If there’s one thing about Calgary I can’t stand, it’s these kind of views:

Image Source

So, to alleviate my growing sense of solastalgia, I counter this depressingly monotonous view with some pictures of awesome architecture, like THIS.

Related:

Inhabitat.com: Awesome Rolling Huts

The Verbus System - Chic Shipping Container Housing

The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

I think this is the best thing since google. Watch the video.

http://labs.mozilla.com

I’ve blogged about it before. Here in Alberta, we are investing $3 Billion dollars into the wholesale slaughter of innocent bats. Sure, someone may catch a goofy-looking fish up in the oil sands, and attribute it to the most obtrusive-looking development in the region. But as our attention focuses on what we think is the obvious, the real slaughter begins by seemingly more benign methods.

We are slaughtering bats in this province, and we will pay the ecological cost. In no time, the bats will be gone, and the vermin will launch a counter-revolution, thereby cementing their hegemonic control over Alberta’s ecosystem. The land will be overrun with blood-sucking skeeters as mosquitoes launch an invasion of proportions not seen since the days of Orson Wells. The end result will be an Alberta that’s run by a Six-legged Vampire Dictatorship.

Above: Insectual Insurgents often depicted as friendly.

Already, Alberta’s mosquitoes are quietly launching a blood-borne jihad on the province, and we sit here, oblivious to the impending ecosystem apocalypse that is beginning to unfold.

Globe & Mail

What is killing the bats of Pincher Creek?

A mystery surrounding the large number of dead animals on a wind farm in Alberta prompted a groundbreaking study at the University of Calgary that found the drop in air pressure around some turbines resulted in fatal respiratory injuries . . .

After a two-year study, University of Calgary researchers have found that most of the bats suffered severe injuries to their respiratory systems consistent with a sudden drop in air pressure - called barotrauma - that occurs near the turbine blades.

The study will be released today in the online edition of the journal Current Biology.

Erin Baerwald, the research’s project leader and a University of Calgary graduate student, said that bats rarely run into manmade structures because the flying mammals can detect objects with echolocation, the location of objects by reflected sound.

“An atmospheric pressure drop at wind turbine blades is an undetectable - and potentially unforeseeable - hazard for bats, thus partially explaining the large number of bat fatalities at these specific structures,” she said.

Above: Dark Knight ponders vengance upon Alberta for the wrongs against his kin.

Related:
Science Daily: Why Wind Turbines Can Mean Death For Bats

U of Calgary Press Release (with video)

Bat Dieoffs in New York, PA, Fungus at work

Ecosystem Services provided by Bats

How much are bats worth?

Now it’s time for some interesting, but completely useless information from around the web.

WSJ: US Will Default on its Debt

NYTIMES: Mindfulness, Not Excercise Boosts Fitness

Boing Boing: Extreme Ironing. Related: Extreme Hammocking

Captain Capitalism: Abortion, the New Birth Control

Globe & Mail: Alberta Royalties Payable in Cash, Bitumen

Liveleak Video: Assasination Attempt on Barack Obama

It’s straightforward enough: other industries are probably getting less environmental scrutiny here in Alberta, now that the focus is on the oil sands.

You’ve probably read about the two-mouthed goldeye that was caught upstream of the oil sands recently. The question we want to know is whether or not such a fish would exist in the absence of the oil sands. If it weren’t the oil sands, we’d probably blame feedlots. If it weren’t feedlots, we’d probably blame pulp mills. If not them, then probably open-pit coal mine.

Anybody but ourselves.

I think it’s absolutely ludicrous to automatically pin the blame for a two-mouthed fish solely on the oil sands, because it’s not they who are to blame. We are the ones who fill up with so-called ‘dirty oil’. We are the ones who export paper, who heat our homes with electricity coming from open pit coal mines. We are the ones who bbq hormone-injected, feedlot-fed Alberta beef every summer.

I do not believe the mainstream media is a place to find critical thought. So consider the following:

1. That the fish’s second mouth was a genetic mutation, which occurs in nature from time to time.
2. That the second mouth could have come from an injury, as was the case with a certain trout in Nebraska a few years ago.
3. That the Athabasca watershed is a vast water drainage that has a host of pulp mills, feedlots, farms and other polluters.

Consider the following, taken from the Northern River Basins Study, 2002:

As the [Athabasca] river leaves the park, the rugged topography softens into rolling foothills. Coal underlies much of these foothills; covering a broad diagonal swath across the province that parallels the Rocky Mountains. Some of western Canada’s largest active open-pit coal mines are found in this region.

Further on, the Athabasca River passes the Weldwood pulp mill at Hinton, the oldest of the five mills in the Athabasca River basin. The mill relies completely on the region’s softwoods: white and black spruce, lodgepole pine and alpine fir.

The river continues north and swings eastward towards the town of Whitecourt, where it encounters the Millar Western pulp mill and the Alberta Newsprint Company. At Whitecourt, the river is joined by the McLeod River that drains areas with open pit coal mines and limestone quarries to the south. Oil and natural gas deposits are found to the north of the river, near Fox Creek and Swan Hills. In fact, one of the largest producing gas fields in the country is located in the Fox Creek area (see Section 3.2 for general information regarding oil, gas and coal developments).

Leaving Whitecourt, the Athabasca River swings north again and is joined by the Pembina River that drains through prime agricultural lands to the south. By now the waters of the Athabasca are brown from the soil and other materials that it has picked up along its course. As the physical environment changes, so too do the numbers and kinds of organisms in the river. These changes continue along the length of the river, corresponding to specific habitat and nutrient requirements of different fish and aquatic organisms.

Above: Let’s blame the oil sands, and not agriculture or forestry. Image Source

The Athabasca is joined by the Lesser Slave River, which drains the agricultural and forested areas surrounding Lesser Slave Lake. Another pulp mill, Slave Lake Pulp, is located along the banks of the Lesser Slave River.

Furthermore, the NREI Study found:

Dioxins and furans are no longer detectable in the water of the northern rivers because kraft pulp mills have changed their pulping process to reduce or eliminate them. Levels have declined in fish. Even so, NREI scientists still found traces of these chemicals in fish and river sediments immediately downstream of Hinton on the Athabasca River and Grande Prairie on the Wapiti River. The sources for these are not known, but it is possible that bottom sediments are still contaminated from previous pulp mill effluents.

In the case of the northern alberta mutant fish, it’s impossible to say whether or not the fish got that way through natural mutation, or from pulp mill sediment that’s been laying dormant in the river for dozens of years, or an injury caused by a fisherman’s hook, or from any number of causes. The truth is, we’re lazy and would like to pin the blame on someone, because that takes attention away from our own part in the process.

My mother always admonished me to turn off the damn tv. Maybe she intuitively knew something.

Mack White: Television and the Hive Mind

It is not just commercials that manipulate us. On television news as well, image and sound are as carefully selected and edited to influence human thought and behavior as in any commercial. The news anchors and reporters themselves are chosen for their physical attractiveness–a factor which, as numerous psychological studies have shown, contributes to our perception of a person’s trustworthiness. Under these conditions, then, the viewer easily forgets–if, indeed, the viewer ever knew in the first place–that the worldview presented on the evening news is a contrivance of the network owners–owners such as General Electric (NBC) and Westinghouse (CBS), both major defense contractors. By molding our perception of the world, they mold our opinions.

From the Cleaver:

The mainstream is the way of the hive. Perceive the hive as a medieval city within defensive walls. What goes in and what goes out is controlled by official guards operating under strict orders. All access to information, goods and services is meticulously regulated by the rulers of the city. As a citizen living within the hive, the knowledge that is available to you has been edited, spliced and diluted before you get anywhere near it. You have no real idea about what goes on outside the hive.

Podcast: Know your Trances

It is what it says it is.

http://www.homelessnation.org

Not much video content by the way of Alberta centricity, but it has a pretty good resources page.

Buffett Says Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac `Game Is Over’

Chinese Central bank Advisor: Freddie, Fannie Fail = Global FAIL

“If the U.S. government allows Fannie and Freddie to fail and international investors are not compensated adequately, the consequences will be catastrophic,” Yu said in e-mailed answers to questions yesterday. “If it is not the end of the world, it is the end of the current international financial system.”

Adbusters has an insightful post on the power structures within the discipline of neoclassical economics. It’s worth a read, because it points out a failing that is not unique to the economics discipline: the problem of groupthink and its influence on which ideas are extolled or banished to the disciplinary dustbin.

Here’s the scoop:

“The fact that CEOs earn millions while their workers struggle by on minimum wages is either not examined in classrooms or is shown by the mainstream model to be completely consistent with properly working markets and to be leading to the best of all possible worlds,” says Lee. “This of course makes most of the students who are concerned by such issues switch to other disciplines because they find economics pointless for what they want to know and do. So generally only the unquestioning students go on to get a PhD and become professors with views just like the professors that taught them.”

The article fails in one respect, however, in leaving out the perspective of Mason Gaffney’s book, The Corruption of Economics (available online, free). Gaffney’s argument goes like this: back in the old days, a populist economist named Henrgy George became so popular, his books outsold even Marshall’s Principles of Economics texts. Georgist ideas ‘infected’ mainstream thought; as a counter-weight, the wealth landowners endowed universities and funded neoclassical economic thought as an antidote to communism. Thus, the debate raged between the capitalists and communists, between machines and labour, all the while ignoring the extractors of economic rent - the aforementioned landowners.

Gaffney explains this much more clearly than I can, in chapter 1:

Henry George came out of a raw, naive new colony, California, as a scrappy marginal journalist. Yet his ideas exploded through the sophisticated metropolitan world as though into a vacuum. His book sales were in the millions. Seven short years after publishing Progress and Poverty in remote California he nearly took over as Mayor of New York City, the financial and intellectual capital of the nation. He thumped also-ran Theodore Roosevelt, and lost to the Tammany candidate (Abram S. Hewitt) only by being counted out (Barker, pp.480-81; Myers, pp.356-58; Miller, p.11). Three more years and he was a major influence in sophisticated Britain. In 1889, incredibly, he became “adviser and field-general in land reform strategy” to the Radical wing of the Liberal Party in Britain, where he was not even a citizen. “It was inevitable that, when (Joseph) Chamberlain bowed out, George should become the Radical philosopher” (Lawrence, pp.105-06). It also happened that when Chamberlain bowed out, the Radical wing became the Liberal Party. It adopted a land-tax plank after 1891 (The “famous Newcastle Programme”), and came to carry George’s (muted) policies forward under successive Liberal Governments of Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Lloyd George.

How could a marginal man come out of nowhere and make such an impact? The economic gurus of the day, even as today, were in a scolding mode, blaming unemployment on faulty character traits and genes, and demanding austerity. They were not intellectually armed to refute him or befuddle his listeners. He had studied the classical economists, and used their tools to dissect the system. Neo-classical economics arose in part to fill the void, to squeeze out such radical notions, and be sure nothing like the Georgist phenomenon could recur.

Georgist tax strategies were even implemented in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton at some point, according to Gaffney. In fact, Alberta’s resource rent policy is an outgrowth of Georgist thought, the idea that land rent constitutes an unearned surplus and therefore ought to accrue to the community at large. Georgist philosophies are against income and sometimes consumption taxes, and wholly in favor of resource rent taxes. Sounds vaguely similar to the Green party platform.

Further reading:

Henry George: Wikipedia

School of Co-operative Individualism

Henry George Institute