Daily Archives: May 20, 2017

Liberal MLAs make plans – Clearwater Times

Posted: May 20, 2017 at 7:20 am

Cam Fortems Kamloops This Week

No matter how the numbers play out in the coming weeks, re-elected incumbent Todd Stone is confident hell be part of the government.

Were moving forward, he toldKTWshortly after the provincial election. The people of B.C. have re-elected a B.C. Liberal government its a question of majority or minority.

While under the provincial ballot the Liberals are in a minority situation, Stone said theres a strong possibility his party will win in Courtenay-Comox, where incumbent New Democrat Ronna-Rae Leonard defeated Liberal Jim Benninger by nine votes.

Still uncounted are absentee ballots for the riding with a military base.

Our understanding is we have hundreds, if not thousands, in that riding alone The vast majority tend to vote for us, Stone said.

A flip in Courtenay-Comox would give the B.C. Liberals a majority margin of one, but Stone acknowledged it would still require support at times from another party in the legislature.

Its a wait-and-see, he said.

Newly elected in Kamloops-North Thompson, Peter Milobar called it a weird feeling knowing his personal future, but not knowing how B.C.s next government will work.Milobar said he will move into retiring MLA Terry Lakes Tranquille Road office.

Theres not many spaces [on Tranquille] to slot in, he said. It makes an easy transition.

Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo MP Cathy McLeod watched results late into the evening Ottawa time. She said its become apparent there is a serious urban-rural divide in B.C. that needs to come together.

Neither the NDP nor Greens won a significant number of ridings outside the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.

My sense is communities in rural areas, to them pipelines are important and natural resource projects are important, she said. Vancouver has perhaps a different perspective.

As for the possibility of a minority government, of which McLeod was a part under the Harper government from 2008 to 2011, she said it will restrict options.

If you have something in your running your son is graduating theres no flexibility, she said. You have to be very watchful.

McLeod added minority governments are not able to deliver on some of their promises if they cannot find support outside.

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Guess who’s back Liberals rise in latest Ontario politics poll: Fisher – CBC.ca

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A new Forum Research poll shows the Ontario Liberals have crept up in popularity. They are now just ahead of the NDP. Both are still far behind the Tories. Queen's Park analyst Robert Fisher talks about what might be behind the latest jump in pubic support for Kathleen Wynne's Ontario Liberal party.

Fisher spoke with theCBC'sConradCollacoabout the new poll and the decision by Ontario NDP Deputy Leader Jagmeet Singh to run for the leadership of the federal party to replace Tom Mulcair.Listen to the full interview by clicking the image at the top of the page, or read an edited and abridged transcript below.

Veteran political analyst Robert Fisher delivers his insights into Ontario politics every two weeks. (CBC)

AForum Research poll done May 9thfound the Conservatives in the lead with 41 percent support, followed by the Liberals at 28 and the NDP at 23.It was a change from a March poll that showed the Liberalsin third place.Why do you think the Liberals have rebounded?

It's a snapshot in time. If they were to take a poll today who knows what the numbers might be. Considering the timing of the poll, taken right after the budget, you must say the numbers must in some way reflect the budget. The poll found that there was "major support" for the Liberal pharmacare plan and for the expansion of rent control. These numbers are a long way away from the numbers in the Forum March poll. The question now is can the government continue what appears to be upward movement. Even senior Liberals will acknowledge privately that there is a long, hard road back to the top for Kathleen Wynne.

This week at Queen's Park news came of a leaked report saying rates will skyrocket in 2022.The Liberals say it's an old document.NDP Leader AndreaHorwathcalled for the legislature to sit for an extra week to address the issue. Why are we still waiting for the Liberals to pass the cut in hydro rates they've been promising for months?

If you have a majority government you can do what you want. Earlier in the week the budget was passed. The government used its majority. They could do the same with hydro. There will be more public hearings next week on hydro and maybe the whole plan is not yet put together. The opposition asked and asked and asked all weekfor cost numbers on the hydro plan but they were never delivered while the governmentdenied the numbers in the leaked report.

At some point the hydro plan is going to be in place because the government is absolutely committed to having a 24 percent rate cut in place by thesummer. If you're Kathleen Wynne and have a 15 percent approval rating it's a promise you'd better keep.

If this legislation doesn't get passed before the summer breakwill the Liberals pay for that delay?

Yes and no. At some point the government will pass it. Andrea Horwath tried and failed to get the legislature to sit an extra week. It's not that the opposition is against cutting rates. The opposition has long called for rate cuts. They are concernedthat if we have a cut now what will happen after the next election, say four years from now after the next election.The public hearings will answer some questions and the government will provide more details at some point but ultimately the plan will go ahead.

How are the party leaders doing in the polls?

For the Liberalsthe long road back to the top includes dealing with Kathleen Wynne'spopularity. At 15 percent approval that's a problem when we are about a year from an election. The disapproval of Kathleen Wynneis at 70 percent, sort of historic highs. Patrick Brown and Andrea Horwath have more positives than negatives. They are pretty close together in the category of who would make the best premier.The poll also indicates that both are still, for many people in Ontario, largely unknown. They have some work to do.

In partial defence of the two opposition leaders historically Ontarians don't pay a lot of attention to provincial politics between elections. While Ms. Horwath has been around for a long time it would be a concern to both parties thatthere is a lack of identifiability particularly for Patrick Brown. Lots of work for them to do between now and June 2018.

One other change at Queen's Park this week was the announcement by now former NDP deputy leader Jagmeet Singh that he's running for the federal NDP leadership.How do you see that affecting the provincial NDP?

I don't see this as Mr. Singh abandoning Andrea Horwath in her hour of need. He had flirted with the federal party before. In 2015 there was a lot of talk he would be a candidate. Instead he stayed at Queen's Park and was offered and accepted a role as deputy leader.He's going to keep his seat as an MPP for Bramalea-Gore-Maltonand should he fail I've been told he'll run provincially. If Ms. Horwath fails to bring her party at least to official opposition in the next election she is probably going to be history. Guess who will be there to seek the provincial party leadership. None other than JagmeetSingh. He's collected many IOU's, politically speaking, in Ontario and other provinces as well. He thinks long range and maybe he's got his eyes on the first prize in Ottawa and prize 1A at Queen's Park.

He has already affected the federal race in that he is a candidate who is very different from the others who are there including wearing the turban, the custom-made suits, the appearance in Gentleman's Quarterly Magazine not too many New Democrat candidates appear in Gentleman's Quarterly Magazine.

Mr Singh is very interesting guy. He is fluently bilingual. My Francophone friends tell me his French is more than passable. He campaigned for the NDP in Alberta and in the last B.C. election. He's well known in Ontario in his role as deputy leader. He's going to make a difference in the campaign. He might not win but he'll raise his profile.

Another interesting note on his resume He's a trained mixed-marital arts fighter in Brazilian jiu-jitsuas well...

Yes. He'dbe up against the boxer in Justin Trudeau. Boxing over jiu-jitsu or jiu-jitsu over boxing? Nevertheless, he's all of that and more. That makes him an interesting and unique candidate in any race he's in.

Jagmeet Singh is a lawyer and deputy leader of the Ontario NDP. He speaks French and Punjabi and has represented a Brampton riding in the provincial legislature since 2011. (Mike Crawley/CBC)

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Can the US fix Afghanistan? – The Manila Times Online – The Manila Times

Posted: at 7:20 am

THREE days after the 9/11 attacks both houses of Congress voted correctlyand without objectorsto authorize the President to use force against those who perpetrated the attacks and those who aided them.

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden had been living in Afghanistan, where the radical Islamist Taliban regime gave him sanctuary.

The US sought to end that regime, capture or kill bin Laden and other al-Qaida terrorists, and prevent Afghan territory from being used to harbor and train terrorists who could attack the United States in the future.

But President George W. Bush ultimately proposed a post-9/11 strategy that went beyond national defense.

We are committed to freedom in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in a peaceful Palestine, Bush said on May 1, 2003.

The advance of freedom is the surest strategy to undermine the appeal of terror in the world, he said. Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life. American values, and American interests, lead in the same direction. We stand for human liberty.

When Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, the U.S. still had about 32,500 troops in Afghanistan, according to the Congressional Research Service. By the second quarter of fiscal 2011, Obama had increased those forces to 99,800. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016, as he prepared to leave office, there were still 9,800 there.

But have we eliminated the threat al-Qaida, and those who share its ideology, pose to the United States?

The most recent inspector generals report on the US military mission in Afghanistan indicates the Taliban and al-Qaida are still active there and the Islamic State has established a presence.

Insurgent attacks continued across Afghanistan this quarter with the Taliban remaining the greatest threat to the Afghan government, said the report.

US counterterrorism operations this quarter disrupted al-Qaidas ability to attack the US and Afghan forces by reducing its numbers to under 100 fighters and killing three of its top leaders, said the report. However, al-Qaida in Afghanistan remained affiliated with the worldwide al-Qaida organization and, according to (US commander) General Nicholson, these groups together have the intent and capability to conduct attacks outside Afghanistan.

And how is freedom doing in Afghanistan? Human rights problems in the country, according to the State Departments 2016 report on that issue, included extra-judicial killings by security forces, ineffective government investigations of abuse and torture by local security forces; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention, including of women accused of so-called moral crimes; prolonged pretrial detentions; judicial corruption and ineffectiveness; violations of privacy rights; restrictions on freedom of speech, press, religion, and movement; pervasive governmental corruption; underage and forced marriages; abuse of children, including sexual abuse; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; discrimination against persons with disabilities; discrimination and abuses against ethnic minorities; societal discrimination based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and HIV/AIDS status; and abuse of workers rights, including child labor.

The Worldwide Threat Assessment that the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, presented to the Senate intelligence committee last week did not paint an optimistic picture for Afghanistan.

The overall situation in Afghanistan will very likely continue to deteriorate, even if international support is sustained, said the threat assessment. Endemic state weaknesses, the governments political fragility, deficiencies of the Afghan national security forces, Taliban persistence, and regional interference will remain key impediments to improvement.

The fighting will also continue to threaten US personnel, allies, and partners, particularly in Kabul and urban population centers, said the assessment. IS Khorasan branchwhich constitutes IS most significant presence in South Asiawill probably remain a low-level developing threat to Afghan stability as well as to US and Western interests in the region in 2017.

The same threat assessment pointed to a terror threat to the homeland that is now homegrown.

US-based homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) will remain the most frequent and unpredictable Sunni violent extremist threat to the US homeland, said the assessment. They will be spurred on by terrorist groups public calls to carry out attacks in the West. The threat of HVE attacks will persist, and some attacks will probably occur with little or no warning.

In addition to the HVE threat, a small number of foreign-based Sunni violent extremist groups will also pose a threat to the US homeland and continue publishing multilingual propaganda that calls for attacks against US and Western interests in the US homeland and abroad, it said.

The ultimate strategic aim of the United States in responding to the terrorist threat exemplified by al-Qaida and the Islamic State should not focus on establishing freedom in Afghanistan or any other distant land but rather on maintaining the God-given rights of life, liberty and property here.

Key to that is preventing terrorists from entering this country and depriving us of those rights here.

In the coming months, Republicans in Congress working with a Republican in the White House will have the opportunity to take concrete acts to secure our border and more aggressively vet those we let legally cross it.

If they want to keep America secure and free, they need to do it.

CREATORS.COM

Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of CNSnews.com.

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Editorial Sussex County showing financial independence … – Coastal Point

Posted: at 7:18 am

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Sussex County Administrator Todd Lawson, along with Finance Director Gina Jennings, presented Sussex County Council this week with its proposed $143.8 million budget for the 2018 fiscal year.

That is a figure that can cause one to choke a little bit upon first hearing it, as any monetary figure that ends in million is one of significance. But one key figure jumped out to us right off the top.

For every dollar of realty and property tax spend by the County, 55 cents will be spend on public safety. The next closest expenditure is the general operations of the County government close to 15 cents on the dollar.

There will be an increase of close to $680,000 of spending in the Countys agreement with the Delaware State Police, as that contract will now see Sussex County paying for the full total and real cost of 22 troopers county-wide. If the County balked at the higher figure, Jennings said the result would be five fewer troopers in the county. And, with the State facing major budgetary issues, more of the onus now falls on counties and municipalities to provide their own funding.

On the bright side (in addition to a fully-stocked stable of Delaware state troopers), the County appears to be responding well to a booming growth period in terms of emergency services. According to a review of last years budget and financial breakdown, there was a 5-percent increase in the number of EMS service calls last year, but the response time improved by 12 percent, according to officials. In an age of declining state funds, Sussex County is adapting and flourishing.

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Birth of the contemporary – The Hindu

Posted: at 7:17 am


The Hindu
Birth of the contemporary
The Hindu
And minimalism saved the ecology. With the Land Art-IT connect, the psychosis of sci-fi dystopia flips over into a new Utopia. Landscape made desolate by global wars becomes the source of a new knowledge order. Psychosis that in one part led to drugs ...

and more »

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A Jobless Utopia? – Boston Review

Posted: at 7:17 am

Photo: Punchyy

A town supported entirely by revenue from turbines gives us a glimpse of the challenges we will face in a workless future.

In 1905 the Spanish writer Vivente Blasco Ibez described the horrible conditions of day laborers in the vineyards outside Jerez. Barely paid, almost starving, and sleeping on hay, the day laborers in Blasco Ibezs novel, La Bodega, stumble through life as cadavers, with twisted spines and dry limbs, deformed and clumsy.

But Blasco Ibeza sort of Dickens of Andalusiaimagines a different fate for his protagonist. Our hero escapes with his fiance to South America, that young world where land ownership is not a prerequisite for a good life. What an Eden, the narrator interjects, so much better for the eager and strong peasant, a slave until then in body and soul to those who do not work. The lovers would be new, innocent, and industrious. The novel ends happilythere is no doubt of thatbut on a mixed metaphor, with an Eden where people work hard. Indeed Blasco Ibezs term for industriouslaboriosoalso translates as toilsome.

What sort of Eden is this, where women and men till the soil? In Genesis, Adam and Eve simply pick fruit from orchards in perpetual bloom. At the Fall, God invents work as punishment and commands his children, You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your own brow. Blasco, however, views a certain form of labor as a reward, and most social critics have shared this perspective. Like most myths, Eden tolerates ambiguity.

Much of the world is approaching the end of work, in which machines and computers will replace virtually all human effort in the production of goods and services.

Now reformers everywhere may have to resolve the dilemma of toilsome versus leisurely Edens. Much of the world is approaching what Jeremy Rifken calls the end of work and, more recently, the zero marginal cost society. In a zero marginal cost society, machines and computer algorithms replace virtually all human effort in the production of goods and services.

Rural Andalusia never had much retail, but its interior villages used to grow a variety of crops under the laborious conditions described by Blasco Ibez. In the last two decades, however, an almost effortless form of green energy has moved in. Wind turbines now crowd the terrain and there are few jobs, agricultural or otherwise. As an anthropologist, I began visiting a village familiar with these machines, hoping to see how people live with unemployment within a landscape that has been transformed from fields into electrical infrastructure.

In the tiny, four-hundred-person settlement of La Zarzuela, spindly poles rise up ninety meters to loom over fields exoticallymenacingly to some. With a smooth efficiency, sixty-meter blades propel current to people far away. The energy is clean in every sense. Once constructed and erected, a turbine consumes no raw materials. It produces no pollution. It also requires next to no maintenance.

They are robots, boasted the manager of the largest wind farm. Indeed the company that owns that farmthe Spanish firm Accionais so confident in automation that it does not even have a twenty-four-hour control room on site. Instead screens in Mexico monitor La Zarzuelas farm alongside hundreds of wind farms worldwide.

Meanwhile unemployed men of a certain age cluster at two bars. Supported by Spains social safety net, they think only sporadically about finding work. These men endured hard labor in their youth, but no one wants to return to that now. When machinery replaced the hoe and sickle, day laborers learned to drive tractors, a modest technology more like a motorcycle than a robot. But turbines upset that balance between device and operator, effectively dispensing with the latter, and as my drinking mates see it, turbines are jobs gone missing.

In a way clean energy is too clean, too divorced from the people and social context around it. Proponents of wind powerand I count myself in this groupwill succeed or fail based on our ability to solve this problem. What should the balance of work and leisure be after fossil fuels? How should we imagine utopia?

La Zarzuela huddles in a valley just north of the Straits of Gibraltar. There the pressure gradient between marine and terrestrial zones stimulates constant wind. Extending inland, two ridges frame the village in a V. They often funnel the strong, east wind, el Levante, into a howling squall. It has scoured the vegetation down to scrub bushes, the indigenous acebuche, and locals do not bother to plant trees, except for palms. El Levante creates the perfect conditions for wind power. Construction of wind farms began in 1999 and proceeded in spates.

Saving the planet from catastrophic climate change is going to be inconvenient.

When I arrived in mid-2015, almost 250 turbines were clustered within a roughly 3-by-6-mile strip. Three companies own the farms, which are called parques eolicos, since the notion of a wind park is meant to calm concern. But protests have dogged the turbines in La Zarzuela and in many other places as well. People object to the visual impact, the constant noise, and the strobe-like shadows cast in various times and seasons. In 2006 and 2007, as the government authorized another expansion, residents of La Zarzuela rallied against the masificacion de molinos (the massing of the windmills). They blocked a road, preventing construction equipment from reaching the site, rallied at the municipal town hall in Tarifa, and then lost. Big Windas critics term Acciona and similarly sized firmsalmost always wins.

At the El Pollo bar, I found men still nursing a grudge.

I am annoyed, declared La Zarzuelas mayor, a short stocky man known for blunt talk. Osvaldo Santiago (a pseudonym, as are all the names below) works as a foreman in the port of Algeciras, just across a narrow bay from Gibraltar itself.

Nadie! Nadie! he says while jabbing at my stomach. No one, no one has gotten a job from these monstrous blades. Local unemployment is 40 percent, he tells me. The turbines only require a few maintenance workerseducated, skilled technicians of the sort you wont find in rural Andalusia. Santiago, who hangs out with the captains and deck hands of container ships, cannot quite believe that such large hunks of steel can run themselves.

We can expect more such conflict and resentment. Denmark generates roughly 40 percent of its electricity from wind; Spain follows at roughly 20 percent. For now proponents and opponents agree on one tacit principle: that turbines should stay out of the way and preferably out of sight. Installers run them along ridges, in the empty spaces between settlement, or out at sea. But even this last option can provoke staunch resistance. Well-connected residents of Hyannis, Massachusetts, all but killed the 130-turbine Cape Wind project in the 2000s because they contended it would pollute their ocean views. Americans seem to prefer their windmills in Iowa, west Texas, and eastern Oregon, hinterlands where few people (and fewer rich people) live and vote. Unfortunately much of that electricity dies on the cables, never reaching refrigerators and light bulbs hundreds of miles away. Therein lies the problem: to power the grid with 100 percent renewables, every society will need to put wind farms and solar farms in places where the wind blows, where the sun shines, and where consumers of electricity live. Saving the planet from catastrophic climate change is going to be inconvenient.

Oil has been quite convenient, especially in terms of space. A hole in the ground less than three feet across can provide enough fuel to power a city. Even if one adds up all the infrastructure of rigs, pipelines, refineries, and gas stations, petroleum occupies very little land. Compare that modest footprint with the forests of colonial New England that were once obliterated to heat and light Boston. Those trees have returned, thanks to fossil fuels, and every Appalachian hiker benefits from that spatial subsidy (in addition to the gasoline that brings her to the trailhead). By refining compact kernels of hydrocarbon power, Americans liberated landscapes from servitude as fuel. Now, with great reluctance, we will have to reconsider this deal. Given that the arrangement will eventually cost us New Orleans, Miami, Boston, and New York, we clearly did not strike such a good bargain after all.

La Zarzuela provides a test case for a new deal between energy and landscapes. Against the will of the people, Big Wind converted field and pasture into an energy platform. The cost in acres was not immediately apparent; landowners still run cattle and plant crops around the turbines. But interior Andalusia had only recently begun attracting tourists, a promising new economic opportunity that the wind industry effectively squashed.

Labor gives us identity and, when it is good labor, the dignity and self-worth of a person fulfilled.

Alejandro Baptista knows about this defeat firsthand. His family owns the Doa Lola Hotel, a coastal resort, as well as the two-and-a-half-mile wind strip between the Atlantic and La Zarzuela. In 2004 the municipality surveyed that strip as a vacation city. Baptista dreamt of building holiday chalets and even a golf course, developments that would have employed the people of La Zarzuela. Tourism promised jobs and garnered local support, while the landowner stood poised to cash in.

Then turbines spoiled the vista. Baptista, who cannot imagine that a tourist would appreciate the whirring blades, opposed the turbines and joined the protestup to the last minute, when he capitulated. Now he collects an annual rent, calibrated to the generating capacity of each of the fourteen turbines on his property. The moneyapproximately $2,500 per machinefalls far below what he might earn from tourism. But it vastly exceeds what any individual in La Zarzuela takes home.

Local residents believe that Baptista sold out. Big Wind cost Baptista his view and his reputation. Meanwhile turbines did nothing good for the local economy. The industrious Edenpossibly something like Blasco Ibezs New World utopiaslipped away.

But what is utopia to the men of La Zarzuela? Sugar beets used to be a major crop in the village, but they are tedious and arduous to grow. As a root crop, sugar beets require men to bend at the waist, manipulating the tuber in the soil with a long-handled hoe. First workers thin the crop, cutting out three of every four roots. Those gaps allow workers to then reach the roots when, some months later, they are harvested.

At El Pollo Diego tells me that the labor was insoportable and dursima (unbearable and hard). In the ninety-degree heat of summer, day laborers would load sugar beets directly onto trucks all day long. Using my pen and notebook, Diego does some calculations. Each truck would carry 20,000 kilograms, and a team of eight could fill two trucks, meaning each laborer would harvest 5,000 kilograms (or 11,000 pounds) per day. It sounds like a Herculean feat to me, and Diego looks me in the eye to convince me that he is not exaggerating. Next to him another veteran of the beet harvest runs fingers down his face, mimicking perspiration.

In a way clean energy is too clean, too divorced from the people and social context around it.

Still in disbelief at such a hellish outdoor sweatshop, I check with Baptista, who grew sugar beets from 1975 to 2009, long after other growers had given up. I expect him to understate the drudgery he imposed on day laborers, but instead he warms to the topic. Day laborers loaded and cleaned the beets at a pay rate of 1.10 peseta (about a penny) per kilogram. I get confused, thinking he has said 100 pesetas per kilogram. No, Baptista laughs gleefully, 1,100 pesetas per ton.

Loaded and cleaned, he repeats with enthusiasm.

When La Zarzuelas men refused to break their backs in this way any longer, migrant laborers from Granada took over the harvest. Eventually the crop shifted to northern Spain, where it grows more economically, under irrigation and mechanical harvesting, and the Baptistas moved on to other crops, to hotels, and, of course, to turbines.

With little sadness, hard labor in La Zarzuela went extinct, but there is still nostalgia for less onerous forms of labor. In the Gazguez bar, just up the road from El Pollo, painted tiles show men cutting wheat with sickles and women carrying it away, and the barrooms conversations about grain differ in tone from those about beets. A man named Jaime smiles, recalling how horses trampled the harvest. Men would then toss it in the air using pitchforks while women carried out drinks to them. This harvest brought families and neighbors together. Old men crowd around Jaime and me, describing their personal experiences, while those middle-aged or younger recall stories from their parents. Mateo explains that one winnowed wheat when el Ponientethe weaker, westerly windwas blowing. Stronger gusts would have blown away the kernels with the chaff.

Although this work also took place in summer, no one recalls the heat or any sense of oppressive toil. No one mentions teams of workers, tonnages, or piecework, although I am speaking to the same men who had also handled beets. These men, mostly in their seventies, know a kind of work that adds to human dignity, family bonds, and the spirit of community. Pepe pays for my drink as he leaves, evidently pleased with our chat.

Hand winnowing ended in the 1960s with the arrival of a fixed threshing machine. Then, from 1975 onwards, combine harvesters took over. On the surface, wheat went the way of sugar beets, but no one in La Zarzuela sees them as parallels. Winnowing began as a task and became an expression of social life and environmental knowledge. It must have been arduous work sometimes, but not all the time. The painter of Gazguezs tiles, for instance, overlooked the sweat on the brows of the men cutting and tossing grain. Between utter toil and joblessness lies this remembered Eden of labor. Can people in La Zarzuela fight their waypast combines and turbinesback to that utopia? Should they?

Wind farms appear more restful than industrious. Workers do not surround the turbine or coax it to spin as do, say, drillers on an oil rig. Proponents argue that the expansion of the wind industry will generate hundreds of thousands of green jobs in the United States alonefar more than are now found in coalas electricians, crane operators, and so on still have to install any given turbine. The clean energy revolution will bring a construction boom lasting a decade or two, they argue. But then the turbines will virtually run themselves.

With little sadness, hard labor in La Zarzuela went extinct, but there is still nostalgia for less onerous forms of work.

Clean energy is structured that way. Karl Marx, who knew nothing about turbines, described labor as a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. That metabolism converts raw materials into products and, also, into waste. Miners, for instance, extract iron ore from the ground; further work is required to refine it into workable metal and still more to manage the discarded rock.

A turbine is utterly different. Its raw materialif one can even call it thatblows downwind. No one needs to dig for the breeze. Kinetically-charged air simply arrives and turns the blades, and electricity flows to the grid. There is no product to carry and certainly no pollution to cart off, bury, or otherwise handle. The dirt, the dust, the pile, the loadthe physical signs by which we know the dignity of laborare all missing here. Where is the work?

With some effort on my own part, I find technicians around La Zarzuela. After driving my rental car through the wind farms, ignoring the warnings that say Authorized Personnel Only, I encounter Ramiro, a ruddy, bearded man in his fifties dressed in a blue uniform. He and his partner are sitting in their truck at the top of a rise, enjoying the view of La Zarzuela and the sea. I ask him about his job. It is great, he tells me. They pay whether he has to do anything or notmuch better than working with pico y pala, pick and shovel. He also enthuses about nature, the view, and the tranquility of his wind farm. We chat for half an hour as blades swoosh gracefully around us. Then he drives off for his lunch break.

A few days later, I meet up with another technician named Jorge in Tarifa, the larger municipality to which La Zarzuela belongs. Jorge is active on social media, posting photos he takes of the turbines as well as photos of the view taken from atop them. He drives a black BMW, which I follow as he takes me to the beach outside town. We lean on the hood of his car, framed by waves on the west and bladed hillsides to the east. Jorgewho likes his job at least as much as Ramiro doesworks on contract doing the infrequent refurbishing of the turbines. He is now fielding inquiries from as far away as Chile. Twenty-six years old and handsome, Jorge likens himself to a soccer player resting between global tours. Friends drive by and wave as he talks about nature, each of us gazing up at the turbines along the ridges.

Meanwhile electricity is surging from those turbines. On one of the arrays outside La Zarzuela, twenty machines generate two megawatts of electricity each. Only five technicians service those turbines, which means each worker produces eight megawatts of energywith time leftover to shoot photos and take in the scenery. In the blow-zone of the straits, technology is enabling a lifestyle of relaxation, enjoyment, and beauty. Some might even call it a utopia.

To live comfortably with wind power, we will have to set aside deep-rooted biases. From Marx to Blasco Ibez to Barack Obama, observers of society have hewed to what Max Weber called the Protestant Work Ethic: one should toil industriously, make a product, and enjoy the fruits of that labor. Leisure must be earned. Perhaps because of Eves trespass, readers of the Bible feel they do not automatically deserve idleness or even hobbies. Labor gives us identity and, when it is good labor, the dignity and self-worth of a person fulfilled.

By refining petroleum, weliberated landscapes from servitude as fuel. But given that the arrangement will cost us our coastal cities, it was not sucha good bargain after all.

Some have dissented. In 1883 the Cuban-born writer Paul Lafargue advocated a right to be lazy. Modern machines, he found, produced enough to support both those working with them and a greater population made redundant by them. Lafargue, who married Karl Marxs daughter after emigrating to London, also argued for shortening the work day. By 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes was on board as well, predicting a machine-driven, post-work society. Three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us, he wrote, referring to the farmer after the Fall.

Some critics of capitalism now call for a multi-activity society, one that supports hobbies, sports, art, political action, and caring for children and parents. My state, New Jersey, has already embarked down that roadin an ecological fashion. The electrical grid pays me for doing nothing, though the transaction is complicated. In 1999 the Board of Public Utilities established an incentive program to encourage homeowners to install solar panels. As a beneficiary of this policy, I consume free electricity equivalent to my generation, meaning that I almost never pay an electric bill. But I also sell the environmental attributes of that electricity, known as a Solar Renewable Energy Certificate. I earn a certificate with every zero-carbon megawatt-hour I generate, which I can then auction to power companies so that they can include it in their quota of renewables, as mandated by state law. In other words, I get electricity for free and I earn more than $1,000 per year from my 22 rooftop panels. That second benefit compensates me, not for work or investment, but for environmental stewardship.

That planet-saving principle is sound, but other people deserve these payments more than homeowners in New Jersey. As they lose their jobs to solar power, coal miners and plant workers are reducing carbon emissions dramatically. Under the logic that pays me, they surely deserve their own, larger share of the $400 million annual market for New Jersey solar certificates. If I get a check for raising kids under my roof on a sunny weekend, then coal country ought to claim a subsidy for its no-wage, multi-activity society.

To agree to that transfer of resources, politicians and the public have to accept a place such as La Zarzuela for what it is. Many in the United States are likely to agree with hard-driving Santiago, the mayor in La Zarzuela, who cannot bear what he sees as idleness. He would prefer that his neighbors load freight, assisted by petroleum, from port of port. One should make something or move somethingor, at the very least, perform a service that others value enough to pay for. We have been taught that we earn money by the sweat of our own brows, as God allegedly put it at the Fall. We should not, as before the Fall, simply receive bread because there is enough to go around. As long as this insistence upon production prevails, we will remain mired in a system of industry and energy completely unsuited to todays ecological conditions. Perhaps, in order to relinquish fossil fuels, we need to learn to forgive ourselves and others for not working.

At El Pollo unemployed men and women come to drink beer and coffee. They pay with welfare money or wages from last summers tourism and they are, by and large, content. Nearby, the Caseta Municipal, the local club, offers free yoga classes for adults, soccer games for kids, and flamenco festivals for everyone. All the while massive robots do the serious, manual work. Some La Zarzuela residents might object to their appearance, but the turbines do their work without changing the climateand to some, they even change the landscape for the better. To me, these circumstances seem as close to utopia as I could ever to expect to witness.

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A Jobless Utopia? - Boston Review

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Dystopia, utopia and the like – Lebanon Reporter

Posted: at 7:16 am

In a recent class of which I was a part, we were studying the subject of dystopia. Dystopia is an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. This was in contrast to the concept of utopia, which is an imaginary place in which the government, laws and social conditions are perfect as they relate to life and its possible perspective from which we live.

I inquired of a number of the participants how they felt about life and how they see their present life as it possibly relates to the concept of dystopia, utopia, or a third concept called reality. As it relates to the media, music and our everyday relationships, they indicated it seems that life is bent somewhat toward the dystopian concept. In the family units, or lack thereof, we feel far from a utopia with the epidemic of heroine overdoses and the cutting of the body for the purpose of substituting of one pain for a greater one. Although dystopia and utopia are both imaginary situations, we view them somewhat readily in our present world.

I have been taught all of my life about the utopia of heaven and the dystopia of hell. As a Christian believer and Christ follower, it is my faith in the Bible and the Resurrection of Christ that gives me my basis of belief and life. I do not believe in heaven as an utopian society, but rather as a designed place and plan for the people of God who have a established a relationship with him through Christ while living here on earth. I do not believe in hell as just a dystopian imaginary place, but rather a place of negative eternal damnation for those who have rejected the invitation of God to become related with him through Christ.

In a world of increased confusion that is seemingly diminished of hope and promise, I would take you back to one of my previous writings in this paper, when I talked about the particular world views from which we view life. Our world view is determined by the perspective from which we view life and all that is involved therein; in essence, whether we come from either a God-centered perspective or man-centered view. We are still in a world where the majority of the population believes in an afterlife. Heaven, hell or whatever you may call the life beyond death, it seems to fit into a thought process regarded as dystopia or utopia. This life is a test ground and a preparation for the life to come. The choices we make and relationships (both divine and human) in which we engage will set the direction and pattern of our utopian or dystopian stage for our eternal destiny.

Each day is another opportunity for writing the perspective and answering the questions that life presents us.

As you embark upon another day of life, I submit to you two passages from that ageless writing called the Bible. From the Old Testament: Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5-6 (NIV) And from the New Testament: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 (NIV)

The realities of life are in the here and now. The questions of life and the answers of reality are before us to take or leave from our personal world view. Choose the God-centered view and be safe on the way.

Richard R. Burdett is a retired minister living in Lebanon.

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Dystopia, utopia and the like - Lebanon Reporter

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Maddon unveils new mantra, T-shirt for Cubs: Embrace The Suck – Chicago Sun-Times

Posted: at 7:16 am


Chicago Sun-Times
Maddon unveils new mantra, T-shirt for Cubs: Embrace The Suck
Chicago Sun-Times
To really expect utopia on an annual basis in the baseball industry is difficult and really not a good method, Maddon said. So right now, I want our guys to understand we haven't done our best work to this point, but that's a good thing (and) to ...
Embrace the Suck: Joe Maddon, Cubs have a new, perfectly-timed rallying cryComcast SportsNet Chicago
Joe Maddon hope Cubs 'embrace the suck' with latest t-shirtChicago Tribune

all 15 news articles »

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Maddon unveils new mantra, T-shirt for Cubs: Embrace The Suck - Chicago Sun-Times

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Sport: Cook Islands to host Tahiti in Oceania Rugby Cup – Radio New Zealand

Posted: at 7:16 am

The Cook Islands will host the Oceania Cup rugby tournament in August, in a one-off clash against Tahiti in Rarotonga.

The winner of this year's tournament will progress advance to a two-match series against the winner of the Asia regional qualifying tournament, with the winner of that series earning a spot in the 2019 Rugby World Cup repechage tournament.

The third-ranked team in the Pacific Nations Cup between Fiji, Samoa and Tonga will also compete in the repechage event.

The Cook Islands won the Oceania Cup in 2013. Photo: Bruce Southwick/Zoomfiji

Cook Islands Rugby Union president Moana Moeka'a was excited about the prospect of the country hosting an international match in Rarotonga again.

"The game against Tahiti is only three months off but it will come around quickly," he said.

"We need to work hard to ensure the success of this game as a Rugby World Cup qualification event and an international match against our closest neighbours."

"It's been a long time between drinks. The last time we played Tahiti in Rarotonga was in 2001 and before that in 1985 when Cook Islands hosted the Mini South Pacific Games," Moeka'a said.

The RWC Qualifying Match between Fiji & Cook Islands, 2014. Photo: Fiji Ministry of Information / Facebook

Papua New Guinea won the last Oceania Cup in 2015, which also featured American Samoa and Solomon Islands, but were a late withdrawal from this year's event.

Moana Moeka'a admitted it was easier playing a one-off game and said if the Cook Islands were not hosting the tournament they may have been forced to pull out too.

"People have got to realise that in Oceania there is a tyranny of distance and some teams that fly to some of the tournaments we hold around the Oceania region...a lot of teams have to catch two or three flights," he said.

"As opposed to places like Europe where you're travelling in a van and pass through two or three countries in the space of about six or seven hours so that's quite difficult.

"Teams find it difficult to find the money to travel and that's basically what happened this year, where initially only three countries put their hands up at the begining of this year and unfortunately PNG have had to withdraw."

Moana Moeka'a said 95 percent of funding for the Cook Islands Rugby Union comes from Rarotonga and the bulk of the team to play Tahiti will have to be local players due to the high cost of flying people in from overseas.

Link:

Sport: Cook Islands to host Tahiti in Oceania Rugby Cup - Radio New Zealand

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Cook Islands and Tahiti to meet in Raratonga – Rugby World Cup 2019 – Rugby World Cup 2019 (press release) (blog)

Posted: at 7:16 am

Regional focus: Oceania

Cook Islands and Tahiti will enter the race to qualify for Rugby World Cup 2019 in August when they contest a one-off match in the Oceania Rugby Cup 2017.

The biennial Oceania Rugby Cup is the regions leading competition for performance and development unions, but this year the winner will progress to a play-off against the Asia Rugby Championship 2018 winner with the prize being a place in the RWC 2019 repechage tournament.

The winner of the four-team repechage will join defending champions New Zealand, South Africa, Italy and the Africa 1 qualifier in Pool B at RWC 2019.

VIEW THERWC 2019 QUALIFYING PROCESS >>

The significance of this tournament to the Oceania region cannot be understated in regards to the valuable competition and opportunities that it provides to the development and performance unions within the region, said Bruce Cook, World Rugbys Rugby Services Manager for Oceania.

It will the first time that the Cook Islands have hosted a Rugby World Cup qualifying event since 2008 when they faced Niue, and the 4 August showdown with Tahiti falls on the Constitution Day public holiday in the Cook Islands.

By that time, the Oceania 1 and Oceania 2 qualifiers will have been determined with Fiji, Samoa and Tonga to complete that process with the World Rugby Pacific Nations Cup taking place from 1-15 July. The winner qualifies for RWC 2019 as Oceania 1 to join Australia, Wales, Georgia and Americas 2 in Pool D, and the runner-up as Oceania 2 alongside England, France, Argentina and Americas 1 in Pool C.

The game against Tahiti is only three months off but it will come around quickly. We need to work hard to ensure the success of this game as a RWC qualification event and an international match against our closest neighbours, said Cook Islands Rugby Union President Moana Moekaa. Its been a long time between drinks. The last time we played Tahiti in Rarotonga was in 2001 and before that in 1985 when Cook Islands hosted the Mini South Pacific Games.

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Cook Islands and Tahiti to meet in Raratonga - Rugby World Cup 2019 - Rugby World Cup 2019 (press release) (blog)

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