eau de porneau.

Buying bottled water is wrong, says Suzuki

“I don’t believe for a minute that French water is better than Canadian water. I think that we’ve got to drink the water that comes out of our taps, and if we don’t trust it, we ought to be raising hell about that.”

I think David Suzuki’s right. Canadian tap water is pretty good no matter where you go, and the quality of said water should not depend on any privately owned organization. I heard somewhere that with all the plastic bottles used to hold drinks in the world (that includes Coke, Pepsi, Sprite and so on) they use 150 million barrals of oil a year. I have no direct evidence to back that up, but it doesn’t exactly sound illogical.

I’m not going to run around like an alarmist and tell everyone to only suck water out of ponds, chain yourself to a tree and only buy hemp clothes, but honestly, who likes paying for water? Buy yourself a Nalgene bottle or whatever and pour one out every day before you go to work. Imagine this: You spend like $8.50, and you never have to buy a bottle of water again. You like flavoured water? Toss some iced tea powder in there or something.

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Chong’s smokin’ hot to local potheads

At Two Guys with Pipes, Ryan Cameron pops over as soon as he hears the name Tommy Chong.

“He’s good. More hippie-like than hipster. He’s funny and he’s pretty smart about marijuana. He knows how to grow, like, a billion-dollar operation,” he says before going out on a break to share a joint with an employee.

I’m not really posting about Tommy Chong, here… but if you live in Edmonton make sure you go check this out, Tommy Chong’s great. What makes me angry about this is the way Albertan media constantly portrays cannabis as this thing to joke about, and it’s almost like they make the users look like goofy cartoon characters, like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. It seems like every second day my Google News feed has something in it from Alberta like “Grow ops ‘up in smoke’,” or “Local Head Shop ‘gone to pot’.”

These so-called journalists may be providing the biggest thorn into the side of legalization by simply making the entire issue look like something to laugh about. Furthermore, when something happens that can’t be laughed about, they spin it so that it is not the assailant who is the menace and the assailed who is the victim, but cannabis that is the menace and society that is the victim. These reprehensible hacks seem to not care about delivering news in an objective, professional manner, but instead lower themselves to producing content that is even below that which can be read in your garden variety supermarket checkstand tabloid magazine.

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In Obesity Fight, Many Fear a Note From School - New York Times

Even health authorities who support distributing students’ scores worry about these inconsistent messages, saying they could result in eating disorders and social stigma, misinterpretation of numbers that experts say are confusing, and a sense of helplessness about high scores.

It seems many schools in America are sending home reports on the obesity factor of their pupils now. I applaud any effective effort to combat childhood obesity, but this doesn’t seem like it will have any real positive effect. What they really need is some form of real government regulation on the quality of food served in school cafeterias, and more funding for physical education programs. My estimation would be that parents are unwilling to put their children on any form of diet that they themselves won’t adhere to. The same goes for any form of exercise regimen.

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Mister Rogers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“My whole approach in broadcasting has always been “You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.” Maybe I’m going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.”
-Frederick Rogers

It turns out that when the manufacture of VCRs was being contested by the TV and Film industries, Mister Rogers stood up, pretty much alone, and defended our right to watch what we want, when we want to. I would honestly read through the entire Wikipedia page.

This guy was a champion of public broadcasting. When President Nixon (read: scumbag) reduced funding to public broadcasting, Fred Rogers stood before congress and gave a testimony so strong that funding was raised from 9 million to 22 million dollers (in 1971, that was a lot more money than it is now)

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Bush Has Quietly Tripled Aid to Africa - washingtonpost.com

Bush has increased direct development and humanitarian aid to Africa to more than $4 billion a year from $1.4 billion in 2001, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And four African nations — Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt and Uganda — rank among the world’s top 10 recipients in aid from the United States.

This is shocking, but pretty cool. I never really expected anything except for scumbag moves from that administration. It’s come to be run of the mill.

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It is impossible to ignore and thus I need not say more.

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Appeals Panel Cuts Award in Valdez Spill by Exxon - New York Times

A majority of a three-judge panel said the company’s negligent conduct, while “particularly egregious,” had not been intentional and had not warranted the maximum financial penalty that a lower court imposed.

The panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, split on applying legal precedents to the company responsible for the worst oil spill in United States history. It cut the award for punitive damages to $2.5 billion.

In the decision, the majority wrote, “Exxon’s reckless misconduct in placing a known relapsed alcoholic in command of a supertanker, loaded with millions of barrels of oil, to navigate the pristine and resource abundant waters of Prince William Sound, was reckless and warrants severe sanctions.”

“The misconduct did not, however, warrant sanctions at the highest range allowable,” the ruling added.

Wait a second. This is one of those odd occurrences where an event does not seem to have any correlation with the events leading up to it. A company puts a relapsed alcoholic behind the wheel of a boat carrying millions of barrels of oil, most definitely “negligible conduct,” in anyone’s definition of the word. What results is the worst oil spill in the history of the United States, and they don’t get the maximum fine allowable because the conduct “had not been intentional,”? Putting a drunk behind the wheel of a supertanker sounds pretty intentional to me.

By the way, they shouldn’t be getting any break. Something tells me they can afford to throw a bit of cash around.

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Iran Seeks Condemnation of Israeli Nukes - washingtonpost.com

Iran demanded Tuesday that the U.N. Security Council condemn what it said was Israel’s clandestine development of nuclear weapons and “compel” it to place all its nuclear facilities under U.N. inspection.

If Israel refuses to comply, Iran said the council must take “resolute action” under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter which authorizes a range of measures from diplomatic and economic sanctions to military action.

Iran insists its own nuclear program is a purely peaceful effort to develop energy, but the United States and many European nations believe Tehran’s real aim in enriching uranium is to produce nuclear weapons. The Security Council is currently debating a resolution that would impose sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend its enrichment program.

According to Noam Chomsky, if you go back over recent (within the past 30-50 odd years) UN Security Council votes, Israel, almost by default, always votes with America. I think what Iran’s trying to do here is challenge Israel’s nuclear program in an effort to seek legitimization of their own. Since Ahmadinejad hates the US and Israel, they’re a good target.

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A study released by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse today suggests an increase in driving under the influence of cannabis since 1989.

The study cites numerous other studies in explaining how cannabis use has doubled in the past 15 years, yet all the attention has been paid to alcohol and drunk driving. The authors seem to be disgruntled at the lack of attention cannabis has received. They only cited four studies on the risk of cannabis-related accidents, two of which came back results supporting the belief that cannabis smoking can lead to automobile accidents in the same sense alcohol does. The other two denied any relation between accidents and pot.

The study come forth at an interesting time, as the Conservative government is looking at passing legislation that would increase punishments for stoned driving. Due to the apparent lack of research on the subject as described in the study by Beirness and Davis of the CCSA, it is quite premature to be passing legislation on the subject, unless it is left open ended and receptive to further developments on the subject. One would question what the level of cannabis intake necessary to impair one would measure? One joint? Two? These things must be decided before any law is passed, and in order for them to be decided, research must be conducted, or else we’ll end up with a law that’s too difficult to enforce.

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2 dead in B.C. in aftermath of windstorm

B.C. Hydro estimates about 10,000 customers are still without power from that storm, mostly on Vancouver’s North Shore and in the Victoria area. At the height of the storm, 250,000 were without electricity.

There’s nobody I know that didn’t either experience the power outages, or know someone else who did. I got extremely lucky and didn’t lose it once, although the lights were flickering once in a while for a day or two. I can’t believe this led people to die, but as the article states, they were using a gas powered heater and got exposed to carbon monoxide poisoning. I suppose these things happen when you bring the heater inside the house and shut all the doors and windows.

I have only two questions:

• What needs to be done to our power infrastructure to prevent this from happening again? I mean, power outages are an inevitability. Wind happens, tree falls happen, and thus power outages happen. However, so many trees being knocked down that it takes out a quarter of a million people’s power? Something needs to change.
• What’s this going to do to pot prices, with all those grow-ops stuck without their lights on? A lot of them are probably either ready to harvest or finished anyway.

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