June 12: best letters to the editor - ever....

The letters to day, are really the best of the TandT. They are full of the   material we should be reading on the op ed page and editorial page - we should be reading it, but with few exceptions, we don't. Start reading today's paper with the letters to the editor. Then the bozo quality of the rest of the paper really shows up.

Page 1 has a big story - a big, big, long story - "Recruitment strategies help keep universities competitive". Trouble is that very few readers are going to plough through all that verbiage. Nor should they.

Most of this story  is gobbledegook put out by the universities. It will have very little meaning to the average reader. And there are stacks of statistics which mean nothing at all to anybody.

The only item worth reading in Section A is on p. 7, "Dismissed DEC member gets a hearing in court". This is a bizarre story. Mr. Crossman was elected to serve on the DEC. But at the urging of the DEC's chairwoman, he was dismissed from the DEC.

Huh? The council can fire a member elected by the voting public?

 Then it replaced him.

Huh? The council can not only fire an elected member, but can replace him without election?

Democracy in action. This one is worth following.
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For proof of a serious plague of infectious ignorance at the TandT, turn to NewsToday.  The big story is that New Brunswick has stiffer regulations on shale gas than any other jurisdiction. Then it shows it ignorance of the meaning of words by saying they're similar to the regulations of Alberta. (How can they be the stiffest if another province has regulations just as stiff?) But that's nit-picking.

The big story is that the TandTeditors apparently didn't read yesterday's news from Alberta.

The closely related regulations for shale gas in Alberta are drawn from those for oilsands, particularly on the issue of disposing of highly toxic waste material. In Alberta, these wastes are deposited in vast, gooey lakes called tailing ponds. They are regulated to meet a target date for cleanup. The regulations were laid down in in 2009. Yesterday, it was reported no company has yet conformed to the regulations.

Worse, they couldn't if they wanted to. The technology to meet those standards does not exist, despite years of intense resarch to find it. The result - lakes of toxic waters that kill bird and animal life in huge numbers and that kill vegetation, and that poison the soil (and the people) around them forever.

But the eagle-eye editors at the TandT didn't notice that story. Nor did the auditing firm of Deloitte that carried out its "impartial" survery for the very impartial New Brunswick Business Council.

(Mind you, I'm flattering them by saying they're ignorant. Some people might call them liars.)

Now, let's chat about our tough regulations for disposing of highly  toxic water in the billions of gallons. What is our proposed technology for disposing of it? Does such a technology exist? Where, exactly, are we going to put this stuff? Could we just deliver it to the offices and homes of Deloitte? Or those of the New Brunswick Business Council?

The reality is that there are some things we cannot yet do. We may never  be able to do them. And to produce vast dumps of toxic materials in the hope that someday, maybe, we hope, we will find a miracle answer......well, that's just plain greed, stupidity and irresponsility. (and that's why I have to hurry this blog so I can join the march on city hall and the offices of SWN Poisoning Inc.)_______________________________________________________________________________

The editorial is the usual propaganda. Norbert's column the usual ignorance with, this time, personal slanders built into it.

Eric Lewis' message from the mountain top is that we have to be patient during summer roadwork season.  Gee! And all Moses could  come down with is ten, lousy tablets.
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Alec Bruce's column is excellent.

Brian Cormier at last shows he has some great stuff in him with a column on what Harper is planning to do to the CBC. I would only urge him to take it a step further. Harper intends to get government control of CBC so he can control the news. This legislation is already prepared, and will be tabled in the very near future. His next step, also already prepared, is to cut off all funding of CBC, and turn it into a privately owned network. That will have two effects.
1. Canada will lose the only world-class news gathering system it has.
2. Canada will be heavily dosed with American programming and American news services with the result that Canadians will lose their sense of identity, and see the world only in American terms. This is exactly what another Conservative, R.B.Bennett of New Brunswick, (and of considerably more brains than Harper) was trying to prevent in his development of CBC.
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Yesterday, the TandT carried a story that the schools will be introducing target dates to reach target standards in our public schools. They (or the government) are doing this at exactly the same time they are cutting school budgets. So -

1. Who is setting the target dates and standards?
2. Who will administer the exams?
3. Will this, by any chance, involve a private contractor? Perhaps a propaganda think tank like Atlantic Institute of Market Studies. (Intellectual prostitutes at reasonable prices?)

Curiously, the TandT made no mention of these points. So I have written to Education Minister Jody Carr for further information.

We'll see.
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And now, off to the march.


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