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editor
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 Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 7:55 am Post subject: |
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The New York Times Magazine
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Athletes will almost certainly be doping in Beijing. And guess what: they'll probably get away with it.
By Juliet Macur
June, 2008
| Quote: | What's On the Menu?
For endurance athletes, the preferred poison is synthetic EPO (erythropoietin), a hormone that stimulates red blood cell production and, thus, oxygen-carrying capacity. Athletes in strength sports use steroids, which increase muscle mass. Human growth hormone is thought by some users to strengthen connective tissue and increase lean body mass, so it may work for most any sport. But athletes often combine drugs. A regimen might consist of steroid drops under the tongue, an EPO shot and a cream that is part testosterone and part epitestosterone (a masking agent). H.G.H. is often combined with steroids to build strength and aid recovery.
Testers in overdrive
Some 4,500 drug tests will be performed in Beijing, 25 percent more than at the 2004 Olympics. About 900 of those will be blood tests, and another 700 to 800 will check for EPO. Who will be tested? The top five finishers in each event and two randomly selected competitors. Each will provide a urine sample, a blood sample or both. The samples will be transported — by armed guards — from 41 collection stations to a facility near the National Stadium where some 150 scientists and volunteers will work 24 hours a day. Besides looking for banned substances, they’ll look for clues that an athlete is taking something new. Low natural hormone levels, for example, indicate an athlete might be taking hormones in synthetic form.
How They Might Get Away With It
Cheaters adapt, and crafty athletes are continually concocting ways to avoid positive results. Some athletes dilute their urine with water. Others use catheters to inject drug-free urine into their bladders shortly before their events. Certain methods, however, are out: male athletes will no longer get away with taking diuretics or other masking agents like the female fertility drug Clomid; those substances are now caught by the normal drug screening. A cheater’s best asset is often time. Drug users rely on detailed calendars to determine when to stop using banned substances. EPO, for instance, can be detected only for a few days after use — but the drug is said to be effective for several weeks after that. Then there are certain male athletes who may be able to take testosterone and not worry about testing positive: a recent doping study showed that two-thirds of Asian men and 10 percent of Caucasians are missing a gene function that converts testosterone into a form that dissolves in urine. These athletes could use the steroid and still test clean.
What They'll Try NEXT
By the 2012 Olympics, drug testers will likely have a new problem on their hands: some athletes will have moved beyond drugs. They will be gene doping, or altering themselves genetically. “This is infinitely more complicated,” Wadler says. By transferring synthetic genes into human cells, athletes could stimulate muscle growth, increase metabolism or boost endurance. Those transferred genes would blend seamlessly into the athlete’s DNA. Some experts say that the future is already here, and that athletes are probably gene doping for Beijing. “This is very much on our radar screen,” Wadler says. So far, the only sure way to detect gene doping is by taking a biopsy of the affected muscle tissue — not a practical solution. Which is just the kind of test that cheaters love. ... (-- p. 18) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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TimesOnline
Fleet Street's Finest
Call that a special relationship? They wouldn't bet on it
America's pursuit of British businessmen who have broken no law is absurd
By Mishcon de Reya lawyer, Anthony Julius
June 17/08
| Quote: | With George W. Bush in London, it is a good time to reflect on the “special relationship”. According to received opinion, this consists of no more than Britain's special culpability for colluding in American crimes. This is mistaken and derives from a European anti-Americanism at least as old as the American Republic itself.
But does this mean that there is no cause at all for concern about the special relationship? Barack Obama has conceded that the relationship must be somewhat “recalibrated”. An Obama adviser added: “Full partners not only listen to each other, they also occasionally follow each other.” He was right to identify an inequality that urgently needs remedying.
The “special relationship”, a phrase coined by Winston Churchill after the Second World War, is predicated on shared language and history, and a commitment to representative democracy and the political freedoms that sustain it. It has the character of a family relationship in two critical respects. It is permanent and open to particular abuse. Although the abuse has been sharpest in recent years, it derives from a longer-term problem - best identified as a peculiarly American extraterritorialism.
“Extraterritorialism” is either when a state gives up some sovereignty to another body, or when it asserts authority over a foreign nation. It can cut both ways. According to the liberal version, individual states should subordinate their sovereign desires to common interests, submitting to authorities such as the UN. According to the imperial version, one state has the right to assert its sovereignty over others, requiring them to submit to its interests.
Liberal extraterritorialism is now identified with Europe; imperial extraterritorialism is taken to be the US default position in both trade and warfare. America is, as the historian Niall Ferguson has approvingly pointed out, an empire. It should therefore surprise no one that it behaves like one.
But the distinction between liberal and imperial does not quite capture the paradox of America's stance. It has been liberal at times and imperial at other times. But it has also been a third, uniquely American thing. This amounts to an interventionism that is genuinely self-sacrificing - acting not merely in its own selfish interests, while also acting without the consent of bodies, such as the UN. It is not submitting to American self-delusion to acknowledge this.
Such an acknowledgement is needed to put into perspective criticisms of US imperial extraterritorialism (to declare an interest, I write as a member of a law firm representing victims of one especially egregious US assertion of extraterritorial authority).
Among deplorable instances of this invasiveness are the Helms-Burton Act 1996, which extends the US embargo against Cuban goods to foreign companies trading with Cuba and provisions of the Patriot Act 2001 that treat foreign bank deposits as if held in the foreign bank's US Interbank account.
And there is the Extradition Act 2003, which reflected an inequality between Britain and the US, making it easier for US prosecuting authorities to extradite from Britain than for British prosecuting authorities to extradite from the US.
The tendency to ignore international obligations and substitute aggressive unilateral, protectionist policies is hardly a vice limited to the US. But the extent of US power and influence means that when the US misbehaves that misbehaviour has the greatest impact. In March 2003, Antigua and Barbuda complained to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) about US laws that prohibited foreign access to the highly lucrative US internet gambling market. The WTO ruled that these US laws violated America's international obligations. The US should have legislated to comply with its international commitments, helping to safeguard the WTO's integrity. Instead, it announced that it would withdraw from its treaty commitments.
Meanwhile, in October 2006, Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act (UIGEA). The publicly listed and most responsible (mainly UK-listed) operators leading the industry immediately stopped taking US customers, at the cost of billions of dollars. These losses were not just to the few individuals most rewarded by the industry's success, but to all the institutional and individual investors in the companies and the other industries benefiting from WTO-sanctioned business in a multi-billion dollar industry.
The US nevertheless continues to act against those who withdrew from the market in 2006, while US businesses still operate in America free of interference or the risk of prosecution. The US seems untroubled by WTO findings. Nor is it deterred by an EU investigation into its discriminatory legislation and its violation of international trade principles. Remarkably, US companies are developing equivalent businesses in the UK and elsewhere in Europe on equal terms with UK and European businesses. (emphasis added)
Many believe that American prosecutors will not rest until those associated with British online gaming are in jail or parties to multimillion-pound “settlements”. Among the UK companies, banks and businessmen threatened with prosecution for activities that were lawful when undertaken, David Carruthers, the Scottish former chief executive of BetOnSports, is under house arrest in St Louis on racketeering and conspiracy charges. And six weeks after that arrest, Peter Dicks, the chief executive of Sportingbet, was detained on entering the US. These British businessmen, who were acting completely lawfully, are being persecuted by retrospective American law.
There is a tendency among commentators to ignore international trade and business relations in favour of broader political and geopolitical concerns. But we should not need Adam Smith to remind us that it is in the fairness of everyday commercial dealings between nations that peace and harmony lie. America is in danger of overlooking this truth, when it acts unjustly and overlooks the interests of its allies and friends.
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| Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 2:58 pm Post subject: |
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From Protecting the Environment - B.C. 'BILLY-style:
Canadian Geographic
Magazine Subscription
A River to Ruin
Why are Americans fighting so hard to protect British Columbia's Flathead River from a strip mine?
By Jeff Hull
June, 2008
| Quote: | The ecological value of the valley - its unparalleled carnivore populations and pristine water - "is too important to jeopardize with irresponsible energy development," says Max Baucus, Montana's senior senator. As chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, he wields a great deal of influence on Capitol Hill. He says he's 100 per cent committed to stopping" industrial development in the Flathead. ...
"I don't know if we're going to seek tenure further down the road. Right now the referral process does not include the Flathead. Therefore our plans are to not include the Flathead," says BP (multinational energy producer, formerly British Petroleum) spokesperson Anita Perry. "It's up to the British Columbia government, not BP, to decide if the Flathead will every be developed, and today it's just not available."
BP's caginess points out why Baucus and others on both sides of the border feel that eventually, without comprehensive protection for the Flathead, an energy project will become the first in a series of destructive dominoes that would ravage the most ecologically rich, unprotected valley remaining along the Canada-U.S. border. Despite BP's withdrawal, other companies, including one eyeing a mine site within the Flathead River flood plain, appear poised to take advantage of the improved infrastructure that would accompany development of Cline's Lodgpole Mine project.
"We are hell-bent to get it done and are pushing the government to get it done," Cline's chief executive officer Ken Bates said recently in the online magazine Kootenaybiz.com. "I'm sorry they are taking so long."
Accordingly, Cline's proposal has ignited a cross-border shouting match and triggered a Canadian Environmental Assessment . Senator Baucus has implored Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to ratchet the dispute to a higher level, and U.S. State Department officials confirm that they are, on some unspecified level, planning to engage their Canadian counterparts.
... Premier Gordon Campbell ... would like to recast the argument as one about global warming, piously claiming that climate change, not industrial development, is the biggest threat to the Flathead. But the premier's concern about climate change seems a bit obtuse given that open-pit mining of low-grade coal, which Cline plans to ship overseas to feed the largely unregulated industrial economies of China, India and Brazil, would ultimately generate even more greenhouse-gas emissions.
... faced with the B.C. government's two-zone mining policy - under which provincial lands either are already protected as parks or reserves or are open to mining - (Montana Governor Brian) Schweitzer, Baucus, ... American scientists and a dedicated cadre of Canadian conservationists believe that minding their own business would be tantamount to watching the ineluctible degradation of a unique ecological treasure. ...
... another mining proposal, on Sage Creek, threatened the valley in the 1970s. Canadian and American officials demanded - and won - a referral to the International Joint Commission (IJC), which adjudicates disputes about waters that cross the Canada-U.S. border. In 1988, the IJC Study Board, a collection of more than 50 scientists from both countries, unanimously concluded that no mines should be allowed in the Flathead until baseline scientific data were collected and both countries could agree on a "mutually acceptable use of resources." (View the results). The Sage Creek mine was never developed. (emphasis added)
... As far back as 1911, John George "Kootenai" Brown, the first superintendent of Waterton Lakes National Park, argued it "seems advisable to greatly expand this park" to protect adjacent "breeding grounds" in the Flathead. In the 1950s and 1960s, various government officials lobbied for park expansion into British Columbia. In 1995, when UNESCO awarded World Heritage Site status to Waterton -Glacier, the missing piece of pie - British Columbia's Flathead valley - was noted as problematic, too much core area was left unprotected, and expansion was recommended.
In 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chretien tried but could not overcome the B.C. government's resistance to park expansion. ...
Paul Martin's Liberal government made a park feasibility study a condition for the transfer to provincial jurisdiction of other federally owned coal blocks underlying the Flathead. But in 2006, the (Conservative) government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper quietly dropped the feasibility study from the deal. Without it, park expansion proposals are dead in the water. (-- pgs. 42-52) |
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| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:00 am Post subject: |
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The Costco Connection
Magazine Freebie of Some Quality for Members
Do politics have a place at the Olympics?
The recent call by some countries to boycott the 2008 Olympics in China again serves notice that the Olympics serve not only as an arena where the best athletes in the world compete, but also as a place where international politics can collide. ... the Olympics are a natural venue for non-violent political protest. The Games are used to promote democracy and human rights around the world, so what better place to raise awareness of human rights infringements and other injustices? ...
July/August, 2008
| Quote: | The Olympic Games by definition are political: They involve citizens, they involve tax dollars, they involve politicians and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) demands financial commitment on the part of relevant government bodies as part of the bid process. Sporting competition is only the tip of the gigantic Olympic industry iceberg. Multinational sponsors, host broadcasters, developers and the high end of the hospitality and tourism industries win most of the gold medals.
All of this is political, and the folks who decry the "politicizing" of the Olympics are the ones who have the most to lose from a boycott. So we see the IOC president leading the chorus of people who claim that the athletes would suffer the most. Human interest stories and appeals to nationalism take top place in the mass media: moving accounts of innocent young athletes who have sacrificed their youth to training and bringing honour to their countries.
When politicians and Olympic boosters try to sell the idea of bidding for the Games, this isn't labelled "bringing politics into the Olympics." Nor is it called "political" when organizing committees lobby politicians to pour more and more tax dollars into the bottomless pit of Olympic spending. Or, in the case of Sydney 2000, when the head of the Olympic Organizing Committee happens to be the Olympics minister in the state parliament.
But when protesters take to the streets to get public attention focused on the misplaced spanding priorities in the host city/state/country, or to get world-media attention on local and global injustices, often with considerable success, they're accused of politicizing and contaminating something pure and holy, as if the Olympics are a religion or a social movement or an extended family. (emphasis added)
"The eyes of the world" argument pushed by Olympic boosters and politicians is equally useful for human rights organizations, anti-poverty groups, housing advocates, environmentalists and Indigenous peoples. As an activist involved in social justice protests in Canada and Australia over the last 10 years, I fully support their tireless efforts to make the Olympic industry accountable and socially responsible. (-- p. 13) |
| Quote: | Olympic Industry Resistance
Papberback
By Helen Jefferson Lenskyj
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:25 am Post subject: |
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What's the carbon footprint of MASSIVE housing failures worldwide?
Again, the 'scientists' load the dice, wilfully blind to the PANDEMIC! of housing failures due at least in part to ill-considered energy-saving provisions?!
Heat
How to Stop the Planet
from Burning
Hardcover
By George Monbiot
| Quote: | Like Bush, the Conservatives have also cut or suspended their funding for energy efficiency programmes and other means of preventing climate change. Environment Canada is beginning to look like the Environmental Protection Agency in the US: an official body whose staff are treated by the government as enemies of the state.
I don't blame you, the citizens of Canada, for this. Not all of you, at any ratel. I know that many Canadians are just as angry about these policies as we are in Europe. An opinion poll by Decima Research showed that 59% of those surveyed believed that Canada should not withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, while only 31% supported Harper's position. The provincial governments of Quebec, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador have vowed to stick to the terms of Kyoto, whatever the federal government might do. The will have to do it without help, however, as Harper has cut their environmental funding. In June 2006, 1400 Canadian mayors committed themselves to cutting greenhouse gases by 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. It's not nearly enough, but it still puts Harper and his flock of chickens to shame.
While in the temperate parts of Europe the graver impacts of climate change will be slow to arrive, in Canada they are already knocking on your door. The Arctic is warming much more rapidly than lower latitudes, with serious consequences for the culture and subsistence of your native peoples; for biodiversity and for infrastructure: already roads and airstrips which will cost billions of dollars to replace are bginning to sag and split as the permafrost melts. As the tundra warms up, it could release the massive store of methane and carbon dioxide it contains, greatly accelerating global warming.
All this, I realise, is hardly likely to boost your self-image. But in other respects we look up to you. Your R-2000 building standards are a model the rest of the world would be wise to adopt. ... (footnotes omitted) (emphasis added)(-- pgs. xi-xii) |
Here we go AGAIN with the R-2000 skullduggery!
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 10:32 am Post subject: |
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The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription yes, but not without the dull clunker daily
Tariff To Nowhere
Will the Democrats come to their senses on trade?
By Roger Lowenstein
June 18/08
| Quote: | What has changed? In the first place, the supposed consensus was never so broad. Clinton passed his trade deals mostly with the votes of Republicans. And in the Bush years, economic troubles have stoked the fear that trade is costing Americans jobs, especially in the shrinking manufacturing sector.
This was also the fear in 1930, when the U.S. hiked tariffs, aggravating the world Depression. To the diplomats who reshaped the world’s economy after World War II, trade barriers were clearly a folly. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, signed in 1947, reduced tariffs around the globe. Seven successive treaties cut them more. Today the average tariff on U.S. imports is a meager 3 percent — down from 20 percent in 1940. Free or almost-free trade is a fact. Clinton greatly accelerated the process by signing Nafta, which created a free-trade zone with Mexico and Canada. Bush has signed 12 more bilateral deals, with countries ranging from Chile to Morocco. But Congress is balking at passing the most recent pact, with Colombia. ...
John McCain, an avid free trader, would surely try to reignite the Doha session. The more interesting question is what the Democrats would do. Obama may soften his populism in the fall, given that protectionists of late have not been winners in national elections. What’s more, if he were to win, he would have a difficult time governing as a protectionist. “There are two forces that will tend to move Obama to centrist positions,” Hufbauer says. Thanks to the cheap dollar, U.S. exports are booming; trade is now the economy’s strong suit. And Obama will find that China is less likely to cooperate on global warming, and the French less likely to lend a hand in Iraq, if our markets are closed to their products. Protectionism does not go down with a multilateral foreign policy.
And most economists, including those advising Obama, still support the old consensus, that trade promotes the general well-being even if it causes certain industries and their workers harm. The harm is difficult to measure, but trade is hardly the only culprit. Middle- and lower-income workers’ relative earning power started falling in the late 1970s — more than a decade before Nafta. In all likelihood, the loss of manufacturing jobs has more to do with productivity gains (the fact that it takes fewer employees to assemble a car, print a newspaper and so forth) than with trade.
Even Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School who, like Hillary Clinton, favors a time-out on new trade deals, isn’t antitrade. He argues that with trade accounting for fully 30 percent of the gross domestic product, the government should do more to cushion its effects. For instance, it could give workers displaced by trade wage insurance or early retirement.
And all discussions of the victims of trade ignore the considerable benefits: the exports we sell and the lower prices for consumers at home. Since poorer Americans spend a higher proportion of their incomes on low-wage imports (shoes from China, for instance), trade can also be seen as favoring the less well off. If only politicians would stop preaching to them otherwise. (emphasis added) (-- pgs. 15-16) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 10:05 am Post subject: |
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Audubon
Magazine Subscription
Raising the Roof
Today city skylines are getting greener. Wildflowers and grasses are carpeting rooftops, soaking up storm water, cooling buildings, and providing habitat in the clouds
By Susan J. Tweit (Twit?!)
March-April, 2008
| Quote: | ... one example of the hottest trend in green building: eco-roofs, also called green or living roofs. Blanketed with an insulating layer of soil medium and plants, these roofs are springing up in cities to fight climate change, save energy, prevent flooding, and provide habitat for birds, butterflies, and other airborne wildlife.
In Europe, meadow-style cottage roofs go back centuries, but planners and ecologists began touting industrial-size versions for city buildings in the 1980s to temper the so-called “heat island” effect and to reduce runoff. Paving and conventional tar and gravel roofs in urban areas absorb tremendous amounts of solar energy and re-radiate it, thus heating surrounding air and causing cities to be as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than surrounding countryside.
Hotter cities cause higher demand for air-conditioning, more air pollution, increased greenhouse-gas emissions, and more heat-related illnesses and deaths. Planted roofs radically reduce heat absorption, helping to keep the heat island effect in check. They also create shade and add insulation, so that buildings are cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. Researchers at Environment Canada, a government agency, estimate that vegetated roofs can reduce summer electricity consumption linked to cooling by up to 25 percent for one-story structures, and by about 6 percent for buildings three to eight stories high. Additionally, green roofs clean the air by removing particulates and ozone-producing compounds, and they add oxygen and sequester carbon as the living plants respire and make food.
... the earliest green roofs used a continuous layer of engineered soil medium, which made them heavy. Further improvements to those soil replacements, some of which resemble potting soils, have since trimmed the weight. These new soils have also helped avoid compaction, and can be planted at depths as shallow as one inch. Some newer types use mats of plants and soil laid like sod, while modular systems employ movable trays containing soil medium and plants. No matter what kind they are, green roofs add weight to buildings, so it’s important to consult an expert such as an architect or roofing contractor experienced in these roofs before incorporating one on your home. (emphasis added)
Once they are installed, most green roofs need to be irrigated at least until the plants are established. Some feature native species, others are planted with horticultural varieties, and some mix the two. All require plants that can withstand the extreme environments of rooftops, where temperatures may fluctuate 50 degrees between day and night and where high-velocity winds whip through urban canyons. For these reasons, varieties of sedums are often a popular choice. ... (-- pgs. 40-45) |
Our e-mail to Audubon:
| Quote: | From: editor
To: editor@audubon.org
Cc: editor
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 2:02 PM
Subject: Green Roofs- Rooftop Gardens - not for the hillbilly housing construction industry outside Europe!
Hello Audubon Ed,
As a consumer advocacy website fighting against the worldwide proliferation of substandard, leaky, wood-frame, barrier-FULL, unaffordable, inaccessible multi-unit housing - thanks in large measure to Canada, land of construction failure spin-doctoring extraordinaire! - we were appalled at the gloss-job you did on green roofs and rooftop gardens in March-April, 2008. We decided to give you a link as a way of filling in what's missing in your infomercial - essentially, the cold, hard reality that few buildings are good candidates for these complex, maintenance-INTENSE features, and that even fewer architects and builders are IN ANY WAY competent to construct them. Please see http://bccondos.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1370#1370.
You MUST stop glossing over the WILDLY INCREASED risk of building failure created by rooftop gardens / green roofs especially in the very well-documented wake of massive housing failures, which are well known not only in Oregon, Washington, California and British Columbia but throughout urban centres in North America and indeed worldwide. Cut through the real estate industry's misplaced, misguided sales pitch and get out your calculators - what's the carbon footprint of a housing failure pandemic?! Environment Canada sure won't tell you. Nor will any other branches of the Canadian gov't in its dubious effort to export what many Canucks now call the new failed housing economy, which requires a reliable stock of failed housing to repair (reconstruct, really) every few years. Unbelievably, Canada has even managed to give technology as patently dangerous as R-2000 marketplace street cred! Don't let them succeed! See http://bccondos.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?t=320.
Editor
http:www.bccondos.ca
Tracking leaky substandard, barrier-full, unaffordable, multi-unit housing failures worldwide.
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada |
Audubon replies:
| Quote: | From: "EDITOR" <EDITOR>
To: editor@bccondos.ca
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 1:36 PM
Subject: RE: Green roofs / rooftop gardens - but not in Canada or at least B.C. - 'BILLIES aren't competent!
Greetings,
Thank you for your email. We appreciate your input regarding our coverage of rooftop gardens and green roofing.
Respectfully,
Audubon Magazine |
Not exactly hard-hitting but maybe reporter and magazine will take a more critical approach next time - especially if these luxury features create the rooftop catastrophe we predict in view of such widespread building failure.
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2008 12:52 pm Post subject: |
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Oh, no! STILL ANOTHER 'expert,' extolling the virtues of insulation with NO thought to the weathertightness pandemic!
The Last Generation
How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change
Hardcover
By Fred Pearce
Our e-mail to Fred and New Scientist:
| Quote: | From: editor@bccondos.ca
To: http://www.newscientist.com/contactperson.ns?recipient=envfdbk
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2008 1:35 PM
Subject: Re: Fred's call to insulate no matter what the consequences
Re: Fred Pearce and the call in his book, The Last Generation, to insulate homes with NO THOUGHT to the weathertightness pandemic sweeping the planet due, at least in part, to misguided energy-saving building standards of the 1970s
What is behind this peculiarly European affection for North America's construction fraudsters, whose spectacular record building failures are at last beginning to cover the globe? What's the carbon footprint, I wonder, of a failed housing economy that may employ legions of marginally-skilled laborers, creating the illusion of a 'hot, booming' economy when, in fact, it's a thin cover for planned obsolescence and ultimately a crying waste of resources?!
I know you can write, Fred, but can you read? Prove it! See annotated links at the poor, beleaguered website, www.bccondos.ca http://bccondos.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1387#1387 and, for goodness sake, spread the word!
At least have a look at a few of the photos documenting a small number of well-insulated, carcinogenic disasters! How much are housing failures contributing to the asthma pandemic among school children? A truly New Scientist would start writing about the implications of Health Canada's study linking indoor building quality with respiratory illness and probably cancer http://bccondos.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?t=54 |
We'll post any replies here. Please check back soon for updates!
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:21 am Post subject: |
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The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
Edited and Newly Translated by Chana Bloch
and Stephen Mitchell
Hardcover
| Quote: | Dice
With great love the people
stand beside the lowered barrier.
In each of their minds a single thought,
licked clean as a bone.
From her small booth,
the lottery woman leans out to watch.
The non-train passes by,
the non-expected arrives.
With great love, afterward,
the people disperse.
With hair loose and eyes
shut tight, they sleep.
They are all dice
that landed on the lucky side.
(-- p. 150) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Nov 09, 2008 12:35 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Mgazine Subscription
The Financial Page
Equal Before Mammon
By James Surowiecki
Sept. 15/08
| Quote: | She was an ordinary middle-class mom who, despite fierce criticism, succeeded in a male-dominated profession. She challenged the local establishment and became a national figure, earning herself a spot as a featured speaker at her party's recent Convention. But she wasn't the governor of Alaska. She was a woman named Lilly Ledbetter, a former middle manager at a Goodyear plant in Alabama, who appeared at the Democratic Convention to give a human face to the slogan "Equal pay for equal work."
Ledbetter's unlikely journey to center stage began in the late nineteen-nineties, when she received an anonymous note revealing the salaries of her fellow-managers, all of whom were men. Although Ledbetter did the same job as her colleagues, and had more seniority than some of them, they were all being paid considerably more than she was. Ledbetter sued, under the Civil Rights Act, and proved that her lower pay was the result of discrimination early in her career, the effects of which had never been remedied. But victory was short-lived; the verdict was overturned on appeal, and then the Supreme Court ruled against her. The Court did not deny that Ledbetter had been discriminated against. However, according to the Civil Rights Act, Ledbetter's lawsuit had to be filed within a hundred and eighty days, and the Court ruled that the clock started ticking with the first act of discrimination, almost two decades before Ledbetter found out what was going on.
Ledbetter was out of luck. But the Court did leave open a possibility for others like her: if Congress wanted a more realistic time frame for lawsuits, all it had to do was change the law. And so, acting with surprising dispatch, that's precisely what Congress tried to do. Last year, the House passed a bill, named after Ledbetter, that essentially did away with the statute of limitations on pay discrimination, and the Senate was set to do the same until Republicans filibustered it to death.
Protecting workers from discrimination is a fairly uncontroversial idea. So opponents of the bill, who include John McCain, insisted that, while they're in favor of equal pay, the new law would unleash a flood of frivolous litigation. That's a familiar excuse, and in this case a threadbare one. There would likely be more lawsuits if the bill was passed--the point, after all, was to allow more people to sue--but there was no reason to expect a deluge, since, before the Court's decision, it's probable that most potential litigants had assumed a less stringent interpretation of the time limit anyway. And giving workers more time to sue makes sense, because pay discrimination usually takes a while to become evident, and, insofar as raises and bonuses are based on initial salaries, its effects never go away.
Other opponents of the bill depict it as a stalking horse for the idea of "comparable worth" (also known as "pay equity"), which would require the government to shrink the current gender wage gap by insuring that workers in female-dominated professions receive pay similar to that of workers in male-dominated professions, as long as they're doing work of "similar value." To have the government, rather than the market, set wages and decide what kinds of work are comparable to others is indeed a poor idea. But the Lilly Ledbetter bill has nothing to do with comparable worth. It's about closing a loophole that has enabled employers to get away with active discrimination. Comparable worth would require the government to enforce equal pay for different jobs. But Ledbetter just wanted what she was entitled to--equal pay for the same job.
Does the Ledbetter bill matter? It's true that active discrimination is rarer these days than it once was. But, contrary to what much economic work would predict, racial and sex discrimination is still a powerful force in the job market. Decades ago, the economist Gary Becker showed that "taste-based" discrimination (pure prejudice) could not survive in a truly competitive talent market, because unprejudiced companies would outperform prejudiced ones by hiring smart women and minorities. Yet the introduction of blind auditions at major symphony orchestras, starting in the seventies, has increased by fifty per cent the likelihood of female performers' advancing--a clear sign that, for decades, orchestras had made bad talent decisions because of their prejudice without being punished. More striking, recent work by Kerwin Charles and Jonathan Guryan, of the University of Chicago, shows that, under certain reasonable conditions, market competition will not necessarily eradicate discrimination. That may be why, they suggest, the gap between black and white wages is widest in the most prejudiced parts of the U.S.--precisely what you'd expect if businessmen could discriminate and get away with it.
Of course, just because the market can't prevent discrimination doesn't mean the government should. And so there is a principled argument against the Ledbetter bill: namely, that Lilly Ledbetter was an adult; that if she didn't think she was being paid fairly she was free to ask for more money or to leave; and that government interference with the idea of what constitutes fair pay is likely to cause more problems than it's worth. Unlike the current opposition to the bill, this is an honest position to take. But it's also, for good reasons, a profoundly unpopular one, which is why few Republicans have voiced it. Instead, opponents of the bill have acted like McCain, proclaiming their support for fair pay while doing their best to insure that workers have a hard time getting it. Maybe it's time for them to give Americans some straight talk and unveil a new slogan: "Unequal pay for equal work." It may not be catchy, but at least it's honest. (--p. 34) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 9:05 am Post subject: |
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Pigs Have Wings
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | ... 'What's all this about your new pig?'
'What about it?'
'Clarence says you imported it from Kent.'
'Well?'
'A low trick.'
'Perfectly legitimate. Show me the rule that says I mustn't.'
'There are higher things than rules, young Parsloe. There is an ethical code.'
'A what?'
'Yes, I thought you wouldn't know what that meant. Let it pass. You are really proposing to enter this porker of yours in the Fat Pigs class at the Agricultural Show?'
'I have already done so.'
'I see. And now, no doubt, your subtle brain is weaving plots and schemes. You're getting ready to start the funny business, just as you used to do in the old days.'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
Gally gave a short, hard, unpleasant laugh.
'He doesn't know what I'm talking about! I will ask you, Parsloe, to throw your mind back a number of years to a certain evening at the Black Footman public-house in Gossiter Street. You and I were young then, and in the exuberance of youth I had matched my dog Towser against your dog Banjo for a substantial sum in a rat contest. And when the rats were brought on and all should have been bustle and activity on Towser's part, where was he? Dozing in a corner with his stomach bulging like an alderman's. I whistled him...called him...Towser, Towser...No good. Fast asleep. And why? Because you had drawn him aside just before the starting bell was due to go and filled him up past the Plimsoll mark with steak and onions, thus rendering his interest in rats negligible and enabling your Banjo to win by default.'
'I deny it!'
'It's no good standing there saying "I deny it." I am perfectly aware that I am not able to prove it, but you and I know that that is what happened. Somebody had inserted steak and onions in that dog - I sniffed his breath, and it was like opening the door of a Soho chop-house on a summer night - and the verdict of History will be that it was you. You were the world's worst twister in the old days, a man who would stick at nothing to gain his evil ends. And ... now I approach the nub...you still are. Even as we stand here, you are asking yourself "How can I nobble the Empress and leave the field clear for my entry?" Oh, yes you are. I remember saying to Clarence once, "Clarence," I said, "I have known young Parsloe for thirty years and I solemnly state that if his grandmother was entered in a competition for fat pigs and his commitments made it desirable for him to get her out of the way, he would dope her bran mash and acorns without a moment's hesitation." Well, let me tell you that that is a game two can play at. Your every move will be met with ruthless reprisals. You try to nobble our pig, and we'll nobble yours. One poisoned potatio in the Empress's dinner pail, and there will be six poisoned potatoes in Queen of Matchingham's. That is all I wanted to say. A very hearty good afternoon to you, Parsloe,' said Gally turning on his heel. (-- pgs. 41-43) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 12:59 pm Post subject: |
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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Hardcover
By Julian Barnes
| Quote: | | ... (British poet Philip) Larkin, visiting an empty church, wonders what will happen when 'churches fall completely out of use'. Shall we 'keep / A few cathedrals chronically on show' (that 'chronically' always produces a burn of envy in this writer), or 'Shall I avoid them as unlucky places'? Larkin concludes that we shall still - always - be drawn towards such abandoned sites, because 'someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.' (-- p. 57) |
Even better:
| Quote: | One possibility we didn't consider was that God is the ultimate ironist. Just as scientists set up laboratory experiments with rats, mazes and pieces of cheese placed behind the correct door, so God might have set up His own experiment, with us playing rat. Our task is to locate the door behind which eternal life is hidden. Near one possible exit we hear distant ethereal music, near another smell a whiff of incense; golden light gleams around a third. We press against all these doors, yet none of them yields. With increasing urgency - for we know that the cunning box we find ourselves in is called mortality - we try to escape. But what we don't understand is that our non-escaping is the whole point of the experiment. There are many fake doors, but no real one, because there is no eternal life. The game thought up by God the ironist is this: to plant immortal longings in an undeserving creature and then observe the consequences. To watch these humans, freighted with consciousness and intelligence, rushing around like frantic rats. To see how one group of them instructs everyone else that their door (which even they can't open) is the only correct one, and then perhaps starts killing anyone who puts money on a different door. Wouldn't that be fun?
The experimenting, ironic, games-playing God. Why not? If God made man, or man made God, in His or his own image, then homo sapiens implies Deus ludens. And the other favourite game He gets us to play is called Does God Exist? He gives various clues and arguments, drops hints, appoints agents provocateurs on both sides (didn't that Voltaire do a good job?), then sits back with a beatific smile on His face and watches us try to work it out. And don't think that a quick and craven acceptance - Yes, God, we always knew you were there from the start, before anyone else said so, You're the man! - will cut any ice with this fellow. ... (-- pgs. 191-192) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:16 pm Post subject: |
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The American Way of War
Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril
Hardcover
By Eugene Jarecki, filmmaker of The Trials of Henry Kissinger
The frontloading/political engineering con:
| Quote: | To illustrate how frontloading and political engineering undermine the wisdom of congressional decision making, Spinney uses a Lockheed Martin/Boeing's F-22 Raptor fighter as a case study. The F-22 is a highly advanced stealth aircraft program whose nearly twenty-year design and development process has been shadowed by controversy over its spiraling costs and diminished usefulness in the wake of the Cold War, for which it was originally intended. "When a contractor builds a major system like the F-22, the first thing they do is to lowball the initial estimate," he explains. "With the F-22, they said it was going to cost $30 million and weigh 50,000 pounds. The plane is now up well over $300 million a copy and climbing. And it's got all sorts of technical problems. Worst of all, Spinney exclaims, "it's an air-to-air combat aircraft originally conceived to fight the Soviet Union, and today we don't even have an enemy with an air force!"
This, according to Spinney, is where political engineering comes in. "Frontloading enables you to get the program going. But to keep it going, you start flooding money and jobs to as many congressional districts as possible as quickly as possible. So when the program's true costs become apparent, or its performance problems become apparent - when it doesn't do what you said it was going to do and it costs far more than you said it was going to cost and it requires more people to operate than you said would be required to operate it - by the time that all becomes apparent, the system is locked up and you can't do anything about it."
In the case of the F-22, its construction was contracted and subcontracted in forty-four states. This means a majority of the Senators on Capitol Hill have been given a vested interest in perpetuating the program. (From The Missing "C", p. 207) |
About the book and the development of America's military industrial complex now controlling even the Executive branch:
| Quote: | In his now legendary 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of "the disastrous rise of misplaced power" that could result from the increasing influence of what he called the "military industrial complex." Nearly two centuries earlier, another general-turned-president George Washington, had warned that "overgrown military establishments" were antithetical to republican liberties. Today, with an exploding defense budget, millions of Americans employed in the defense sector, and more than eight hundred U.S. military bases in 130 countries, the worst fears of Washington and Eisenhower have come to pass.
Surveying a scorched landscape of America's military adventures and misadventures, Jarecki's groundbreaking account includes interviews with a "who's-who" of leading figures in the Bush administration, Congress, the military, academia, and the defense industry, including Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Colin Powell's former chief of staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and long-time Pentagon reformer Franklin "Chuck" Spinney. Their insights expose the deepest roots of American war-making, revealing how the "Arsenal of Democracy" that crucially secured American victory in WWII also unleashed the tangled web of corruption America now faces. From the republic's earliest episodes of war to the use of the atom bomb against Japan to the passage of the 1947 National Security Act to the Cold War's creation of an elaborate system of military-industrial-congressional collusion, American democracy has drifted perilously from the intent of its founding. As Jarecki powerfully argues, only concerted action by the American people can, and must, compel the nation back on cours. (emphasis added) (From the jacket flaps) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 11:36 am Post subject: |
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Open Veins of Latin America
Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Hardcover
By Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano
Translated by Cedric Belfrage
| Quote: | ... The United States crisis of 1929 could not but have a fierce impact on so dependent and vulnerable an economy as Cuba's: the price of sugar sank well below $.01 by 1932, and in three years the value of exports fell by 75 percent. At that time the unemployment index would have been hard to match in any other country.
What happened to prices was repeated in volume of exports. The United States lowered export duties on Cuban sugar in exchange for similar privileges for the U.S. exports to Cuba, but such "favors" only consolidated Cuba's dependence. By 1948 Cuba had recovered its quota to the point of supplying one-third of the U.S. sugar market, at prices lower than U.S. producers received but higher and more stable than those in the international market. Sugar production was arbitrarily limited by Washington's needs. The 1925 level of some five million tons remained the average through the 1950s; dictator Fulgencio Batista took power in 1952 on the heels of the biggest harvest in Cuban history - over seven million tons - with the mission of tightening the screws, and in the following year production, obedient to the demand of the north, fell to four million tons.* When Batista fell in 1959, Cuba was selling almost all its sugar to the United States. As Marti said and Che Guevara quoted at the OAS Punta del Este conference in 1961,
"The nation that buys commands, the nation that sells serves; it is necessary to balance trade in order to ensure freedom; the country that wants to die sells only to one country, and the country that wants to survive sells to more than one." ...
... By 1850 the United States was absorbing one-third of all Cuban trade, selling it more and buying more from it than Spain, whose colony it was; the Stars and Stripes fluttered from more than half the ships arriving at the island. A Spanish travelerfournd U.S.-made sewing machines in remote Cuban villages in 1859. The main streets of Havana were paved with New England granite.
At the dawn of the twentieth century one could read in the Louisiana Planter: "Little by little the whole island of Cuba is passing into the hands of U.S. citizens, which is the simplest and safest way to obtain annexation to the United States." (From King Sugar and Other Agricultural Monarchs, pgs. 82-83) |
| Quote: | | * Note: The director of the United States Department of Agriculture's sugar program declared soon after the Revolution: "Since Cuba has left the scene, we cannot count on that country, the world's largest exporter, which always had enough reserves to supply our market when need arose. |
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Last edited by editor on Thu Mar 05, 2009 2:54 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 9:00 am Post subject: |
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COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
Dangers of Valuing by Square Feet
It's becoming the norm, but, when inaccuracies in measuring abound, is valuation on the basis of square feet sensible, asks Phil Spencer
March 20/08
| Quote: | ... Take my own home, a semi-detached late-Victorian house in south-west London. As a test, I asked three local floorplan firms to measure it. It’s not an especially complicated property, with no nooks and crannies, odd-shaped rooms or peculiarities that could lead to discrepancies. Yet all three reached varying estimates of how large it was. The difference between the biggest and smallest was 100sq ft the equivalent of a small room or about 4% of the total square footage. Given that houses in the street have been selling at about £700 per sq ft, that would mean a difference of £70,000. (emphasis added)
The discrepancy, it transpired, was due to differing policies on whether or not to include a walk-in wardrobe or a utility room. If I were selling, I would have wanted them included, but as I can’t sit or sleep in either, their value is limited. In fact, the difference was quite modest. As a buying agent, I’ve seen a variance of as much as 10% for one property in different brochures. A particularly blatant example was a London riverside penthouse flat I was shown last year, which, according to the sales particulars, measured 3,100sq ft. This was odd, as, when it was built in 2000, it was only 2,800sq ft and the owners could not, by definition, have converted the basement or extended into the roof. When challenged, the company said its policy was to include void areas.
The flat had double-height ceilings with mezzanine levels and open areas to the side of staircases, which had been included in the square footage; so had a storage room deep down in the underground car park. Given that the flat was priced at £1,000 per sq ft, this made a difference of £300,000. After some fraught negotiations, £250,000 was shaved off the price, and our client cheerfully moved in.
We acted for another purchaser last year who wanted to buy a detached modern house near Kingston upon Thames, Surrey. Three sales-agent particulars came up with different sizes from 5,100sq ft to 5,500sq ft (a variance of 400sq ft or 7.2% of the total). The asking price of the house was £2.5 million, which meant, at £454 per sq ft, a discrepancy of £181,600. The market was very hot at the time, and, although the vendor acknowledged the discrepancy, he continued to demand the full asking price. Our client reluctantly paid. No prizes for guessing which measurements he’ll use when he sells. Even today’s high-tech measuring devices leave room for ‘user error’, and, despite the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyor’s code of measuring practice, without stricter industry regulation, mistakes are made, which some people unwittingly pay for. This is a ridiculous state of affairs. Measurements should be a statement of fact.
The solution would be for everyone to agree what’s being measured: external, gross internal or net internal? Some firms include boot rooms, roof terraces, hallways, wine cellars, staircases, storage facilities and even outbuildings in the overall total living space. Others measure deep into eaves, fitted wardrobes or alcoves. And even when the methodology is clear, how many buyers check how accurate the plans are? Sometimes, people are paying for tens of thousands of pounds of space that doesn’t exist or isn’t useable.
A well-proportioned six-bedroom family house in Oxfordshire with a couple of reception rooms, a study and a playroom will be about 4,000sq ft. If it was worth £450 per sq ft, and there was a 10% variance in total measurement, this would equate to a difference in valuation of £180,000. This could come to light when the house is next sold and accurately measured. When prices are rising, this is a risk some may be prepared to take. But if, as now, the market is wobbling, it could be more of a cause for concern. And in any case, even if we suppose these square feet have been accurately measured, is size actually that important? It may be the dominating factor if you’re a buy-to-let investor comparing flats in a new development, but things aren’t always that simple.
Property in Britain comes in such a vast range of architectural styles that a pound-per-sq-ft calculation is never going to be as applicable here as in other parts of the world. How can you compare a Devon long house, a Cotswold manor house or a Kentish farm house square foot by square foot? For there to be any relevance, you need to compare apples with apples and pears with pears. Quite apart from the accuracy problem, there’s so much more to a property’s value location, condition, character, layout, aspect, privacy, land. Just think of all that when you see the agent reaching for the tape measure.
For more advice, visit www.garrington.co.uk (-- p. 98) |
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