all, I said the NDP represents foreign interests, not ours. Too polite to answer back, she abruptly bid goodbye for the night.

Tim

September 16/09

HOW TO PLAY TO A CROWD AND SELL OUT YOUR COUNTRY

2009-10-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

This is demagoguery at its finest. The late Senator Ted Kennedy, author of the watershed Immigration Bill of 1965, a bill which effectively added 100 million more consumers to America, increasing its collective footprint by 33%, kisses up to an Hispanic rally in Washington, DC in 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VIyKVhGuYE&feature=related

Notice how he hits all the right buttons. Hard work. Love of family. The American dream. And standing up for “our” faith, that is Roman Catholicism. Dear God, those anti-Americans in Congress who oppose us even say that priests are criminals for helping illegal immigrants. They say “report to deport”. I say “report and become American citizens!” Rapturous applause.

Kennedy invoked Martin Luther King, who, he pointed out, spoke not far where this rally was taking place, and promised that one day freedom would reign in America. And one day freedom would come to the illegal aliens in America too, the Senator promised. One champion he did not refer to, however, was Caesar Chavez, a hero of Mexican Americans, who in his time, stood at the border to oppose the entry of illegal immigrants from Mexico. Chavez recognized that they threatened the livelihoods of the Mexicans who had come to America legally and worked hard to establish themselves as law-abiding citizens. Nor did Kennedy mention that African Americans are the biggest victims of the illegal invasion, as it is their low paying jobs which have been displaced in greater numbers by the invaders than any other sector of American society. The late African American Congresswoman Barbara Jordan may have been at the King rally forty years ago, but if she had been alive in 2006, she certainly would not have been at this Washington rally cheering on Senator Quisling and his vision of America, which, after all, citing his brother John, was “a nation of immigrants.” That’s odd, I was under the impression that most of the people resident in the United States were born there. About 88% of them in fact. But then, they don’t count. They won’t work for indecent wages.

When Kennedy ended his speech here, he screamed out that “I stand with you, and you, and you!!!!” But he has never stood for the native born workers of American, 5 million of whom lost their jobs in the Bush era to the squeeze play of out-sourcing and the cruel competition of cheap foreign labour. Nor did he stand up for the environment, notwithstanding the environmental protection measures he fought for, for it is the environment which has also born the brunt of the runaway immigrant-driven population growth that his 1965 bill inaugurated. While it broke down discriminatory walls against the entry of good people from non-European lands, it carried within it a fatal flaw. Chain migration. For every immigrant who came in through the third world door, a dozen relatives not of the immediate family were able to follow. In one example, cited by a documentary, one Korean immigrant generated, through sponsorship, some 59 other immigrants. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo1m-FylZp4 Kennedy never revisited that legislation to plug that gaping hole. And why would he? When he looked upon that crowd in Washington, he saw votes. In his words, “I see our immigrant future”. A future, no doubt, where, with a solid bloc of Hispanic citizens behind him, his Democratic Party would have a lock on power. The new Amnesty Bill would determine “the future of our economic growth”

Population and economic growth. More and more jobs for hard working people of faith. A vision of unending plenty and fecundity that somehow the Senator and his liberal allies found compatible with their clean environment agenda and pro-Kyoto aspirations. In the cornucopian liberal-left world view, life is never about limits, it is about growing limits, baking a larger economic pie which more and more folks, especially the foreign poor, can share if only it is distributed fairly and equitably.

It is a vision that if dressed up in the clothing of human rights, can beguile a crowd and confuse the issue.

Kennedy was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Best friend that the ADM Corporation, Microsoft and cheap labour employers ever had.

It might have been better had he never been born.

Tim Murray
Sept. 4/09

"Jobs That Americans Won't Do"

2009-10-23T06:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0901/p08s01-comv.html

With millions of native-born people desperate for income, those jobs presumed to be too menial are now acceptable – a point to remember in the immigration debate.
By the Monitor's Editorial Board
Christian Science Monitor
from the September 1, 2009 edition

With fewer jobs for Americans these days, are there fewer jobs that Americans won't do?
The answer will influence whether Congress decides to grant amnesty to some 11 million illegal immigrants in the US, perhaps by next year.
Most illegal workers in the US are Mexicans who mow lawns, clean motel sheets, butcher hogs, pick strawberries, and otherwise toil away at tasks that, as George W. Bush once said, "Americans won't do." And they often are paid less than the minimum wage.
A widely held assumption in Washington's debate about immigration is that native-born Americans avoid menial and dirty work. Laid-off autoworkers wouldn't really wash dishes at a Denny's or milk cows on a dairy farm, would they? Such a notion has long helped justify a flow of foreign workers into the US – or possibly an amnesty for those hiding from the law.
Recent recessions have been short enough that jobless Americans who rely on government benefits waited for a "good job" to return. But this "Great Recession" has been long and deep. The unemployment rate has doubled from 4.7 to 9.4 percent, and it may keep rising into next year. Many layoffs appear permanent as whole industries have collapsed and new fields, such as clean energy, are slow to emerge. The percentage of Americans "mal-employed" – working below their skill or education – is higher than in recent recessions.
With people desperate for income, downward mobility may be on the way up. News reports show long lines of applicants for a janitor's job or for work at a factory after a federal raid clears out the illegal workers.
Maybe it's a myth that Americans won't take certain jobs. In fact, a study by the Center for Immigration Studies used 2005-07 data to look at 465 occupations. Only four had a majority of immigrants in them: plasterers and stucco masons, agricultural graders and sorters, personal appliance workers, and tailors and dressmakers.
In every other occupation, such as janitors, maids, and groundskeepers, a large majority were filled by native-born Americans. The report's conclusion: "The often-made argument that immigrants only take jobs Americans don't want is simply wrong."
The US job market is too dynamic to be easily segmented. Americans move too often for new jobs – more than a third live outside the state in which they were born. This recession can help bust the myth that native-born workers are too snooty to get their boots dirty in farm fields and back shops.
Maybe then a key plank for an amnesty will be removed.

Comment:
It was never true that there were "jobs that Americans wouldn't do." Proof was that,

1] in every occupation, even where lots of immigrants were working, the majority of workers were still American.
2]any time ICE raided a business and arrested illegal aliens, hundreds or thousands of Americans would line up to take available jobs.
3] immigrants beat out Americans only be taking jobs at much lower wages and without benefits. At a living wage, Americans have always been willing to do ANY job

ELIZABETH MAY PARACHUTES INTO LOTUS LAND

2009-10-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/may-to-unveil-candidacy-in-bc-riding/article1279346

Mortgage your house and send your donations to the Conservative incumbent Gary Lunn. This woman must be stopped. Better to have an enemy that is upfront upon his agenda---GROWTH----than a “growth-manager” who favours an immigration quota 25% upon the Harper government’s outrageous level. Elizabeth May has taken the Green Party down the same hypocritical open-borders road that she took the Sierra Club. 56% of Green Party voters in an internal poll taken in late 2004 favoured a Population Plan for Canada, which under section 5, included immigration reduction. The Green Party hierarchy ditched the policy and the experiment in grassroots democracy that approved of it. The majority of the rank and file of the Green Party would support our agenda, but the Pied Piper of counterfeit environmentalism, the globalist American émigré, Elizabeth May, wants to accelerate the destruction of both the cultural and biological heritage of Canada. Only her defeat will make it possible for the Green Party to move in the direction that its name implies.

On the other hand, Saltspring Island deserves a quisling moron of her caliber. It is the home of the granola green yuppies and New Age flakes who believe that “love” and “non-violence” will somehow banish scarcity. The rich Albertans and urban exiles on Saltspring can, wearing her badge, continue to enjoy their extravagant lifestyle, their mega homes and foreign vacations, but feel good about themselves with cosmetic genuflections to sustainable living. Replace your old lights with CFLs and recycle your garbage and voila, “look at me, I’m green”.

Resident billionaire John Lefebvre, indicted on criminal charges of internet gambling in America, is a key supporter and benefactor of the David Suzuki foundation. His home was the venue for an international meeting on the environment in January of 2009 hosted by the Great Man Himself, His Holiness David Suzuki, father of five ecological footprints. Participant Bill Ryerson flew across the continent to get a chance to make a case that “Hey, overpopulation has at least SOMETHING to do with climate change and environmental degradation, people.” He barely got a word in, and it was at the very end of the conference. No one on that island has a clue about the meaning of sustainability it seems. The hotel that we were staying displayed cards in each room that boasted that the hotel, like other island establishments, was “green”, because it followed the prescriptions of the Holy Trinity---Conserve, Re-use, and Re-cycle. Meanwhile, the planners attached to Islands Trust, the governing body of the island, have hatched a plan to hike the population from its current 10,000 to a stratospheric 18,000. Do any of these ‘green’ businesses raise the alarm? Not in your life. Population growth is good for business—especially for the 50 real estate sharks who circle every tourist with out-of-province licence plates on his SUV. And in the world of Elizabeth May, the David Suzuki Foundation and the soft greens of Saltspring Island, you can have the best of both worlds. Growth and a “clean” environment. 4,000 sq. foot waterfront homes, $30,000 cars, exotic vacations and a sustainable society at the same time. They are rootless cosmopolitans, they love the world but hate Canada and what it once stood for. Open the floodgates and share the bounty, that is, your bounty. Canada---“Home to the world”.

We have one ace in the hole. Wildlife artist and long-time Saltspring resident Robert Bateman. He is a dedicated and authentic environmentalist, a courageous opponent of population growth globally and in Canada, and has boldly stated his position on one of his websites. His mere celebrity should force the attention of Elizabeth May, who might experience an epiphany if she listens to him. One can always hope. But I am betting that I will see the Second Coming before that happens.

Tim Murray
September 8/09

THE MEANING AND PURPOSE OF MULTICULTURALISM IN A NUTSHELL

2009-08-21T03:19:00.000-07:00

Just as Central Asia gave Europe the Bubonic Plague, and Central Africa gave us AIDS and the Ebola virus, Canada gave the world the state ideology of multiculturalism. As it is our incubus, then it is fitting that it should be defined by us. So according to the dictionary of Immigration Watch Canada: http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=8&MMN_position=123:123

“MULTICULTURALISM: A term used to refer to the phenomenon, in Canada, of promoting, among immigrants, the retention of their own cultural practices. It also refers not only to the different ethnic backgrounds of many people in Canada, but to the growing number of those backgrounds.

Multiculturalism has been widely criticized. Some critics have said that multiculturalism requires a continuous inflow of immigrants in order to survive. If multiculturalism is to continue, immigration (particularly high and unnecessary immigration) must continue. As some critics have said, Canada's multiculturalist policies are a prescription of what Canada will become, not a description of what we are.

Multiculturalism has positive connotations for some, but for many Canadians, it is a euphemism and a disguise for a continuation of Canada's present unprecedented, unremitting high immigration levels. In fact, one critic has said that continued, high immigration levels are the oxygen for multiculturalism. Without continued high immigration, multiculturalism would die the death it richly deserves.

To others, the words "multiculturalism" and "diversity" are the positive-sounding "artillery" used against an unsuspecting Canadian public to get them to accept unjustified immigration. In other words, these terms are more examples of the deceit used to perpetuate high immigration levels.”

So while high immigration levels breathe life into multiculturalism, multiculturalism, or the quest for “cultural diversity”, justifies high immigration levels. Mass immigration is, in the words of Green Party leader Elizabeth May, “Canada’s great project”. A project of cultural balkanization and colonization of urban Canada and the attendant loss of farmland and wildlife to the population growth that results from it. Cultural diversity comes at the cost of biological diversity. To corporate Canada its apostles are what Stalin said of Western fellow travelers: “useful idiots”--- who give developers and cheap labour employers a smokescreen to pursue naked greed.

Tim Murray
August 21/ 2009