Superboard superdumb superbad

The CUPE union in Nova Scotia is right to raise an alarm over calls from two of the province's three visible registered parties to have a single Halifax based health board run all the hospitals in the rural part of the province.

Will the whole damn world, one day, be run out of one office at the UN ?

The Small Party : North America's first and most radical 'green' Party

I seem to recall meeting Elizabeth May in the summer of 1979 at an environmental fair on Halifax's Garrison Grounds just after the 1979 federal election.

She was nonplussed by the total lack of reference to any environmental issue in the election from any party and talked about forming some sort of party that would.

A few months later she did just that : THE small PARTY ran almost a dozen candidates - all but two in the Maritimes, Elizabeth among them.

Manhattanites , "brag about your country"

It really shouldn't be my job to blow wartime Manhattan's horn.

Joe Howe, the Bluenosers' favourite son, always advised his countryman to brag about their country :

Brag of your country.  When I am abroad, I brag of everything 
Nova Scotia is, has  or can produce and when they beat me at 
everything else, I say, 'How high do your tides rise?


Don't let the 9/11 plotters define wartime Manhattan to the world 
for you.


Admit The Bomb and wartime eugenic inclinations , but also talk up Henry Dawson and Patty Malone , Dante Colitti and Penicillin.

Take a bow ....

South Mountain BATHOLITH debated by skygods and earthlings

hunka,hunka burnin' lava

One reason why Nova Scotia has such an unique lobster like shape is that its backbone is one immense chunk of highly-erosion-resistant granite, by far the largest chunk on the entire east coast of North America : the famous South Mountain batholith.

A batholith is an giant upwelling of granite-like magma, from deep down below melting its way through the surface rocks.

The South Mountain batholith, which is hundreds of kilometres long is indeed big, but not the biggest in the world - ones on the west coast of North America can be thousands of kilometres long.

Batholiths and thermodynamic laws

Basically batholiths are one enormous rock that erodes about as slow as anything does on earth ; this one in Nova Scotia is about 350 million years old and hardly changed since its birth.

Skygods are People of the First Law (of thermodynamics) and in their understanding of the South Mountain, its surface impression of solidity is in fact just that, an impression.

In fact, they are argue, its solidity is all an illusion. Matter and energy can't be created or destroyed only changed from one form to another ----- and change is easy, even for granite.

Granite can be easily reduced to its constitute atoms and then reduced no further : atoms are the simple, small, easily controllable, harmless "solid" fundamentals of reality : mix and match them and turn granite's atoms into the atoms of silicon oven gloves or concrete or whatever.

Earthlings , as People of the Second Law (of thermodynamics)see the South Mountain totally differently.

They think that its granite is surpassingly solid - one of the most solid objects in the Universe in fact.

But once they divide it into its atoms, they find they are not solid but rather dividable and in fact,  "a waste of space" : tiny busy electrons swirling around the vast distance between them and a tiny heavy nucleus.

But that nucleus isn't solid either : it breaks down into ever smaller sets of Russian dolls and ends up feeling like nothing more than whirling bits of energy.

So mass, it turns out, isn't just convertible into energy : it IS energy , bits of energy whirling about so fast that it gives us mega-sized humans the illusion of weight and solidity.

Energy popping in and out of existence constantly, but always moving slowly,ever slowly, to a totally dispersed state where they will slow down into the Universe's death at near absolute zero temperatures.

(Aka : Entropy).

Skygods: big is dynamic and complex and small is solid, stable and knowable-controllable. Optimism as high as the blue skies themselves.

Earthlings: big is solid and while dynamic is at least a bit knowable-controllable. The small ? mercurial, unknowable, non-solid. Cautious (grounded in what we do know, not what we might know) and skeptical we will ever begin to 'control' reality.

Which side are you on ? Is granite more solid-seeming than atoms or vice versa ........

Brian McNair's world of "Cultural Chaos" : amateur nova scotia whale blowing rainbow out-virals Canada's official slicks

Over half a million sets of eyeballs and still going strong.

Sean Rowley's 22 seconds of amateur video of a Digby Neck , NovaScotia whale gaily blowing a rainbow at a passing boat of tourists was viewed by more people in the world than any of the expensive "slicks" put up by Official Canada on Canada Day 2012.

Canada's right wing prime minister Harper (and the government he runs with an iron fist) is all about total control of the message.

But even Stephen Harper with all the power, prestige and money behind him couldn't control the message that actual people on an actual globe took away about Canada on July 1st, Canada's national holiday.

Harper would prefer that when the world thought about Canada, it thought first and foremost about Tar - MegaTar Projects in Alberta, his home province.

In BC, another strand of Official Canada - the powerful right wing Fraser Institute, voted one of the top thirty think tanks ( out of over 6500) in the world, also puts out slick videos and runs its own mini tv network.

But its slick pro-megaproject videos can not draw flies anytime - let alone on Canada Day.

Another part of Official Canada is the NDP, the Official Opposition federally and a strong presence provincially, where it runs several provinces.

The Dexter NDP government in Nova Scotia , which proudly bills itself as "democratic socialist", is most proud of its many, many megaprojects: it will gladly give taxpayers money to almost anything ---- just as long as the proposal is big enough.

In the language of media theory, the Nova Scotia NDP can't handle a news story about "slow continuous murder" or "slow continuous growth".

But promise it hundreds or thousands of jobs, in the very short term , all in one location and it will take that over any alternative plan that might produce more jobs, jobs that last forever, but developing over a longer time span and spread geographically over a much larger area.

Official Canada - from Official Left to Official Right, can be summed up in one word: Megaprojects.

Rowley's amateur video by contrast is all about modesty.

Short, unedited, shakey, not promoted at all (to my personal despair !) : a small whale and a smaller rainbow.

So why did the rest of the world like it so much ( and how did they ever find it in the first place, when it was so un-promoted ?)

Perhaps because the world chooses to see past the Official Canada Bluster produced by the PR firm of Harper-Fraser-Dexter.

They have met Canadians and Americans and Britons and Australians and they find Canucks, overall, more low key than their other fellow Anglos.

This is the sort of thing that Brian McNair's 2006 book, Cultural Theory, predicted would happen --- the elites' Official Version would no longer be able to control the message, in part due to alternative media sites like YouTube and the blog-o-sphere.

Coming at it a trifle differently, I think it would have happened anyway, with or without the rise of the internet : the lost of faith in anything and everything elites hand us, I believe, came as a result of the collapse of Modern Hegemony since the events of 1945.

But I feel we can agree that a post-hegemonic world is a chaotic world, messaging-wise ....

who is WATCHING THE 63% of australians who are DENIERS ?

I will keep repeating it until I am not just red in the face, but a whale of a rainbow of colours in the face:

The true measure of the numbers of deniers in our world is not the number of highly vocal, well paid, loonies but rather it is the percentage of ordinary citizens (us) who deny we need real carbon taxes to actually cut global warming.

In the Australia that is home to "WATCHING THE DENIERS" , that percentage is 63%, according to the latest polls  from the Lowy Institute on the Gillard Government's new (& very modest) carbon tax. Green voters ? 38% of them are also opposed to this carbon tax. Weak reeds indeed !!

Deniers are nothing more and nothing less than latter day modernists, (aka skygods) and in this post 1945/ post hegemonic age, they still make up about 60% of the world.

Greens, commensalists, earthlings, "renewers*", postmodernists - call us what you will - we only make up about 40% of humanity.

Attacking raving loonies, rather than that nice-but-doubting couple next door is the moral equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel - we  shouldn't do it - I won't do it.

Too many citizens claim to be - but can't be - both in favour of saving whales and rainbows and opposed to carbon taxes.

If you won't want carbon taxes then don't be a hypocrite ; get out there and shoot every rainbow blowing whale in Nova Scotia that you can see and dig every foul black tar pit you can find.

If you are determined to have places like Harper's Canada actually led the way to Hell, at least be upfront about it - don't be Po-Faced....

* renewers is the opposite of deniers - one side denies non-renewable energy will ever run out or cause problems ( and once they HAVE mined this earth out, it is off to new vistas on Mars) - the other says we should husband our renewable energy if this earth, Life's only lifeboat in the universe) is to survive.