nibbler

we do what we can

Maybe theres a future in politics for you after all. Way to stand up for the Opera House while ignoring the music fans who effectively pay your rent, buy your beer, and put food on your table.

Don't get me wrong, both the Chameleon Project and Lotus are awesome bands, all the more reason that I don't know which is worse: The Opera House consistently treating customers like shit, OR The jamband promoters letting the Opera House treat their customer base like shit show after show, OR The large numbers of fans who buy tickets and line up at the Opera House only to be treated like shit, seemingly oblivious to the way venues like Massey Hall, Convocation Hall, The Beacon Theater, etc. are able to manage larger audiences and still treat fans, bands, and promoters with respect and class. Is bONES the only one in the group expecting some dignity, whilst having the integrity to speak up? I'm not holding my breath, but it sure would be refreshing to see a change in this regard.

Check out this Toronto Life article!

You forgot to capitalize your e and your t.

My point of this thread IS the NOFX song/video. The deeper point being that even a bunch of apathetic, lazy, drunk, drug-abusing musicians like NOFX can only handle pacifying the angry youth with skate tunes for so long before a guilty conscience kicks in. Next thing you know they start reading Howard Zinn, connecting dots for themselves, and before you know it, they're making music which challenges COINTELPRO and the status quo. For the record, it wasn't until after 9/11 that they grew balls.

This 5 minute video explains it a little better than that: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/12/olympics

Might I suggest watching the posted NOFX video a few times until it clicks?

Left of Right Blues = great song title!

Confiscation of anti-nuke signs draws Peace River protest BY ELISE STOLTE, EDMONTONJOURNAL.COM JANUARY 22, 2010 Photograph by: Supplied, edmontonjournal.com EDMONTON — Six Peace River residents occupied their local Alberta Transportation office Thursday, protesting the department's decision to take down all anti-nuclear signs posted near highways. The group sat in the lobby for five hours, promising to return unless told who made the decision. Office staff brought them coffee. Tensions have been high in the region since Ontario-based Bruce Power proposed a nuclear plant. The proposal is still going through an environmental assessment but the province has said it is open to the idea. Many residents have nailed anti-nuclear signs up on their property but provincial contractors started removing them last December. Alberta Transportation says signs are banned along provincial highways for safety reasons. Residents say only anti-nuclear signs are being removed, even if work crews have to step over signs from realtors or local businesses in the process. "Whatever it takes, we're hoping to get some answers," landowner Victor Guerette said. Protesters met Thursday morning with officials at Alberta Transportation, but the meeting broke down after 10 minutes. District operating manager Bill Gish said the residents would not listen when he told them all illegal signs were being removed. "I don't want to draw social policy or anything," he said. "I just want to make the highways as safe as possible. I'm just trying to do my job here." The men vowed to return next week and have set out more signs on trees, fences and trailers around the site. "They got orders from higher up," Guerette said. "We're trying to find out who gave the order and why." estolte@thejournal.canwest.com http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Confiscation+anti+nuke+signs+draws+Peace+River+protest/2469514/story.html

(published three months after ^article^) Company begins process to build Alberta's 1st nuclear plant Last Updated: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 | 3:35 PM ET CBC News The Alberta company that wants to build the province's first nuclear reactor has taken the first step in the long and complex licensing process. Calgary-based Energy Alberta Corp. said late Monday it had filed an application with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to build the proposed plant about 30 kilometres from Peace River in the province's north. "This filing, the licence to prepare site, is the first of many steps in getting licences to build the plant," Wayne Henuset, president and co-chairman, said in a release Monday night. "Building a nuclear power facility is a long and rigorous process. This is the beginning of a public and regulatory process that will include environmental, health and safety assessments. Public consultations will be an essential component of the process." Assuming everything goes as planned, the plant will produce 2,200 megawatts of electricity when it opens in early 2017. Henuset told CBC News a deal is already in place for the purchase of the majority of the electricity created by the reactor, but he won't reveal the customer, only saying none of the electricity produced will be exported to the United States. The proposed site is on private land beside Lac Cardinal, about 30 kilometres west of Peace River. The community was chosen "because of the demonstrated support from the community, existence of essential infrastructure and support services, and technical feasibility," the company said. The company proposal, budgeted at more than $6 billion, uses Atomic Energy of Canada Limited ACR-1000 Candu reactors. The nuclear plants run by Ontario Power Generation, the leading nuclear power company in Canada, can produce 6,606 megawatts of electricity. Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2007/08/28/alberta-nuclear.html#ixzz0fRKcS9C1

Alberta Tory party backs nuclear power study Last Updated: Monday, May 7, 2007 | 5:06 PM MT CBC News Grassroots members of Alberta's Progressive Conservative party voted Saturday to explore using nuclear power plants to assist oilsands development. After the vote at the party's annual general meeting in Edmonton, Energy Minister Mel Knight suggested the province may not follow up on the idea of forming a committee to study the issue, saying the government is staying neutral. "We will not have any development in the province of Alberta without open, public discussions with the public," he said. Knight said it is in the government's best interests to be seen neither as an opponent nor a proponent of nuclear energy, but he is willing to listen to ideas on any forms of alternative energy. Delegate Bill Dearborn of Medicine Hat said oilsands industries need a nuclear option as a bulwark against any future federal raids on Alberta's resource-based economy. "We're familiar with these Liberal governments in Ottawa that have imposed unfair taxes on the oil and gas industry in the past," he said. But delegate Don Dabbs said he participated in an earlier provincial study on nuclear power and that nuclear is not the way to go to generate steam power for the oilsands. "A reactor to generate steam is not the principal purpose of a nuclear reactor. It's for electrical energy. It's a very expensive source of steam." Energy Alberta Corp. recently announced it would file a regulatory application to build a twin-reactor plant in northern Alberta. Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2007/05/07/alta-tories-nuclear.html#ixzz0fRJVHRL3

Arf Arf says my dog

Becoming a third World Country John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ February 10, 2010 In the course of writing last week’s Archdruid Report post, I belatedly realized that there’s a very simple way to talk about the scope of the brutal economic contraction now sweeping through American society – a way, furthermore, that might just be able to sidestep both the obsessive belief in progress and the equally obsessive fascination with apocalyptic fantasy that, between them, make up much of what passes for thinking about the future these days. It’s to point out that, over the next decade or so, the United States is going to finish the process of becoming a Third World country. I say “finish the process,†because we are already most of the way there. What distinguishes the Third World from the privileged industrial minority of the world’s nations? Third World nations import most of their manufactured goods from abroad, while exporting mostly raw materials; that’s been true of the United States for decades now. Third World economies have inadequate domestic capital, and are dependent on loans from abroad; that’s been true of the United States for just about as long. Third World societies are economically burdened by severe problems with public health; the United States ranks dead last for life expectancy among industrial nations, and its rates of infant mortality are on a par with those in Indonesia, so that’s covered. Third World nation are very often governed by kleptocracies – well, let’s not even go there, shall we? There are, in fact, precisely two things left that differentiate the United States from any other large, overpopulated, impoverished Third World nation. The first is that the average standard of living here, measured either in money or in terms of energy and resource consumption, stands well above Third World levels – in fact, it’s well above the levels of most industrial nations. The second is that the United States has the world’s most expensive and technologically complex military. Those two factors are closely related, and understanding their relationship is crucial in making sense of the end of the “American century†and the decline of the United States to Third World status. The US has the world’s most expensive military because, just now, it has the world’s largest empire. Now of course it’s not polite to talk about that in precisely those terms, but let’s be frank – the US does not keep its troops garrisoned in more than a hundred countries around the world for the sake of their health, you know. That empire functions, as empires always do, as a way of tilting the economic relationships between nations in a way that pumps wealth out of the rest of the world and into the coffers of the imperial nation. It may never have occurred to you to wonder why it is that the 5% of the world’s population who live in the US get to use around a third of the world’s production of natural resources and industrial products – certainly it never seems to occur to most Americans to wonder about that – but the economics of empire are the reason. A century ago, in 1910, it was Britain that had the global empire, the worldwide garrisons, and the torrents of wealth flowing from around the world to boost the British standard of living at the expense of everyone else’s. A century from now, in 2110, if the technology to maintain any kind of worldwide empire still exists – and it can be done with wooden sailing ships and crude cannon, remember; Spain managed that feat very effectively in its day – somebody else will be in that position. It won’t be America, because empire is the methamphetamine of nations; in the short term, the effects feel great, but in the long term they’re very often lethal. Britain managed to walk away from its empire without total catastrophe because the United States was ready, willing, and able to take over, and give Britain a place in the inner circle of US allies into the bargain; most other nations have paid for their imperial overshoot with a century or two of economic collapse, political chaos, and social disintegration. That’s the corner into which the United States is backing itself right now. The flood of lightly disguised tribute from overseas, while it made Americans fantastically wealthy by the standards of the rest of the world, also gutted America’s domestic economy – the same economic imbalances that funnel wealth here also make it nearly impossible to produce goods or provide services at home at a cost that can compete with overseas producers – and created a culture of entitlement that includes all classes from the bottom of the social pyramid right up to the top. As always happens, in turn, the benefits of empire are failing to keep pace with its rapidly rising costs, and in addition, rising demands for imperial largesse from all parts of society are drawing down an increasingly straitened supply of wealth. Meanwhile other nations with imperial ambitions are circling like sharks; the wisest among them know that time is on their side, and that any additional burden that can be loaded onto a drowning empire will hasten the day when it goes under for the third time and they can close for the kill. This view of the world situation is not one that you’ll find in the cultural mainstream, or for that matter any of its self-proclaimed alternatives. The contrast with a century ago is instructive. A great many people in late imperial Britain knew perfectly well that the empire on which the sun famously never set – critics suggested that this was because God Himself wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark – had had its day and was itself setting; the lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Recessional†– Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire. Lo! All our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre. – simply put in powerful imagery what many were thinking at that time. You won’t find the same sort of historical sense nowadays, though, and I suspect the role of the myth of progress as the secular religion of the modern world has a lot to do with it. In 1910, the concept of historical decline was on a great many minds; these days you’ll hardly hear it mentioned, because the belief in history as perpetual progress has become all the more deeply entrenched as the foundations that made the progress of recent centuries possible have rotted away. The resulting insistence on seeing all social changes through onward-and-upward colored spectacles has imposed huge distortions on our perceptions of recent events. One good example is the rise and fall of the so-called “global economy†in recent decades. Its proponents portrayed it as the triumphant wave of a Utopian future that would enable everybody to live like middle-class Americans; its critics portrayed it as the equally triumphant metastasis of a monolithic corporate power out to enslave the world. Very few people saw it as the desperate gambit of a faltering imperial society that could no longer even afford to run its own economy, and was forced to outsource even its most basic economic functions to other countries. Nonetheless, this is what it has turned out to be, and it had the predictable result that several other nations used the influx of capital and technology to build their own industrial sectors, bide their time, and then enter the market themselves and outcompete the very companies and countries that gave them a foot in the door. More broadly, it seems to have escaped the attention of a great many observers that the day of the multinational corporations is drawing to an end. The struggle over Russia’s energy resources was the decisive battle there, and when Putin crushed the Western-funded oligarchs and retook control of his country’s energy supply, that battle was settled with a typically Russian sense of drama. The elegance with which China has turned international trade law against its putative beneficiaries is in its own way just as typical; a flurry of corporations owned by the Chinese government have spread operations throughout the world, using the mechanisms of global trade to lay the foundations of a future Chinese global empire, while the Chinese government efficiently stonewalled any further trade negotiations that would have put Chinese economic interests at home in jeopardy. More recently, China has begun buying sizable stakes in the multinational corporations that so many well-meaning people in the West once thought would reduce the world to vassalage; the day when ExxonMobil is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNOOC may be closer than it looks. The same biases that make such global changes invisible have impacts at least as sweeping here at home. Faith in progress, coupled with the tribute economy’s culture of entitlement I mentioned earlier, have made it nearly impossible for anybody in American public life to talk about the hard fact that America can no longer afford most of the social habits it adopted during its age of empire. It’s almost impossible to think of an aspect of daily life in America today that will not change drastically as a result. We will have to give up the notion, for example, that most Americans ought to go to college and get a “meaningful and fulfilling†job of the sort that can be done sitting at a desk. We will have to abandon the idea that it makes any sense to spend a quarter of a million dollars giving an elderly person with an incurable illness six more months of life. We will have to relearn the old distinction between the deserving poor – those who are willing to work and simply need the opportunity, or who have fallen into destitution through circumstances outside their control – and those who are simply trying to game the system. The great majority of us will get to find out what it’s like to make things instead of buying them, even when that means a sharp reduction in quality; to skip meals, or make do with very little, because the money to pay for anything more simply isn’t there; to treat serious illnesses at home because care from a doctor costs too much; I could go on for paragraphs, but I trust you get the idea. All these changes, it needs to be said, would be inevitable at this point even if the industrial world depended on renewable resources and had a stable, sustainable relationship with the planetary biosphere that supports all our lives. The United States has played its recent hands in the game of empire very badly indeed, and responded to each loss by doubling down and raising the stakes even higher. If, as a growing number of perceptive commentators have suggested, the US government has been reduced to borrowing money from itself in order to pay its bills – the theme of last week’s Archdruid Report post – the end of that road is in sight. It’s hard to see this as anything but a desperation move on the part of a political and economic establishment that sees no other options for short-term survival and thinks it has nothing left to lose. It’s the exact equivalent of paying household bills by running up debt on credit cards; it can buy a little time, but at the cost of making bankruptcy a certainty once that time runs out. The global context of the crisis, though, also needs to be kept in mind. The industrial world does not depend on renewable resources, and its relationship with the biosphere is leading it straight down the well-worn path of overshoot and collapse; the endgame of American empire, while it would be taking place anyway, has the additional factor of the limits to growth in play. In an alternate world where energy and resource flows could be counted on to remain stable for the foreseeable future, it’s quite possible that one of the rising powers might offer America the same devil’s bargain we offered Britain in 1942, and prop up the husk of our empire just long enough to take it over for themselves. As it is, it cannot have escaped the attention of any other nation on the planet that something like a quarter of the world’s dwindling resource production could be made available for other countries, if only the United States were to lose the ability to purchase energy and other resources from outside its own borders. It’s not hard to think of nations that would be in a position to profit mightily from such a readjustment, and nothing so unseemly as a global war would necessarily be required to make it happen; to name only one possibility, it’s by no means unthinkable that the United States, having manufactured “color revolutions†to order in countries around the world, might turn out to be vulnerable to the same sort of well-organized mob action here at home. Exactly how things will play out in the months and years to come is anybody’s guess. One of the consequences of America’s descent into Third World status, though, is that a great many of us may have scant leisure to contemplate global and national issues amid the struggle to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. In the long run, this shift in focus may have certain advantages; I have argued in previous posts that those nations that undergo the deindustrial transition soonest, and are thus forced to learn how to get by on the very modest energy and resource flows available in the absence of fossil fuels, may find that this gives them a head start in making changes that everyone else will have to make in due time. Still, making the most of those advantages will require a very different approach to economics, among other things, than most of us have pursued (or imagined pursuing) so far. Interestingly, this brings us back to the point where this blog’s exploration of deindustrial economics started some months ago: the thought of the maverick economist E.F. Schumacher. Among his other achievements, Schumacher developed a theory of economic development for the Third World that cut straight across the assumptions of his own time and ours alike, and proposed a route toward relative prosperity that took the limits to growth and the failures of empire into account. That route was not taken in his time; it may be the only way left open in ours. We’ll discuss it in detail in next week’s post.

Thanks- interesting read

If only High Plains Drifter was on the bill I'd sooo be there!

The love for the agedashi onion just keeps growing, The Ring is now getting the love of over 167,000 fans! The group's wall is loaded with hilarious and informative links, videos, comments: time well wasted!

The olympic party scene will be rockin. So will the protests. Cops posted on every street corner in Vancouver sounds like they're expecting some big noise! (not to mention spending a big security budget!) If I was going out west for such a trip I'd be sure to take in the olympic vibe from both perspectives. To all planning on attending, have fun, be safe, and please share the stories with us less fortunate ones!

hype hype hype... surely they will fly some weather making planes over and take care of it before the freestyle events start

Check your PM inbox.

When Snow Melts: Vancouver’s Olympic Crackdown by Dave Zirin The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/528319/when_snow_melts_vancouver_s_olympic_crackdown February 09, 2010 News Flash: Winter Olympic officials in tropical Vancouver have been forced to import snow - on the public dime - to make sure that the 2010 games proceed as planned. This use of tax-dollars is just the icing on the cake for increasingly angry Vancouver residents. And unlike the snow, the anger shows no signs of abating. As Olympic Resistance Network organizer Harsha Walia wrote in the Vancouver Sun, "With massive cost over-runs and Olympic project bailouts, it is not surprising that a November 2009 Angus Reid poll found that more than 30 per cent of [british Columbia] residents feel the Olympics will have a negative impact and almost 40 per cent support protesters. A January 2010 EKOS poll found that almost 70 per cent believe that too much is being spent on the Games." Officials are feeling the anger, and the independent media, frighteningly, is paying the price. Just as Democracy Now's Amy Goodman was held in November for trying to cross the border for reasons that had nothing to do with the Olympic Games, Martin Macias Jr., an independent media reporter from Chicago, was detained and held for seven hours by Canada Border Services agents before being put on a plane and sent to Seattle. Macias, who is 20 years old, is a media reform activist with community radio station Radio Arte where he serves as the host/producer of First Voice, a radio news zine. I spoke to Martin Macias today and he described a chilling scene of detention and expulsion. "I was asked the same questions for three and a half hours in a small room. They told me I had no right to a lawyer. I went from frustrated and angry to scared. I didn't know what the laws were or how the laws had been changed for the Olympics. I kept telling them I wasn't going to Vancouver to protest but to cover the protests but for them that was one and the same. This is bigger than me. We need to ask who is exactly ordering this kind of repression. Is it the government? The IOC? Why the crackdown?" Then insult on top of injury when they deported Macias and insisted he pay his own way out of the country. "They wanted me to buy a $1,300 plane ticket back to Chicago. I said ‘no way' and now I'm in Seattle." Martin's story is not unique. Two delegates aiming to attend an indigenous assembly taking place alongside the games were also detained and turned away. For people with just a passing knowledge of our neighbors to the north, it must all seem quite shocking. When we think of human rights abuses and suppression of dissent, Canada is hardly the first place that comes to mind. But there actually is a long history in Canada of this kind of abuse of power. The latest chapter in that history has been written during the pre-Olympic crackdown of 2010. Now as protestors and independent, unembedded journalists gather for the February 10-15 anti-Olympic convergence, as tax dollars go toward importing snow, the need to silence dissent becomes an International Olympic Committee imperative. As Chicago's Bob Quellos, who entered Vancouver successfully after accompanying Macias, said to me, "Walking the streets, residents here are very clear about who is responsible for the billions of dollars of Olympic debt they will be paying off for generations. They are outraged that the over $1 billion that is being spent on security has placed a cop on almost every corner of Downtown Vancouver. And they are outraged by the government's priorities. For example, while Vancouver's Downtown East Side struggles with poverty similar to third-world countries and social programs continue to be gutted, VANOC is spending an untold amount of money helicoptering in snow to the Olympic venue of Cypress Mountain that would otherwise be a mud hill due to the warm weather." It's not hard to deduce why the snow is melting: it's the heat on the street. Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love" (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Holyfuck! Blown away! These guys (and one sexy gal) are awesome! thanks and praises!

So long as you're skilled on the slopes/you love riding/skiing powder, Whitewater is simply the best. Endless lift accessible backcountry treats. Plan to take a backcountry preparedness course first.

Possibly the world's most popular and notorious musical artist, Robert Nesta (Bob) Marley was born on February 6th, 1945. This February will mark the 65th year of his birth. To commemorate him, his legacy, his message and his music, Dub Trinity will be performing a set of select songs written by him and some of his peers during their February 6th concert at Peterborough's Red Dog Tavern. Dub Trinity have been hard at work writing music and performing classic reggae, ska and funk music from around the world for the Kawarthas and beyond. Join them for a night of music, dancing and fun and celebrate a new year of strength and courage in our community. The Red Dog Tavern is located at 189 Hunter Street West in the heart of downtown Peterborough. And visit www.dubtrinity.com for any new recording updates of the band.

I'm told the shaking of the tail feathers will happen soon... Mr Bonghit must be really baked- he's inhaling directly from the bowl?!!? Blue Sky Sunshine FryDay, imported sounds and songs from Jamaica tonight... See you there! :relax: