The $5.5-billion Enbridge pipeline project is all about sending Alberta bitumen in huge oil tankers to China. Beijing’s own state enterprises are among the project’s major backers, and Beijing has been buying up Alberta’s oilpatch at such a dizzying pace lately it’s hard to keep up. In the spring of 2010, China’s state-owned Sinopec Corp. took a $4.65-billion piece of Syncrude. Then the China Investment Corporation, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party, took possession of a $1.25-billon share of Penn West Petroleum. Last summer, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation gobbled up Opti Canada for $2.34 billion. And so on.

Then, last month, Sinopec spent $2.2-billion to take over Daylight Energy Ltd., and last week, Petro-China, with the final push of $1.9 billion, became the owner and manager of the MacKay River oilsands project. This is what Ottawa doesn’t want you noticing.

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It turns out that two can play this sort of game. B.C.’s environmentalists are now making great sport of it, pointing out that Ottawa’s “ethical oil” branding exercise was begun by Conservative party gadfly Ezra Levant, who was succeeded at the Ethical Oil institute by none other than the otherwise intelligent Alykhan Velshi, who parked himself there between his term with Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and his new job in Stephen Harper’s office. Bonus points: Ethical Oil dial-a-quote Kathryn Marshall is married to Hamish Marshall, Harper’s former strategic planning manager.

While it’s all good fun to play Spot the Freemason, something very serious is going on here. Last summer, John Bruk, the Asia Pacific Foundation’s founding president, warned that Ottawa was ignoring the rapid emergence of Chinese government interests “in sheep’s clothing” taking over Canada’s natural resource industries. Bruk told B.C. Business magazine: “Are we jeopardizing prosperity for our children and grandchildren while putting at risk our economic independence? In my view, this is exactly what is happening.”

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/story_print.html?id=5981230&sponsor

And, IMO, the worst part of the American political system is partisan politics, and its grown to a level of extremism that it could only hope to be challenged by a well established and respectable 3rd party (perhaps a party of the 99%... food for thought?).

The addition of a third, 4th, 5th, or 10th party would do nothing to resolve partisan politics. A lot of people think the 2 party system is poison, and multiple party systems are some sort of nirvanah. A 1 second analysis of parlimentarian political entities dispells that illusion. Systems with more parties - if anything - become even more contentous, fragmented, and full of partisanship than ever. The amount of skullduggery is amazing. The common man becomes even more distant from the political system, because the dizzying level of alliances, promises made/broken, and other shenanigans that take place to engineer a 'majority' on a vote essentially render any one party non-existent.

This is a bubble that really needs to be popped. I'm not saying the 2 party system is good. Quite often I feel very disenfranchised by the 2 party system because my perspective as a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, libertarian leaning, constitutional constructionist are rarely represented to my tastes. But the opinion that the addition of a 3rd party would in any way address the rancorous nature of US politics is simply incorrect.

I adore Dizzi's stuff.

>> ^luxury_pie:

@Boise_Lib can comment on comments commenting commentary in third person, neat!


Stop! I'm getting dizzy.

Wind idea: think of the atmosphere as you think of the oceans... they both flow around in patterns, wash up and around mountains, have layers, etc.. This is how a hurricane can build off the coast of Africa then swamp through the Caribbean and the U.S. Atlantic coast. And this is how you'll sometimes see lower clouds going one way and higher clouds going another.

The question of getting dizzy at the poles/equator... remember we're talking about something that rotates one time over the course of 24 hours. We get dizzy because our vestibular system orients us... the vestibular system is essentially tubes of saline with nerves arranged basically to sense the pressure of the saline in 3D space. Swinging your head around and then halting rapidly leaves this saline swirling a bit, and you get a vertigo-like sensation.
>> ^Contagion21:

>> ^Sagemind:
I'm convinced, without a doubt that the world is round.
But, the wind idea is interesting/facinating, and the question of would I get dizzy standing on the axis of the planet if I were used to standing at the equator, are all good questions.
Does anyone have a link that may discuss these phenomenon? ... Sometimes an explanation is more convincing that saying, "Well that's a stupid statement or opinion." Maybe someone schooled in this area (or who has more spare time than others)can guide us to some interesting reading on this.

It's a frame of reference issue.

>> ^Sagemind:

I'm convinced, without a doubt that the world is round.
But, the wind idea is interesting/facinating, and the question of would I get dizzy standing on the axis of the planet if I were used to standing at the equator, are all good questions.
Does anyone have a link that may discuss these phenomenon? ... Sometimes an explanation is more convincing that saying, "Well that's a stupid statement or opinion." Maybe someone schooled in this area (or who has more spare time than others)can guide us to some interesting reading on this. <img class="smiley" src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/smile.gif">


It's a frame of reference issue. It's harder to define mathmatically, but the view point that the earth is standing still and the rest of the universe is revolving around it is just conceptually valid.

The wind argument assumes that the atmosphere is not part of the earth and should be sitting still while the earth rotates beneath it. However, the physical planet applies more force to the atmosphere than the surrounding vacuum so eventually, the atmosphere will also rotate in sync with the planet itself based on Newton's laws.

I'm convinced, without a doubt that the world is round.

But, the wind idea is interesting/facinating, and the question of would I get dizzy standing on the axis of the planet if I were used to standing at the equator, are all good questions.

Does anyone have a link that may discuss these phenomenon? ... Sometimes an explanation is more convincing that saying, "Well that's a stupid statement or opinion." Maybe someone schooled in this area (or who has more spare time than others)can guide us to some interesting reading on this.

New York itself is a wonderful beautiful city with a million stories and I absolutely love it. However...

It's a monument to this country in the since of inequality of wealth. You could walk by a bum that's begging outside a restaurant that's $1,000 a table. It's appalling if you really compared the dizzying heights of opulence to the lowest poverty stricken individuals in that city. Walk by each other everyday.

I remember my mother waking me up and telling me that she thought terrorists had flown planes into the World Trade Center. Not having ever known a person from New York, or ever having gone there, and also because I had to go to work in a few hours, I just went back to bed. I remember thinking: "yeah, America was pretty overdue for a major terrorist attack."

Then when the towers fell, I got woken up again, but this time I stayed up because it seemed more interesting. I went to work and talked about it with people for the next few months but I always remember it as something I really couldn't have cared much about. I DID care about the bullshit war though.

Anyway, I always find myself surprised when I think back on it, because I wound up moving to NYC in 2006 and living there for almost four years.

After I got used to the city (I worked on 35th street) it was really strange to hear my co-workers talk about their own experiences. It really affected me more than it ever had before. I'd hear my boss say something like: "I got out of the station at Chambers (our previous office was a lot closer to the site) and everyone was just standing still."

That's really fucking creepy. If I ever got out of any station on Manhattan early on a Tuesday morning and everyone was just standing there, I probably would've shit myself. Once you get used to the way Manhattan streets are always buzzing with people all doing their own separate thing, that footage takes on a whole new meaning.

Two of my other co-workers wound up having to walk all the way home to the Bronx. It doesn't seem like it if you look at Google maps, but that's a long, long, long walk. Especially for a Yenta who takes cabs everywhere. I walk a lot, but when I thought about my two fat-assed (no offense girls) co-workers making that walk, I was pretty seriously moved. It must have been traumatizing for them. And I say that in all seriousness.

That's about as short as I can make my mushy "I saw the light" story of learning about how real 9/11 was for some people. I visited the Trade Canter site on two of the anniversaries when I lived there, and seeing all those people and their cards and flowers was very moving. Not to mention seeing the scale of the block involved and getting to know the area. (which is best seen if you walk around and then through the lobby of the World Financial Center to the west BTW) Standing there and looking up, having never seen the towers in person, it is dizzying trying to imagine what it must have looked like. I'm not sure that any news footage could ever convey what people who were there must have really seen.

I worked on the 13th (12A) floor of my building and that was scary enough sometimes.

Confirmed fake. It's part of an advertising campaign for some show called "Stoppt die Show". Another viral ad they did featured a bride spinning until she's dizzy across the dance floor and landing on a table.

>> ^Boise_Lib:

Makes me dizzy.


spinspinspinspinspin (for several minutes straight)

Makes me dizzy.

I vote to rename it the Dizzy Gillespie fly

1. Do not equate jobs. I was a public education teacher for four years, and I've been an IT pro for seven years, now as a senior consultant for AD, Exchange, VMware, and storage, with too many certifications to list them all off the top of my head. I just want to make this clear. Even with all the learning I've done to get all those certifications, it wouldn't take me the five years it took me to get a master's degree in education. Even with "summers off", without a doubt, I worked more hours in a year as a teacher than I have as an IT pro with 2-3 weeks paid vacation. Even in the most demanding IT jobs I've had (one was Premier Support for Microsoft Support Services), I have never been more stressed out than I was as a teacher, and I got paid half as much to teach.

2. You get better with experience as a teacher, but the ability to teach is also a gift. You must have some innate ability for it to actually be a good teacher. Not only do you have to know your subject matter, but you must also be able to relate it to an audience with completely different backgrounds, styles of learning, while managing a classroom of immature people by their very nature. Dismissing it as an "acquired skill just like anything else" shows an dizzying amount of ignorance about what the job entails.

3. You're half right about this. Teachers in my experience fell into 3 categories - great teachers, slackers, and those who tried really hard but failed because of a lack of talent. Of the slackers, the overwhelming majority were people who got the idealistic burning desire to teach beaten out of them by the system. They didn't move on or weren't fired because they simply didn't want to start over, and the system was short of teachers anyway. I moved on because my wife had medical issues, so I needed to earn enough for both of us, and there was no way I could do that by teaching. It took me 2-3 years to fully transition into IT. By the second year, I realized I didn't want to be a teacher anyway because of how screwed up public education was. I still believe in public education, but it's the external factors that prevent you from doing your job, whether it be woeful funding, bad salary, unsupportive parents, ludicrous insistence that standardized multiple choice tests accurately measured knowledge and understanding of a subject, etc.

Here's the problem with "getting rid of those bad teachers" - we don't have enough teachers as is, so you want less teachers? Can't wait to see those classes of 37 go to 45 or 50. Until you address the problem of attracting and keeping teachers, all that stuff is moot.

As for merit pay, I'm fine with that as long as something can be devised that accurately measures the teacher's performance. Standardized test scores won't do that because, nor absolute values on grades, etc.

5. See above. Most teachers' unions are against merit pay because no one has come up with a fair evaluation of a teacher's performance.

As for the arts, exposure to arts help students beyond the specifics of the art, assisting with learning and comprehension of every other subject. Ridding art from schools is a big mistake. Major advancements in science for example is derived by creative thinking, which art helps to develop. And this isn't just some psychological BS.

>> ^RedSky:

1. So is every other job.
2. It's an acquired skill like anything else. Also, let's not equate private tutoring with teaching a class, they are different things entirely and while some teachers certainly fill that role it is entirely unreasonable to suggest that most students will either demand this kind of attention or that most teachers will provide it (outside of what their job entails). I should probably disclose that my mother is a teacher too.
3. I'm not sure what you mean here. What I'm saying is people who don't want stress in their job and potentially don't want to put in a great deal of effort work in more secure positions, typically government related. I am not saying that all government employees are lazy and unmotivated, I'm simply saying that the obvious and apparent perks they provide attract certain kinds of people disproportionately.
4. This is why I would argue there needs to be a way to evaluate performance and reward teachers that do well. Rewarding them will allow the wages of teachers who are good at what they do rise and encourage more talented individuals who want to teach into a field they would otherwise not consider. As I said in my previous comment as far as I'm concerned the primary skills that schools should be teaching are reading, comprehension and rudimentary maths. These are also easily able to be evaluated with standardised tests. The same standardised tests that determine university enrollment. As far as I'm concerned I see no reason a test like this cannot evaluate a teacher's capability in improving year upon year results of students. Yes, it cannot be a primary measurement and it is certainly not perfect, but if your intention to increase the standards of teaching and you accept the impractically/implausibility of vastly increasing the teaching budget, you have to accept that improvements have to come from improved efficiency and effectiveness. You can't begin to address that unless you have some way of measuring it.
5. No skilled or academically minded industry is a factory. Yet everything from engineering to consulting to scientific research companies thrive in a competitive economy. Am I suggesting privatising and cutting funding? Not at all. I think poor neighborhoods need to be subsidised to encourage good teachers to teach there. I have no particular issue with public schools although I see no reason charter schools should not receive eligible to such government assistance and what currently exists where the funding is there to serve the common good of creating an educated and knowledgeable society. My problem is entrenched union interest groups who by virtue of the campaign contributions they endow to their elected representatives, block any capacity to reward good teachers and who in effect keep teacher wages depressed and a whole bunch of talented individuals who would have otherwise genuinely considered teaching out of schools.
My point is not that I don't think art/music/drama are valuable aspects of schooling. Rather that schools in poor neighbourhoods are failing to endow students with the basic skills they need to enter a skilled job or for that matter to enter university. I think when people make arguments like this (which if I recall one of the people in this video did), they fly in stark contrast to reality that many simply do not even grasp the basics of education.
Schooling at it's base is not rooted in wishy washy concepts of creativity, expressing individuality or character, they are part of growing up but not the function of school at its core. Math and reading skills are ultimately rooted in effective teacher instruction followed by repetition. No amount of related activities will dress up the fact that if you want to function in modern society you need to go through these trials and tribulations. Until all schools can do that, the last thing I want to listen to is some guy at a rally preaching about abstract skills.