Category: Environment

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Chinese Science

I came upon this marvelous item in the New York Times today that made me want to move to China:

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.”

They don’t “waste time” questioning scientific data? Wow. Imagine that. Leaders who make decisions based on science.

So what do our leaders here in Canada and the U.S. base their decisions on?

But let’s not get glib about it. “Men of science” can have creepy overtones.

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Stephane Dion’s Carbon Tax

Stephane Dion’s carbon tax proposals may well be the most sensible policy yet proposed on the issue of the environment– but are voters sophisticated enough to accept that there is a need for structural change in our economy to reflect the new realities of global energy use? Are they smart enough to not think they can continue to live in a world of cheap oil when China and India are both increasing demand at astounding rates?

One anchor asked the reporter in the field, “and how are we going to get those gasoline prices to go down again”. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Even people who should know better can be heard muttering about bad timing– gas prices are already up to record levels and here he wants to raises taxes on it.

What is happening is this. Gas prices are going up because expected consumption exceeds supply. It sounds like most people want to increase consumption (by lowering prices), which, of course, will reduce supply even faster, which, of course, will inevitably result in even higher prices.

Dion’s proposals actually shift the tax burden so that consumers are rewarded for reducing consumption and for using alternative fuels. Even better– it rewards clean energies and punishes energy consumption that contributes to climate change. You’ll notice that this took more than one “quip” to explain. That might– sigh– means it’s doomed as a political move.

“No new taxes” sounds much more appealing on your doorstep or in a 30-second radio ad.

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Obama’s Next Compromise

Barack Obama supported and voted in favor of the recent wiretapping bill that grants immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the Administration’s illegal requests for wiretaps on Americans receiving or making foreign telephone calls.

The so-called liberal media has completely dropped the ball on this one. Why is this not a scandal? George Bush refuses to admit that his Administration acted illegally when they requested the wiretaps. He continues to assert that the requests were legal. If they were legal, there is no need for immunity. The courts, as is their role in a constitutional democracy, have the authority and right to decide the lawsuits filed by plaintiffs against those Telcos. This law circumvents the constitution by providing retroactive immunity for crimes the government refuses to admit were crimes. This is insane. This is impeachable. This is obscene.

This is an out and out betrayal of all the bullshit platitudes about constitutions and freedoms and due process that America constantly foists on the world as justification for all the lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Barack Obama also supports the ethanol industry in its Disney-esque fantasy of replacing foreign oil with domestic plants. Everyone can already see what the results of this policy will be: oil will continue to cost more, and ethanol will have an absolutely negligible impact on domestic consumption while driving up food prices in the poorest parts of the globe. Even worse, Obama does not support dropping tariffs on imported Brazilian sugarcane ethanol which at least provides a far better return on the energy conversion (8-1, vs. ethanol’s 2-1). Why?

Because Iowa.

Because he wants the support of the Midwestern farmers who stand to benefit enormously from the ridiculous government subsidy of ethanol prices.

Put it this way: the oil industry is not worried about ethanol.

Think about that a lot. Think carefully about it: the oil industry LOVES ethanol. The oil industry’s stooges in the White House are pushing ethanol enthusiastically. The oil industry’s stooges in the White House have, so far, successfully torpedoed a bill that continues giving tax incentives to other alternative forms of energy like wind and solar power.

For those who think Obama will bring a sprig of fresh ideas to the White House, these two issues are bad omens. The first is a classic political compromise, an opportunistic sell-out to the enduring Democrat fear that they won’t appear to be tough enough to take on all those zillions of terrorists out there blowing up buildings in Des Moines, Iowa, or Cedar Rapids, or Flint, or Greensboro, and so on. Oh my God– we can’t let them think that John McCain will be more willing to undermine the constitution than we are!

The second is the classic trade-off of special interests against the genuine interests of the American people. There are numerous lobbyists or other agents associated with the ethanol industry working with Obama’s campaign. That’s disappointing.

The optimist hopes that Obama is making these compromises to get into office, so that once he gets into office he can resume his principled leadership and persuade Americans to support the right course of action. I tend to think it is more likely that once he gets into office, he will make the same compromises that most politicians usually make and things will not be so different after all.

It’s all relative. So we have here the shocking realization that Obama is human after all, and capable of making the same kind of moral and ethical compromises that most politicians make… it is still probable that the election of Obama will improve the U.S. government by a huge margin for the simple reason that we are more likely to have competent people in charge of government policy for the first time in 8 years.

Just how perverted is this generation of voters? McCain feels no need to hide the fact that he would allow the CIA to continue to use torture. TORTURE. On human beings. As if we were not morally superior to terrorists and murderers and torturers.

No candidate in this coming election– wait, is Ralph Nader running?– has proposed to return the U.S. to democratic constitutional greatness and honor and decency. There are no Christian candidates in this election. There is no god in this election.

Torturing the New York Times: Why, in this article, does the New York Times– supposed bastion of liberal dissent– refer to torture as “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Who the hell told them to use this phrase instead of the word “torture”? Is this because they are giving McCain and Bush the benefit of the doubt? Well, it might not be torture, after all? It might be the euphemism? Geez, where are the real liberals when you want one!

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It was Always Really About the Oil

In a rather stunning disclosure, Alan Greenspan, former head of the federal reserve, admits that he urged Bush to depose Saddam Hussein for the simplest of all possible reasons: the oil.

Greenspan insists that nobody in the Bush administration agreed: they were only concerned about WMDs and democracy and human rights. But they also told him that nobody here talks about the oil. They knew that if there was the slightest suspicion of it, the other Arab countries, and the rest of the world, would go ballistic. It is quite possible that they never talked about the oil because they didn’t need to. Everyone understood it absolutely perfectly. Except George Bush who, to this day, seems to believe that it was about democracy and the safety of American citizens.

Keep in mind that America doesn’t have to actually hold deed to the oil to take possession of it. They merely have to ensure that whoever controls the oil is friendly to American dollars and technology, like Saudi Arabia.

In Greenspan’s eyes, it is right and good that the U.S. should take oil from where ever it can be found and use it to generate prosperity and a high standard of living for America and Americans. He is a former (?) disciple of Ayn Rand. America must be strong. It must do whatever serves its own interests. It can take the oil. If you’re too weak to take the oil away from America, then that’s just tough.

There is a pretty kind of logic to this spirit of individualism. It is very, very pretty. It is elegant and slim, because strategic decisions are unfettered by moral or ethical considerations, and should be guided strictly by questions of efficiency. How soon can we get rich? How many bodies do we step over to obtain our goals?

To believe in the myths of individualism and capitalism, you have to believe in “finders-keepers”, for there is no way to justify the possession of oil or air or water on any basis other than “might makes right”.

Or you can believe that we are all in this world together and nobody in particular has any kind of magical title to the world’s resources.

Or, like George Bush, you can believe your own spin: God commanded us to destroy Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a great sinner.

The disadvantage of Ayn Rand’s brand of individualism is that eventually someone stronger comes along and knocks you off the pony and takes it away. And you really have no moral grounds upon which to complain. You can only hope to make yourself strong enough so that you can take it back. And to make yourself strong is to make yourself cruel. The suicide bomber is Ayn Rand’s ultimate legacy: not strong enough to take the oil back, but fully comprehending that the world is really about raw power, individual fanatics are easily convinced that there is meaning in flailing against the machine. In George’s Bush’s gentle dreams– which are not Ayn Rand’s dreams– there can be no comprehension of individuals who give up the possibility of enjoying the fruits of raw power. The only explanation is the lamest one: they must be jealous of our affluence and prosperity and freedom.

Patriotism, in the case of Iraq, is an attempt to convince most people– who do believe we are in this together to a great extent– that the war on Iraq is a moral cause. It is a lie. It can’t be anything but a lie because the war on Iraq is about nothing more than “finder’s keepers”. We found your oil. Now it’s ours. Just try to take it from us.

Ayn Rand had nothing but contempt for religion.  Which is odd, because most of Evangelical America believes in Alan Greenspan.

 

The bizarre thing about Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and those backroom fascists who believe in it, is that even the most hard-core capitalist doesn’t practice it when it comes to neighborhoods and families and churches and schools. Everyone knows how long a family would last, or what a neighborhood would look like, or how children at school would behave, if we all actually practiced Ayn Rand’s version of enlightened self-interest. There would be no need to do chores, or clean up your garbage, or keep it quiet after 11:00 at night, or do your homework– if the world works better if I only do what is in my own self-interest.

She is consistent in one respect: there is no need of a god in her scheme of things either. We are quite enough.

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Global Warming

For the past few years, I have been playing a little game with myself on the issue of global warming. I would read whatever I could about it, from any source at all, and then try to find out if the writer was funded, in any way, directly or indirectly, by the oil industry.

This was an easy task, for the most part. Virtually every scientist who denied global warming was employed by Exxon, Mobil, or another oil or coal company, or a foundation or Institute funded by them.

Conservatives will tell you that the people who believe in global warming, like Al Gore, are funded by the “climate-change industry”. I leave it to you decide if a voluntary group of concerned citizens is more “self-interested” and more likely to lie about the subject than Exxon and Mobil and the coal companies. It’s a clever approach, though, I give you that. A little earlier in history, they might have tried to convince you that Mother Theresa was running an “industry” of vagrant nuns looking for a handout and that poverty in India doesn’t really exist. It’s all just a scam to provide for Mother Theresa’s lavish memorials.

For the past year or so, I thought the game was over. Seemed to me that a tight consensus had grown up in the field, that global warming was real, that it was caused by humans, and that it was going to cause some severe environmental problems. Not so. Or so. I don’t know. But one has to be amazed at the capacity for humans of all political and social stripes to delude themselves into believing that any particular piece of knowledge is a “slam-dunk”.

In an article in Discover Magazine, a scientist not employed by the oil industry, named John Christy, of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asserts that all the scientists who say the globe is warming are wrong. I wish I could give you a number of how many exactly are wrong, and how many are for and how many are against, and how many don’t know but wish everyone else would make up their minds….

Wouldn’t it be nice if facts could be decided by a majority.

Anyway, they are wrong and he is right, because he looked at temperatures in a different way, and got data from different sources, and his data shows that, in fact, there is a bit of cooling going on– not warming. And the Arctic is actually freezing, so forget all those images you saw on TV and in National Geographic. It’s all the result of sun spots, and a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark has proven it.

Okay– that last part is my deductive conclusion based on Mr. Christy’s reasoning. If we are not warming, I’m not sure why the ice is melting. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it just a fluke, an inversion of some kind. Who knows?

We have always known that hot summers are not the result, directly, of global warming. Weather in any particular location on any particular day is not cut and dried and linear. We know there will be oddities and anomalies, so Christy should stop pretending that people noticed the hot weather and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the entire globe was heating up.

Christy thinks that Africa could be saved from dire poverty if only every hut had an electric light bulb and microwave. And there was a Walmart in the neighborhood. Okay– I’m making up the Walmart part. But surely Christy is making up the microwave part. He believes America is a grand force for good in the world– we export “freedom”, you see.

Not sure why the people in Darfur haven’t lined up to buy it yet.

Conservatives have been very clever at leveraging dissent:

If 1000 scientists say that global warming is real and 1 scientist says it’s not, they announce that there is no consensus and Public Television is now obliged to present “both sides” of the issue.

I believe this ratio could also be used to justify presenting “both sides” on the issue of witchcraft. After all, a fair number of people really believe in witches.

Please— please Mr. Christy, give us all one tiny little insignificant little break and don’t take a job with the coal or gas or oil companies. Be the only light, the soul beacon of potential unconflicted evidence on the subject of global warming– at least from the skeptic side.

(Sorry Mr. Christy: I don’t regard foundations that raise money from people concerned about climate change to be as “interested” as the oil industry, even as the oil industry keeps trying to convince us that those greedy environmentalists will stop at nothing to continue to have an excuse to protest….)

Christy, by the way, is a Baptist. So, just because he is not employed directly by the oil industry, does not mean he doesn’t belong to a group that has an axe to grind: Baptists in the Southern U.S. are overwhelming politically and socially conservative. Climate change is a liberal, European issue.

Christy’s social and religious background are not helpful in determining whether he is telling the truth or not. As a Christian, you might hope that he would tell what he believes to be the truth, but that he also might express some distaste for some of the character assassination and oil industry lobbying that is going on behind the scenes.

No such luck.  Did he say he was a Christian?

We do know that the Republicans– who hate the idea of reducing carbon emissions– have carefully cultivated the support of Evangelical Christians since the 1970’s.  Unfortunately, the fact that Christy is a Christian makes it more likely that he is more loyal to the Republican Party than he is to independent research.

It is more likely that he is just a partisan hack and a liar.

Does that seem crude and judgmental?  I don’t ask that Christy agree with 99% of the climate scientists that the earth warming and it is due to human activity and carbon emissions.  I just ask that he show that he has principles, and, if he has principles, that he disagrees with Exxon’s blatant advocacy of fake science in order to protect their fossil fuel business investments.

Details From Discover Magazine

Christy’s Testimony to Congress on the Impact of CO2 Emissions that might come from More Coal-fired Plants

Just in– apparently Christy now acknowledges that climate change is real. His earlier data was flawed. Okay. That is a bit of a shock. I thought I’d found that hold-out independent scientist…. but no. BUT…. Christy believes that global warming will be a good thing for the planet. You can’t keep a good man down! Tune in again in five years…

Christy further undermines his own credibility by attacking “extremists”. If Christy is acting like a scientist, he wants you to know that his information is accurate and unbiased. But Christy is not being asked for his emotional judgment of a dissenting movement in politics. He has no expertise on what “extremism” is. He should only have addressed any particular facts and figures presented by any group– including those who are tools of the oil industry.

Author Michael Crichton has chimed in with his own propaganda on behalf of the skeptics. He has also testified to congress and given several public speeches on the global warming “scam”. Once again, it is odd that a skeptic seems more interested in political attacks on the climate change lobby than on disputing the facts. Most of us feel a speaker or writer is most credible when he is the least emotionally involved, and when it is clear that he isn’t just out to try to humiliate or insult or marginalize people he just doesn’t seem to like very much. It would have done wonders for Crichton’s credibility if he would acknowledge that the science is being “corrupted” by oil companies as well as by scientists who crave peer approval and don’t think for themselves.

Think about it– if you have a fire department with 12 members and they are sitting in the fire hall waiting around and a garbled message suddenly came through on the telephone and half the men thought it said there was a fire at city hall and the other half said they heard no such thing. What would anyone with common sense do? They’d drive the fire truck out to city hall with a crew to find out for sure. But the climate change skeptics, including Crichton and Christie, are trying to take away the keys to prevent the other six firemen from going anywhere. When that fails, they slash the tires. They accuse the other six firemen of being in the pocket of the Fire Prevention Industry.

The only explanation that could account for this behavior? The six skeptics are allied with the people who have set fire to city hall.

Mr. Crichton and company would be far more believable if they would merely take the trouble to point out that the skeptic “industry” is far more lavishly funded and “interested” than Al Gore and the majority of climatologists. If they really believe that the fact that many people make a living advocating reductions in carbon emissions invalidates their “science”, they would be quick to admit that the “science” of the skeptics is even more compromised. (At least the believers have an overtly beneficial purpose: to save mankind from immense suffering and economic hardship.) Then they might get back to the point: what are the facts? How can we find out more about what is really going on?

Crichton talks about the “religion” of environmentalism. All fair and good– there’s some truth to that. But it is absolutely ridiculous of him to ignore the “religion” of economic growth and capitalism which, like environmentalism, bears an irrational, unscientific adherence to a set of values and assumptions that colour it’s “scientific” conclusions about a global warming. The motive of the skeptic “industry” is increased consumption, bigger profits for corporations, and more pollution.

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The Most Important Thing You Will Ever Read About the Government and Diet

The excerpt from the article here makes it pretty cut and dried.

The government came to the honest conclusion that the increase in consumption of raw meats and dairy products after World War II resulted in a significant increase in heart disease. So it recommended that people cut down.

The dairy and meat industries vigorously objected. They had enough power and influence to force the government to alter the independent findings of it’s scientific and regulatory bodies and put out a lie to the general population: go ahead. Consume. Enjoy. It won’t hurt you.

From NY Times, January 28, 2007

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same.

First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement.

Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient.

Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them.

Do you think government guidelines don’t have much influence?  The meat and dairy industry certainly thought they did.

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John Ashcroft Captures an Actual Terrorist!

John Ashcroft, Attorney-General of the United States, has announced many, many arrests of people he claims are terrorists. If you check into these stories, you will find that most–if not all– of these arrests are actually of individuals who are guilty of nothing more than being suspiciously Arabic.

But lo and behold, the top law enforcement officer of the United States of America has finally arrested a bona fide terrorist, a man with actual bombs, guns, remote-controlled detonators, and a load of cyanide. Yes, John Ashcroft has finally caught himself an actual living, breathing, sweating terrorist.

And you aren’t going to hear much about it.

Why? Because the terrorist’s name is William Krar. Not Arabic at all. And he is no associate of Osama Bin Laden. Mr. Krar is a good old-fashioned all-American White Supremacist. Where’s the fun in that?

Doesn’t fit the official White House narrative does it? Doesn’t play well to the heart-land, does it, which sometimes holds to it’s bruised bosom the heartless souls of patriots like Timothy McVeigh, who may have gone a little astray, but, after all, grasped the essential dialectic of our time. No no no– America’s enemies are out there, they are not us, they don’t look like us.

There are persistent rumors that a “olive-skinned” man was seen in the Ryder Truck with McVeigh the day of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Now Krar and his cyanide.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times reports that an FBI spokesman asked an industry group for help dealing with the top domestic threats today: eco-terrorists and animal rights activists.

Stirring, isn’t it? Osama Bin Laden and Heather Graham at the same fund-raiser.

It’s spin. You don’t hear about Krar because the Bush administration needs you to believe that we need to spend $200 billion demolishing a two-bit dictator in Iraq to feel safe. The Bush Administration doesn’t want you to believe that you might end up being safer if a well-managed domestic police force was doing it’s job properly instead of chasing illegal immigrants or pot-smokers.

Krugman also reports that John Ashcroft is using every government data base available to search for terrorists. Every data base except one: the one that contains information about people who applied for gun permits.

To use that information, Ashcroft believes, would be to violate Americans’ civil rights.

If you’ve stopped laughing by now at the idea that John Ashcroft cares about anybody’s civil rights, read on: it is utterly amazing that the press has little or no curiosity about these stories. It’s waiting for signs that Bush will lose the election, before lining up their potshots.

Then we will hear how they had always known that Ashcroft was just a little over the top.

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The Police Take Sides on Trade Agreements

On Sept. 5, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff of the ACLU attended a briefing that the police held for local business leaders at the Intercontinental Hotel. Rodriguez-Taseff was shocked that Asst. Police Chief Frank Fernandez’s PowerPoint presentation openly endorsed the controversial trade agreement, telling the audience that it would bring 89,000 new jobs to the area and add $13.5 billion annually to Florida’s Gross State Product. From Salon, December 31, 2003.

Do the police know or care how damaging this information is?

I have no doubt that the police think they are behaving quite decently. Doesn’t everybody support Globalization? Well, real people do. So the unreal can be pelted with tear gas and pounded with batons.

 

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Carbon Dioxide

There isn’t very much carbon dioxide in the air, relatively speaking. As much as we spew it forth, from SUV’s and power plants, it only makes up a tiny fraction of the atmosphere. Plants need it to survive, and they convert it into oxygen, which we do need.

A field of corn ripening in the sun consumes all of the carbon dioxide within a meter or so of it’s stalks in five minutes. If there was no wind to bring more carbon dioxide, the corn would not grow. I didn’t know that. I thought it only needed sun and water and nutrients from the soil.

When a plant gets “too much” carbon dioxide from the air, it increases the number of roots that it grows, in order to balance it’s intake of carbon dioxide and minerals. These roots eventually die, of course, every fall. They then decay. Parts of them become topsoil, and parts become carbon dioxide and return to the air.

Did you know that “global warming” will take place mostly in the colder extremes of the earth, where the air is dry. That is because the increase of carbon dioxide doesn’t affect moist air as much as it does dry air (which is usually cold). But that doesn’t mean that North America will necessarily get warmer. If global warming increases rainfall in the West Antarctic, it will decrease the salinity of the water, which could cause it not to sink under the denser warmer currents in the middle of the ocean, which could affect the Gulf Stream which apparently brings moderate temperatures to Northern Europe.

For the last million years or so, the earth has been subjected to periods of extreme cold lasting for about 90,000 years, interrupted by brief periods of relative warmth lasting 10,000 to 12,000. We are at the end of one of those periods rights now. In fact, the next ice age could arrive at any moment. All of Northern Europe and Canada could be covered by ice sheets in a few thousand years. Unless,

My point? As a good old-fashioned “bleeding heart” liberal, you might think I would be a bit of an eco-freak and thus opposed to global warming. Well, I am. But not because I believe that science has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt,  that we are in danger of melting the polar ice caps. In fact, I think the science is not very certain at all on that issue: the problem is that the earth has a history of various climate changes over periods of thousands of years. It is possible that we were headed for an ice age but now we’re not.

But the science is clear on one thing: we are definitely increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a significant rate.

I am opposed to global warming because we don’t fully understand what the results will be, and some of it’s major effects may well be irreversible. In other words, I’m simply in favor of prudence, especially when the arguments against Kyoto are largely related to sustaining our voracious appetite for conspicuous consumption anyway.

Coincidentally, the same actions we need to take to address global warming also reduce pollution. So why not? It just seems prudent.

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Infodiversity

You are going to hear this word a lot in the next few years.

I hope..

Biodiversity is good. We know that if there is biodiversity in a certain geographical region, that the region is generally healthy. There is a balance of interests that allows all species to thrive and propagate within the same habitat.

However, if one species gains advantages as the result of human intervention or mishap, the entire ecosystem can become polluted or barren. Some species, for example, will consume all the grass and leaves, because of a reduction in the population of the carnivores that prey on them. The entire habitat can become a disaster zone.  (See Yellowstone Park and wolves.)

Information technologies are the same way. If our environment is balanced with news and information from a diversity of sources– labour, management, government, academia, women’s groups, men’s groups, capitalists, socialists, environmentalists, even conservatives– we will have a healthy habitat that represents a balance of all the competing interests.

But what happens if the wolves take over all of the information technologies and begin to control the message. That is what is happening in the news and entertainment industries. Big corporations like Time-Warner are taking over more and more other media companies, including AOL and CNN.

So when you watch your newscaster and read your paper and think that you are getting information from honest people who have drawn their own conclusions about various events and are relating them to you– think again.

When Adbusters tried to show a documentary on deforestation in British Columbia on TV– even offering to buy the air time– they were turned down flat. No television station would broadcast their documentary. Why not? You can buy air time to sell cars and panty hose and diamond rings and even tampons. You can even buy air time to show ads for pharmaceuticals that provide relief for non-existent illnesses.  Why can’t you buy air time to tell people about an ecological disaster in the making?

Because these media companies are not objective or neutral when it comes to interpreting events for you, the consumer. They want to decide what you should or should not see and they serve the interests of the moneyed class.

In practice, their standards seem pretty broad. They are always excited about showing you something that is “cutting edge”. But there are some things that they will never show you. And that is anything that challenges the idea that personal fulfillment and happiness can only be found in the purchase of more and more branded products and services.