Oh the drama of it all! (Click here if the video doesn't appear.) Hat tip: Doug MacKay...

19 August, 2010

In response to the fuss over Halifax sewage sludge, Contrarian reader S.P. points out that the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, District Sewerage Commission has been selling processed sludge under the brand name Milorganite for more than eight decades. The name, a contraction of Milwaukee organic nitrogen, was the winner of a 1925 naming contest in National Fertilizer Magazine. A corporate history on the commission's website explains that product grew out of a pollution control program. Early in the last century, the city formed the commission to clean up organic matter flowing into Milwaukee's waterways. The commission opened a laboratory to study a British chemist's scheme for...

18 August, 2010

If the admirable Ellen Page* wants to contribute to the environment of her home province, she might consider pressuring the Dexter government to rethink its politically expedient decision to delay regulations to control mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Mercury is a dangerous element with well-known impacts on human health, especially the health of young children. The province and Nova Scotia Power have known about their obligation to clean up mercury emissions for years, if not decades. [Disclosure: both NSP and the NS Govt. have been my clients.] The government's decision to back away from that legislated commitment in the...

17 August, 2010

Datamarket.com has animated the earthquakes that prefigured Iceland's unpronounceable volcano. [Embedded below or vis this link.] Earthquakes and Eruptions in Iceland 2010 from hjalli on Vimeo....

17 August, 2010

Where possible, I like to embed videos in Contrarian, to save readers the trouble of clicking through to them,  while including the links for those who prefer to view them at source. Lately, however, most of the embedded videos are disappearing from the emails a few hundred of you use to read Contrarian [see link (1) at right.] At first I assumed this was an artifact of Steve Jobs's hatred of Adobe Flash, causing the embedded videos to disappear chiefly on iPads and iPhones. But, no, of late they have failed to show up in my regular email program. Is this true...

17 August, 2010

Andrew Coyne demonstrates afresh why he is my favorite conservative columnist with this attempt to fathom Harper's inexplicable vandalizing of the census. Money quote: It isn’t just that the Tories habitually ignore the expert consensus on a wide range of issues—crime, taxes, climate change—it’s that they want to be seen to be ignoring it. It’s the overt antagonism to experts, and by extension the educated classes, that marks the Tory style. In its own way, it’s a form of class war. You can see it in the sneering references to Michael Ignatieff’s Harvard tenure, in the repeated denunciations of “elites” and “intellectuals.”...

17 August, 2010

Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman did some research before a visit to Canada, and found disquieting signs. His conclusion: I’m not making any predictions here, just noting that if we go beyond banking to ask about household balance sheets and risks thereto, things up north bear watching. Hint: Read the comments, too. Hat tip: Tim Bousquet...

17 August, 2010

Google wasn't always a carrier-humping, net-neutrality, surrender money, and TechCrunch has video to prove it: For those who don't follow tech news, Google pulled a stunning about-face on net-neutrality this week, teaming up with Verizon, the very company it pilloried on the issue, in an agreement to abandon the concept of neutrality for fast-growing wireless portions of the Internet, and for whatever new transmission technologies happen along in future. The do-no-evil company's reversal stunned the tech world. Unabashed Google admirer Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, called it a Munich Agreement, a description Josh Marshall of TPM Media said was "a...

15 August, 2010

A United Way ad now on display above urinals in select Halifax bars: What you're really giving is decapitation....

15 August, 2010
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