Acoustic Ecology

I was listening to CBC 2 radio this week and they played Canadian acoustic ecologist performance artist and composer R. Murray Schafer.

Who in the 1980's blew me away with his eight hour invocation of RA at the Ontario Science Centre. While I was not there, I got to hear it on CBC. Which of course I would not hear on private for profit radio.

Schafer shows that musick is magick and vis versa, that it is one of the key elements to ritual, and thus all music is sacred, even when it is profane.

If you like the minimalist and avante garde music of Edgar Varèse ,Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, or Steven Reich, you will love Schafer.

R. Murray Schafer has achieved an international reputation as a composer, an educator, environmentalist, scholar and visual artist. Born in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1933, he was raised in Toronto.

Schafer entered the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto in 1952 to study with John Weinzweig. His casual contact with Marshall McLuhan on campus in that period could arguably be singled out as the most lasting influence on his development.
He went to Vienna in 1956. After two years he went to England, studying informally with composer Peter Racine Fricker. While in Britain Schafer supported himself by writing (resulting in a book, British Composers in Interview) and by the preparation of a performing edition of Ezra Pound's opera Le Testament (1920-1) broadcast by the BBC in 1961.

As the 'father of acoustic ecology' Schafer has been concerned about the damaging effects of noise on people, especially dwellers of the 'sonic sewers' of the city. His booklets The Book of Noise and The Voices of Tyranny are pleas for anti-noise legislation and urban soundscape improvements through reduction of potentially destructive sounds. Of the various publications Schafer released after his work with the World Soundscape Project, the most important is The Tuning of the World (1977) where he summarizes his soundscape research, philosophies, and theories. The concept, central to Schafer's thinking, has influenced his composing. The background rhythmic structure for String Quartet No. 2 ('Waves') is based on the intervals at which ocean waves crest; the graphic notation of No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes was influenced by charts made of Vancouver traffic noise.

While Schafer's focus in the 1970s was his soundscape work, in the 1980s it was Patria, a 12-part cycle of musical/theatrical works begun in 1966. Schafer's dramatic works employ music and theatre in a manner which he calls the 'theatre of confluence' (a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk reflecting his urge to explore the relationships between the arts). Schafer has used ritual as a way of revitalizing contemporary theatre, several works transforming the theatre audience into participants. Patria 6: RA is a dusk-to-dawn ritual enacting the descent to the underworld and resurrection of the Egyptian sun god. For its Ontario Science Centre premiere in Toronto, the audience was led through 29 different performance sites during the 11-hour ritual.

And again this August he will be performing in the wilderness.

Princess of the Stars
R. Murray Schafer, Banff Festival of the Arts, 1985. Performed in Two Jack Lake, near Banff, August 8-10, at dawn for the Banff Festival of the Arts (photo by Scott Rowed).

Suppressing a youthful urge to become a painter, Schafer entered the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto in 1952 to study with Alberto Guerrero (piano), Greta Kraus (harpsichord), John Weinzweig (composition), and Arnold Walter (musicology). In view of Schafer's later proclivities, however, his casual contact with Marshall McLuhan at the university might be singled out as the strongest and most lasting influence on his intellectual development. Disillusioned by what he came to view as the confining atmosphere of the university, Schafer terminated his formal studies in 1955 and embarked upon an intensive autodidactic routine with an emphasis on languages, literature, and philosophy. The LRSM remains his only formal diploma.

The CBC recorded Schafer's Wolf music which he has performed for 15 years, in a forest for a select audience, but mostly for the ambiance of playing in the forest. So if a trumpet sounds in the forest do we hear music? The wolves do.

Wolf Music is not only a composition: it is an annual ritual music-drama involving sixty to seventy people over eight days, taking place on a lake in the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve. The composer and six professional musicians each lead small groups of people whose very presence are part of the performance. So, too, are the flora and fauna, the lake,the wind and even a passing jet. This description of the work could be very unappealing to those who are not attracted to ecologically-based spirituality, or those that feel this style of composition is passé. However, apart from Schafer's narrative (which, frankly, I could have done without) the listener is easily able to bypass the philosophy to get at the music, which is beautiful and imaginative.

R. Murray Schafer's environmental music drama, And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon (1988- ), stands at the nexus between the lived experience of performance in the Canadian wilderness and Schafer's romantic idea of the North. A collaborative project involving 75 volunteer participants, the work takes place over an entire week each August in the Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve near Ontario's Algonquin Park. It forms the epilogue to the composer's massive Patria series (1966- ). Simultaneously performers, creators and audience, the participants camp together as they enact Schafer's participatory and ritualistic theatre - a theatre specifically designed for performance in the Canadian wilderness.

When they camp and work together each summer, members of the Wolf Project participate in Schafer's idea of the North, his vision of a Canada reconciled to, and integrated with, its wilderness environment. They return from this liminal realm to their urban lives distinctly changed, no longer the uneasy inhabitants of a humanly undigestible wilderness.

My articles on music:

What's Opera Doc

Summer Solstice Give Or Take A Day

Thick as a Brick

Dion Sucked

Shaft

Trumpetlingus

Christy Moore Viva La Quince Brigada

Brown, Ford, Castro

The N Word

Hip Hop Gun Culture

John Lennon Working Class Hero

Revolutionary Music Flashback

Happy Birthday Mozart

Soul of a City

Before MTV

Nazanin

Happy Birthday Bob

Daniel Barenboim's Dream

Rich Man's War

Classical Rock

Ennio Morricone A Fistful of Composer

find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
rock, music, progressive, bands,, avante garde music, minimalist music, sacred music, electronic music, Canadian composers, R. Murray
Schafer, acoustic ecology, Varese,

What's Opera Doc

A tribute to the Bugs Bunny Cartoon 'Whats Opera Doc' from the Toronto Star. Which makes the same point I did here in tribute to Chuck Jones. And see my post at the Carnival of Anarchy on Bugs the anarchist drag queen.

Elmer Fudd, left, and Bugs Bunny in a scene from Warner Bros.' What's Opera, Doc?

At any other time, the film would not have been made. Imagine the pitch: "Let's steal time and funding from our other projects so we can go way over budget making a cartoon with no jokes, and no real gags. The score will be a German opera. Kids won't get it. Most adults won't get it, but I don't care because I think it's funny."

Fortunately, the time was 1956, the director was Chuck Jones, and the place was the Warners Bros. backlot animation studio dubbed "Termite Terrace." The result – released 50 years ago this week – was "What's Opera, Doc?," voted by animators in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals to be the greatest cartoon of all time.

It is the antithesis of the routine cartoon. In place of snappy one-liners we see Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny singing their parts with complete sincerity and commitment. The backgrounds are beautifully textured paintings. The score is powerful and moving. Bugs cuts a striking figure in a metallic brassiere before Madonna was even born. It's audacious and decadent and beautiful and bold and everything the vast majority of cartoons would never dare to be.

Thanks to Bugs and folks like Chuck Jones we got a classical education on TV. Classical as in music, and opera. Masses of folks from the Forties through the Seventies, experienced these cartoons on the big screen and then on the little screen and were introduced to Wagner, Rossini, Verdi, Mozart etc.

The fact that all these composers were the popular music of their day gets forgotten by those who would make classical music some form of 'long haired' intellectual haute culture. Thanks to Bugs and his creators we came to see and hear the music in a pop culture format.

Which is just a sneaky way to promote the fact that this week we are discussing libertarian education on the Carnival of Anarchy.






Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Wiley E. Coyote, Road Runner, Bob Clampet,, Fritz Ferleng,, Mel Blanc, , Warner Brothers, cartoons, Bugs Bunny, DaffyDuck, Grinch, Christmas, opera, classical music, ElmerFudd, Michigan J Frog, toons, animation,

The War Against Secular Society

The right wing is expanding it's identity politics campaign claiming that Christianity is being oppressed and abused; with politically correct attacks on outspoken atheists of late.

As Barbara Kay in the National Post writes;

"atheists in democratic countries can't conjure up grim tales of the truncheon's midnight thud on the door,"

Once again proving that right wing political correctness is based on historical revisionism.

Indeed Ms. Kay atheism was considered a legal offense in Merry Olde England for the longest time.

Free Thinkers, as they were called, did have the police truncheon and worse put upon them. Indeed their publications were banned and their printing presses destroyed. Free Thought, indeed secularism, with its libertarian origins in Godwin, Bakunin, Carlisle, Tucker, Proudhon, Woodhull, etc. was began in the late 18th Century and was a 19th Century phenomena.

Richard Carlisle, a "freethinker," opened a lecturing, conversation, and discussion establishment, preached the "only true gospel," hung effigies of bishops outside his shop, and was eventually quieted by nine years' imprisonment, a punishment by no means undeserved.

Despite its origins in Greek Philosophies such as those of Heraclitus and Epicurus, atheism is a modern movement coincidental with the Enlightenment and the development of modern industrial/capitalist society.

And it was the philosopher Spinoza, a Jew, who began the attack on Christianity, Judaism, Islam and all the Abrahamic religions with his philosophical defense of atheism.

It is well known that Marx was familiar with Spinoza; indeed, he hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his notebooks. Less clear is the significance of this fact, and the extent of Spinoza's influence on Marx's thought.

And it would be Marx who would proclaim that atheists needed to take one more step to truly be revolutionaries.

In the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" (1844), Marx said:

Once the essence of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practical life, in sense experience, the quest for an ALIEN being, a being above man and nature (a quest which is an avowal of the unreality of man and nature) becomes impossible in practice. ATHEISM, as a denial of this unreality, is no longer meaningful, for atheism is a NEGATION OF GOD and seeks to assert by this negation the EXISTENCE OF MAN. Socialism no longer requires such a roundabout method; it begins from the THEORETICAL and PRACTICAL SENSE PERCEPTION of man and nature as essential beings. It is positive human SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, no longer a self-consciousness attained through the negation of religion. (Marx 1964A: 166-67)

In the famous Introduction to the Critique of the Hegelian philosophy of public law, Marx gives an even more explicit and elaborate formulation of this outlook. "Religious misery", he writes, "is at once the expression of real misery and a protest against it. Religion is the groan of the oppressed, the sentiment of a heartless world, and at the same time the spirit of a condition deprived of spirituality. It is the opium of the people. The suppression of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the premise of its real happiness. It is first and foremost the task of philosophy, operating in the service of history, to unmask self-alienation in its profane forms, after the sacred form of human self alienation has been discovered. Thus criticism of heaven is transformed into criticism of the earth, criticism of religion into criticism of law, criticism of theology into criticism of politics". And just before: "Religion is the consciousness and awareness of man who has not yet acquired or who has again lost himself. But man is not an abstract being, isolated from the world. Man is the world of man, the State, society. This State and this society produce religion, an upside-down consciousness of the world, just because they are an upside-down world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic epitome, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its fundamental reason of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of human essence, since human essence does not possess a true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world of which religion is the spiritual aroma" (K. Marx, Per la critica della filosofia del diritto di Hegel, Introduzione, Rome 1966, pp. 57-58).

Ironically in her attack on atheists Kay attacks Christopher Hitchens, the right wings favorite former Trotskyist turned pro war contrarian. She of course claims that atheists only want to ban Christianity and Judaism.

Aggressively marketed grievance has worked for women and gays. The same strategy for brights will doubtless end in a government-funded Status of Atheists Council to undo the iniquities of 10,000 years of theocratic hegemony and repression. After that, we may yet see -- don't laugh until you're sure it can't happen -- demands for reparations payout by churches and synagogues to redress the ignominy and shame now-atheist, former (involuntarily-designated) Christians and Jews suffered as children when force-fed the Ten Commandments in Sunday and Hebrew School. (Somehow, I do not envisage a similar campaign by Muslim atheists directed against the madrassas, not sure why ?)

While Christopher Hitchens has made it clear for many years that he opposes all theocracies and theocrats, Christian, Jewish or Muslim, heck he doesn't even like the Dali Lama. He has been outspoken against Islamism in fact his support for the war on terror is based upon his atheist opposition to Muslim Fascism.

So like her counterpart at the Sun; Michael Coren, she smears atheists with the Anti-Christian PC label, while failing to accurately point out that atheists oppose all religions and all belief systems that put faith in a supreme being.

Like Coren, Kay and other social conservatives, especially those of the evangelical Protestant faith, believe in the coming Rapture, the end times, and the Israel plays a role in this as predicted in the Book of Revelations in the New Testament.

They of course overlook the persecution and pogroms of the Jews by the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Empires in Europe. They are not defending Jews or Jewish culture, which has had a major cultural impact on the West in developing secularism, socialism, and yes atheism as well as anarchism and libertarianism. Rather they are defending Israel and Zionism.

The phony war on Christianity is just so much bunkum. According to Stats Canada the dominant religion in Canada remains Christianity and its sects and cults.

For Kay, Coren and the Byfields, the supposed war on Christianity is being engaged in by the secularist elites and heathen pagans, whoever they are. Oh yeah the old 'Powers That Be'. Except that the PTB in North America are Christians. Once again the right embraces historical revisionism; the screed of conspiracy theorists.



h/t to Another Point of View




SEE:

Lou Dobbs New Enemy: The Church

Pauline Origins of Social Conservatism

Marxism and Religion

Secular Democracy

GoldilocksEnigma

American Polytheism

1666 The Creation Of The World

Snakes Alive

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
religion, enlightenement, Lucifer, Prometheus, Christianity, Fuerbach, Marx, Engels, Rothbard, libertarian, Christians, Bakunin, Satan, Freemasonry, cults, conspiracy, conspiracy-theories, social-conservatives,
phiosophy, Marx, Marxism, Spinoza, Negri, Holland,
Hume, Kant, Philosophers, Spinoza, Whiskey, Monty, Python, Phiosophers, song, Marx, Negri, Eugene Holland, Blogs, bloggers, Hegel,
hristopher Hitchens, Lou Dobbs, illegal aliens, migrants, Christianity, God, atheist, contrarian,
Fundamentalists, Christians, Deism, Deists, Jefferson, Adams, Knownothings, Republicans,Constitution,

Drunks In Space

The Mackenzie brothers would qualify as Canadian Astronauts.

Aviation Week & Space Technology reported on its Web site that a special panel studying astronaut health found that on two occasions, astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so drunk they posed a safety risk.

The independent panel also found "heavy use of alcohol" before launch — within the standard 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule, the magazine reported.

SEE:

Mars Or Bust

Canada Celebrates Star Wars

Star Wars The Next Installment

Space Litter

Science or Tourism

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
space, litter, debris, NASA, Atlantis, satelittes, UFO, grabage, junk, spacewar, L5, Lagrange, Lagrange5, sci-fi, space-colonization, space, space-colony, space-station, Budget, Moon, Tourism, Space, Science,

$63.90 Per Hour

On average, B.C. and Alberta saw productivity gains worth $122,698 per net worker gained from migration. Provinces who lost population due to migration, however, saw average productivity gains of $82,955 per worker.

Based on these productivity estimates it means that workers in B.C. and Alberta should have earned wages of $63.90 an hour. In fact in the Trades most earned less than half that. Leaving the surplus value for the bosses. In Ontario the wages were closer to unionized manufacturing rates at $43.50 per hour.

In fact average wages even in booming Alberta are 1/3 of what each worker creates in surplus value, profit, for the bosses.

Alberta continues to lead all provinces in average weekly earnings despite a drop in May, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

Earnings for payroll workers, including overtime, hit $818, down from $825 in April but up 2.3 per cent over May, 2006.

Earnings are up 4.3 per cent so far this year, second only to the 5.1 per cent in Prince Edward Island, which has the country's lowest weekly rate at $635.

Ontario has the second highest earnings at $798, up from $796 in April, followed by B.C. at $750, down from $755 the previous month.

Average earnings for hourly paid employees edged up 14 cents in May to $19.04.

Which is why the bosses demand concession bargaining as they are in the case of Molsons Edmonton strike, since the CAW and the Molson bosses are negotiating in Toronto. They are overlooking the Alberta boom and the fact that Molsons corporate productivity and value has increased since its merger with Coors.


SEE:

Pay 'Em What They Want

Labour Boom = Falling Rate Of Profit

Productivity Myth

Canadian Workers Poorer Today Than Yesterday

Variable Capital

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Strike, strike, Molson, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Beer, CAW, Calgary
paramedics, Strike, Stelmach, anti-strike laws,
workers, variable costs, labour, labor, Marx, variable capital, labour theory of value, social-factory, proletariat, capital, capitalism, profit, productivity,

Cavet Emptor Illegitimate Goverment

There is no government like no government.

For an prime example of American Republican Libertarian forms of limited government one needs only look to Alberta.

Last weekend a fire destroyed 94 housing units, the majority were part of a new condo complex, the others were single family dwellings built too close to the complex, with little or no fire protection for their siding and outside walls. The result was mass destruction.And folks left homeless. In a boom economy with rental housing and other ownership options priced beyond most folks means.

The problem is an obsolete building code written in 1960 and based on the notion of preventing fires from spreading from building to building from inside out instead of from the outside in, Wolsey said.

"There has to be a better look at how we deal with building codes as to how we protect our society," he said.

"Is this preventable? I believe it is. With minor amendments to building codes and minimal costs, we can prevent this kind of a devastation from occurring in our communities."

The governments response was little, minor, small, none at all.

The Alberta government's own public safety division recommended changing building codes more than two years ago to prevent fires like Saturday's $20-million inferno in south Edmonton.

But the government chose not to act.

Instead, it forwarded the recommendation to the National Research Council for further study via a provincial committee - although it is under no obligation to wait for an NRC recommendation before making code revisions.

In fact, a year later, the department - then under the leadership of Rob Renner - rejected an official request by the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association to address the insufficient separation between homes, saying there was no evidence to support it.

Government exists to protect citizens, except after the neo-con revolution that defined government as existing above, apart, separate from the people. The earliest forms of self government, have been about building codes and fire prevention. Whether at the municipal, state/provincial or federal level. In Alberta this responsibility has once again been abdicated by the ruling Tories.

Building codes blamed for massive fire
Condo blaze sparks call for tighter fire codes
$25-million fire calls building codes into question
Insurance industry backs tougher building codes
Heed fire's warning: improve building code
Fire chiefs say Alberta should be leader in Canada on building codes

Since the Ralph Revolution of the nineties the neo-con/neo-liberal republican lite agenda of the Fraser Institute and the right wing political business lobby the NCC have dominated conservative politics in Alberta and Canada.

Tougher code carries a price

The Tories created a myth, first they attempted under Lougheed to both expand oilsands development and diversification of the economy. The former succeeded the latter failed. Under Don Getty the diversification expanded, but it ended up a failure because it was simply the government doling out corporate welfare to businesses and lobbyists that had the best selling points, rather than realistic business plans.

Though some plans and businesses were by their nature something the state should have done as public services, such as hazardous waste disposal, due to the costs and long term responsibilities involved, as well as the continuing need for state funded research and development required for technological and industrial advances.

And as usual the left wing moonbats like Neil Waugh of the Edmonton Sun trash our glorious republican government for their obvious contradictions.

More study is needed before deciding whether to update building codes to prevent repeats of a $25-million condo development inferno, Alberta's municipal affairs minister said yesterday.

Although he said he personally favours a "proactive" approach, Municipal Affairs Minister Ray Danyluk also said the numbers aren't all in. He said the province approached the National Research Council 18 months ago and asked it to study the issue. Its next major amendment of national standards, however, isn't until 2010.

Ray's job in Ed Stelmach's Country Club Cabinet is housing and municipal affairs. Both are hot topics after Wolsey warmed up to his usual theme following the MacEwan Fireball. Edmonton houses are fire prone. Thanks to the controversial vinyl siding that's slapped on them without any fire retardant board beneath.

Wolsey talked about a "simple fix." And when asked whether the MacEwan blaze and other similar fires involving Boom-berta houses are preventable, he answered: "I believe it is."

He talked about "minor amendments" to the building code. Which is Ray's responsibility.

And if the houses around the condo blaze had something as simple as exterior grade drywall under the plastic siding "we probably wouldn't have lost any of those homes."

So here's the question I put to Ray in the flower garden.

"Are get-rich-quick developers cutting corners and building shoddy houses that could put Albertans' lives in peril?"

Which, of course, is the Monday-morning-coming-down question for many folks.

No emergency meeting with Battlin' Randy Wolsey, no read-the-riot-act session with the Edmonton Region Homebuilders Association, no task force of surly bureaucrats to prepare a report, make recommendations and get to the bottom of what's going down out on Pleasant Acres Drive and Woodside Wynd.

Instead Danyluk froze up like a rusty Lada at 40 below.

The best he could offer was that the National Research Council is apparently working on something, but it won't be ready for three years.

Once again showing this government has no use for its citizens and is in the pocket of establishment special interests.

Caveat Emptor, citizen beware you have nobody to blame for getting screwed but yourself, the government refuses to protect you or to govern for the public good. Just as they have failed renters in this province now they fail homeowners, in favour of developers.

This then is limited government in a nutshell.

See:

Pay 'Em What They Want

He Can't Manage

Drumheller Bell Weather

Stelmach Tanks

Alberta Deja Vu

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Alberta, minimal government, Edmonton, libertarian housing, rental, condominium, apartment, Income Trusts, rent controls, homelessness, housing-costs, housing-boom, Alberta, ED Stelmach,
Premier, Alberta Cabinet,PC, Party of Calgary, politics, leadership, Conservatives

Pay 'Em What They Want

'Disaster' if paramedics walk off the job

If it's a disaster then pay the workers what they want. They have not had a contract for a year, which saved Calgary money.

It's a boom economy, let's see some of the Alberta Advantage spread around. Instead of course Stelmach will try to appease Calgary by lowering the boom on these workers with illegal no strike legislation.

Alberta government blocks a paramedic strike

The paramedics are NOT deemed an essential service, until today. It isn't going to help Stelmach's falling poll numbers in Calgary.


SEE:

Molsons Strike

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
class-war, class-warfare, CUPE, working class, proletariat, workers, labour, labor, unions, syndicalism,
paramedics, Strike, Stelmach, anti-strike laws, Alberta, Canada, Calgary,

Alberta Cabinet, Harry Strom, Ed Stelmach,
Social Credit,Socreds, PC, Calgary, Party of Calgary, politics, leadership, Conservatives, Edmonton, History, Politics, Economics,leadership, politics, PC,

Serpent Geology

It was. Hundreds of millions of years ago.

Western North America may have once been joined to Australia, a hypothesis that a local mining exploration company is banking on to help it find riches in the Yukon.

The theory is that if Australia and the Yukon were once joined, the two areas would share some geological DNA. So what is happening mineral-wise in Australia may also be happening in the Yukon.

And what's happening in Australia is the Olympic Dam mine, a multi-mineral ore body that includes the world's largest uranium deposit and fourth-largest remaining copper deposit, as well as significant amounts of gold and silver.

Due to plate tectonics the plates under the continents slip and slid over and under and along each other.

Thus producing widely separated rock formations common in many mountain regions, like ophitic rocks and serpentines. And so living in areas where the earth is alive and active, rather than dormant, humans associated the ever present geological striations of the earth with serpents the oldest diety/fetish we have.

To early humans the earth was alive, rock art representations of serpents, as well as the idea of painting with ophitic stone pigments on ophitic stone, showed a reverence for the sacred space that was stone walls, stone outcrops, the serpent image carved out of the serpent forces around us. Which gives new meaning to Snakes On A Plain.

In geologic terms, a plate is a large, rigid slab of solid rock. The word tectonics comes from the Greek root "to build." Putting these two words together, we get the term plate tectonics, which refers to how the Earth's surface is built of plates. The theory of plate tectonics states that the Earth's outermost layer is fragmented into a dozen or more large and small plates that are moving relative to one another as they ride atop hotter, more mobile material. Before the advent of plate tectonics, however, some people already believed that the present-day continents were the fragmented pieces of preexisting larger landmasses ("supercontinents"). The diagrams below show the break-up of the supercontinent Pangaea (meaning "all lands" in Greek), which figured prominently in the theory of continental drift -- the forerunner to the theory of plate
tectonics.

According to the continental drift theory, the supercontinent Pangaea began to break up about 225-200 million years ago, eventually fragmenting into the continents as we know them today.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Yukon, Australia, diamonds, Serpentine, Ophitic rocks, python, ophites, ophidian, gnostics, serpent worship, totems, primitive peoples, religion, rituals, magick, rites, cave paintings,archeology, archeologist, San, 70,000yearsago,
Simon WinchesterEarthquake,
Krakatoa, Volacanos, A Crack In the Edge of the World, Africa,
Japan, Earth-In-Upheaval, East, Timor, Earth-Sciences, tectonic plates, San Fransisco,

Contracting Out Is A Crime

Once again the attempt by the Liberals to Reinvent government, the mantra of the neo-con revolution of the nineties, ends up costing Canadians millions. Whether it was the P3 Boondoggle with the Firearms registry, the RCMP pension fund fraud or this case where the Department of National Defense was bilked for millions. It all has to do with contracting out and outsourcing IT functions of the State.

Ex-federal employee guilty of huge fraud

A former defence bureaucrat, who led a jet-set lifestyle, pleaded guilty today to two charges in a phoney contract billing scheme that bilked $146-million out of the federal government before it was stopped.

Paul Champagne, who had been an $80,000-a-year contract manager with the department, pleaded guilty to one count of fraud and one count of breach of trust in an Ottawa courtroom.

He was fired from his job in 2003 after billing irregularities were revealed involving a contract with U.S. computer giant Hewlett-Packard.

After a lengthy RCMP investigation, Champagne, 49, was charged with seven fraud-related crimes. After he pleaded guilty today to two charges, the Crown dropped the remaining five counts.

He will be sentenced in January.

In the late 1990s, the Defence Department issued a series of contracts to Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Inc., eventually paying $159 million for computer maintenance services. The government later discovered it got little or nothing for its money.

The Public Works Department red-flagged the contracts over the four years prior to Champagne's dismissal, but did nothing. A scathing report in 2003 found that managers at the federal government's tendering department failed to appreciate the significance of at least three audits that warned something was terribly wrong with the computer contracts.

After the scandal became public, Hewlett-Packard said it was told by the department to pay a group of subcontractors and their work was deemed secret.

In May 2004, the computer giant repaid $145 million to the federal government, and said its employees did nothing wrong.

Two Ottawa businessmen, Peter Mellon and Ignatius Manso, were also charged, but the Crown said Monday only one case remains to be resolved. A spokesman for the RCMP couldn't say what the status of the cases might be.

Over 10 years, starting in 1993, five contracts worth a total of $250 million were signed with the Compaq Computer Corp., Digital Equipment and Hewlett-Packard, which eventually bought Compaq.

Audits conducted by Public Works in 1999 and 2000 raised concerns about three of the contracts, but in 2001 a further review found unauthorized billing and "evidence of contractual funding appropriated for other purposes."

After Champagne was fired, National Defence did its own internal review of contracts and discovered problems with two dozen other projects. Today, the Defence Department did not respond to requests for comment about what safeguards have been put in place to prevent a repeat of the fiasco.

At the time of his arrest Champagne was a multimillionaire, who insisted his wealth and homes in exclusive districts of Ottawa, Florida and the Turks and Caicos were the results of shrewd investment in high-tech stocks during the tech boom of the late 1990s.

SEE:

Defense Lobbyist Now Minister

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
P3, privatization, public-private-partnerships, Canada, London, UK, Rotor, Tipple, Harper, Government, scandal, Ottawa, MacDonald Commission, Canada, Liberals, free trade, Trudeau, Emerson, Conservatives, Harper, Government, investment, politics, trade

Tags
Politics
Canada
government
P3's
contracting out'
privatization
DND
computers
technology
fraud
Crime
RCMP

Dinos and World Systems Theory

In the World Systems Theory of political economy, the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstien claims that capitalism evolved coincidentally with the decline of feudalism, it did not suddenly replace that political economic system but rather evolved out of it. It was not the only political economic system evolving at the time but the one that became dominate.

This can be proven with a simple example, a robber baron newspaper owner who sells his national citizenship in order to buy a lordship from Baronial Britain. Here we have someone who is a capitalist aspiring to the titles and honorifics of the old feudal order.

Now we find the same thing happened with proto-dinosaurs and their later dinosaur relatives. The dinos did not wipe out their earlier relatives but co existed with them. Much like the remnants of feudalism, Lords, Queens and Kings, autarchies, exist today under capitalism.,

UC Berkeley scientists, digging deep into a remote New Mexico hillside, have discovered a trove of fossil bones that they say is evidence that dinosaurs and their early relatives lived side by side for tens of millions of years before the relatives slowly died off and left the dinosaurs to dominate the ancient world.

Until now many scientists had thought that dinosaur "precursors" -- perhaps their ancestors -- disappeared suddenly long before the dinosaurs themselves rose to prominence, but the bones dug up by Berkeley paleontologists show evidence of a different story.

The discovery of a wide variety of creatures all mingled together in layer upon layer of rocks dating from Earth's late Triassic period between 235 million and 200 million years ago, they say, shows that the strange relatives of the dinosaurs remained on the scene while the dinosaurs evolved into truly dominant creatures during the Jurassic period, between 120 million and 200 million years ago.

Until now, many scientists have argued that the early close relatives of dinosaurs must have disappeared abruptly in an early "mass extinction" about 215 million years ago that has never been clearly explained. Others have thought that the true dinosaurs, whether carnivores or plant eaters, simply outcompeted their relatives for dominance in the ancient environment and quickly drove them to extinction.

And after all economists call themselves scientists. Of course like its prehistoric ancestor Capitalism itself is a dinosaur. And those who believe that Capitalism is, was, and will always be eternal are to political economy what creationists are to paleontology.



See:

Paleontologist Versus Paleo Conservatives

Commodity Fetish a Definition

Marx For Beginners

Saving Capitalism From Itself

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Conrad Black, Lord Black, Barbara Amiel, crime, fraud, Canada, Chicago, Hollinger
racketeering, Radler, newspapers, paleobotanist, paleontology, fossils,
dinosaurs, Alley-Oop, Flinstornes, Hanna-Barbera, christians, evolution, prehistory, prehistoric, Darwin, Creationism, Creationists, Drumheller, Tyrell, Museum, Creation-Museums, Dino, Canada, US, Kentucky

Damn Commie Canadians

Quick someone tell the flat earth society and the climate change deniers at the Blogging Tories.

Canadians prove humans are causing climate change

Like Medicare this will prove once again to the Republican and conservative American rightwhing whiners that their northern neighbours are truly evil and a socialist menace.



See:

Strange Bedfellows

Saving Capitalism From Itself

Echo Chamber

Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Fraser Institute, climate change, environment, global warming,
Kyoto, UN, IPCC,
John Birch Society, Creationism, nuclear power, flat earth, Lyndon LaRouche, right wing, conspiracy, conspiracy theory, climage change denial,

climate-change, Conservatives, Liberals, government, environment, oil, electricity, capitalism, sustainablity