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Showing posts from December, 2007

Mnemonic Impunity.

Mnemonic Impunity. Mnemonic: Of or relating to memory. Impunity: To go unpunished. Who do you think determines what is remembered by history?  The Victor.  The Victor almost always determine what is to be remembered as "the truth" by a people.  The Victor comes in many forms; From generals and dictators to popes and mullahs, the presidents of nations and of corporations. The local mayor or gas company CEO. That brown-nosing snot down the hall who you know will, inevitably, see his way to the top to inflict his mediocrity upon ever more innocent humans.  Whether it's the workplace or in war, in the great games of life, the Victor is the competitor who makes it to the top of their game.  In any competition, those who are bound by fewer rules will almost always beat competitors who are bound by more.  People who are unbound by the inhibitions of morals and ethics make a disproportionate contribution to the population of those who have risen to the top of their ga

Population

At long last, a serious media conversation about the root cause of almost every globally important problem; the Human population. Have a listen to it here- Download Audio - 02122007 In it you will hear a number of perspectives but among them is a fellow who is the true embodiment of the real reason we just can't seem to solve the things that blight us as a species. This man voices one of the most un-selfconciously idiotic contradictions that I've heard since... I don't know when. He said that people who choose not to breed for reasons that are not medical are selfish. He then went on to report that he couldn't understand why people wouldn't want to pop out offspring in order to see themselves recreated in their young. Any species that obtains an ecological advantage will thrive. If the organism proliferates to the point where it becomes a threat to the stability of the environments with which it interacts, then we have a word for it. That word is, "PLAGU

Thoughts on Logging

We now understand without question that our forests are vital components of an unbelievably complex, global life support system. Therefore, arguments for their destruction should be offensive to any thinking person. When those arguments are based on nothing but corporate concerns they are nothing short of obscene. The only position that has been put forth by the proponents of old growth logging that deserves any attention is that protecting forests will impact timber communities. The commercial power behind the logging process fuels a popular image of the proponents of forest protection as be- dreadlocked , dole- bludging ' greenies ' out to bankrupt honest battlers. With that in mind, surely it would be better to tackle what must be the actual major cause of job loss in timber communities and certainly the greatest threat to the future of those communities themselves; the industrialization of forestry? When a couple of hi-tech machines can strip in hours, a hill

The Risk Matrix.

I wrote this in the belief that this topic is one of the most important in geopolitics today and for tomorrow, I am hoping that we continue discussing the issue for a good while to come. I would like to make a couple of points. Firstly, regardless of any uncertainty surrounding the matter, there is now enough momentum in the debate to have motivated our captains into making decisions that will have a profound effect on the geopolitical landscape. Carbon trading, bio-fuels, non-combustive alternate energy sources, water rights and usage decisions, science funding, settlement patterns, agriculture and land management, fishing... to name just a few of the issues which currently affect the global power balance and which are given extra weight and urgency when viewed through the greenhouse lens. Secondly, it is a common refrain of the political Right that it will cost trillions of dollars to address the problem and that if it's a false alarm it will be trillions wasted for no good rea