The Life Slant - Page 2

‘Brazil of the North’, British Columbia Razing Its Rainforests

VICTORIA—Despite agreeing to protect trees over 400 years old, British Columbia Timber Sales, a government agency, greenlit the destruction of rare thousand-year-old western red and yellow cedars adjacent to Cape Scott Park, northwestern Vancouver Island.

Let me tell you about British Columbia’s wild woody neighbourhoods and why they are so worthy of defending. It’s awe-inspiring to stand in the presence of big venerable trees with impossibly high canopies. An old-growth temperate rainforest is a salubrious mystical experience.

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Big Oil’s Economics of Extinction

From Edmonton, Alberta, to Burnaby, British Columbia, 890,000 barrels of oil per day are now flowing through the Trans Mountain Pipeline and off-loading onto tanker vessels docked on the edge of the Salish Sea.

Beguiled Canadian taxpayers forked out C$39bn to buy and rebuild the Trans Mountain Pipeline that winds its way through a school yard, waterways and endangered animals’ habitat.

The 2016 Paris Agreement was a smoke screen for unprincipled heads of state. The business of combusting carbon fuels was always the order of the day. From the Great Barrier ‘Graveyard’ and the Gulf of Carpentaria’s expired mangrove woodlands to the drought-ravaged Amazon rainforest and beyond, life is damned by accelerating manmade heat.

In the Pacific Northwest, fossil fuel tanker traffic is predicted to increase by a whopping seven-fold, to 408 trips through the Salish Sea – home of the critically endangered Southern Resident Orcas. And there’s 168% chance of a major oil spill from this obscene madness.

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Reykjavík Murdering Pregnant Fin Whales, Again

SAN FRANCISCO, June 11 – Iceland’s government issued a licence to the North Atlantic nation’s last whaling company, Hvalur hf, to brutally slay 128 fin whales.

It’s long overdue for the notorious whaler, Kristján Loftsson, to cease and desist massacring Mother Earth’s great whales, the oxygen replenishers.

Did you know that the oceans provide planetary life with three out of every four breaths of oxygen? Combustion heat (fossil fuels, wood pellets, palm oil) is adding the equivalent of 15.95 Hiroshimas every second of the year (31,536,000 A-bomb detonations) into the oceans, and it’s accelerating. Consequently, 40% of the oxygen-producing phytoplankton and cyanobacteria (Prochlorococcus) are missing from heat-disrupted nutrient deficiencies.

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How to Resist Corporate Deception and Greenwashing Hypocrisy

Corporate hypocrisy is a masterclass in deceit, where companies promote their so-called social responsibility, while their actions tell a completely different story. This chasm between sparkling company promises and grim reality erodes the trust of citizens and shatters the ethical foundations of our communities.

Take JBS, a meat processing giant that pledged to fight deforestation but was caught sourcing cattle from illegally deforested Amazon land. Or Cartier, a luxury brand that prides itself on ethical sourcing yet was found using conflict gold and advertising their products using indigenous Amazonian peoples they violently dispossessed. Then there’s IOI, a palm oil producer boasting about their “sustainability” while contributing to massive environmental destruction. Such brazen acts of deception ignite public outrage, often sparking more public discontent that the original acts of deception.

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Now We Know

Imagine that planet Earth is a corporation with many indispensable branches called Earth Inc. After completing a pro forma balance sheet for the Earth Inc, I mulled over what might be said to a group of investors who were contemplating acquiring that entity.

It was very clear that Earth Inc was in a downward spiral and that a substantial portion of the annual operating profit was now being derived by liquidating assets that were essential for its continued operations. To correct the existing problems, and make the entity viable, it would realistically take decades and require injecting hundreds of trillions of dollars.

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British Columbia’s Canine Bloodbath

So far this year, British Columbia has slaughtered 248 wolves bringing the nine-year running total to 8084 gruesome canine deaths. The provincial government has committed to razing its old-growth native forests and subsidising five liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipelines as well as two LNG outake ports.

Sorrowfully, the wolves are but a mere encumbrance to British Columbia’s planet-destroying wood pellet and fossil fuel commerce. So, in order for Big Forestry, Big Fracking Gas and Big Coal to hasten the Sixth Mass Extinction and cook the planet alive, the wolves are being exterminated by bounty hunters with military-grade sniper rifles on snowmobiles and helicopters, and by torturous steel-jawed leg-hold traps. It’s a grotesque excruciating bloodbath. In their infinite wisdom, three British Columbian premiers: Christy Clark, John Horgan, David Eby, respectively, doled out $10M (and counting) to sociopathic wolf hunters.

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Philanthropists Plotting Public Plunder

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In 1916, part of the federal tax code included an “oil depletion allowance” which “in American (US) tax law is an allowance claimable by anyone with an economic interest in a mineral deposit or standing timber. The principle is that the asset is a capital investment that is a wasting asset, and therefore depreciation can reasonably be offset (effectively as a capital loss) against income.” This is, in simpler terms, the ability to write off profits (in other words, they are not considered taxable income) because the asset that is generating you money (also called revenue) but is, as an asset, growing smaller and smaller.

Since your oil well will eventually run dry, you can deduct a certain amount of income that it generates, because your oil well won’t last forever.  Big Oil takes and is allowed to keep 23% of their profits, as they are not taxable under the Depletion Allowance Tax law. Wouldn’t you love to keep the top 23% of your income as non-taxable? According to Mother Jones magazine, Big Oil and the petrochemical industry have shielded $470 billion from being taxed since 2014 using this tax deduction. Nice work if you can get it.

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Deadly Palm Oil

Forestry’s highway to hell is simplifying self-organising networks of cooperative biological communities to extinction. Hideous monoculture palm oil plantations are plaguing the planet. It’s a $71bn per annum sickening industry that’s fraught with corruption and escalating destruction. Deadly palm oil plantations are ruining our best defence against climate Armageddon, tropical rainforests.

Palm oil makes up one-third of all the biofuels burned annually. It emits 4X more planet-searing gases per unit than diesel fuel.

So, what can YOU do about it? LOTS!
Refuse to purchase products.

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Varying Versions of Verisimilitude and Today’s Universities

In recent years, the truth became subjective, and that was a justification for many rationalizations. You might need some years to understand this, but the truth you know at fourteen is not the truth you know at twenty-four. It isn’t the world that changes from teenager to adulthood, it is the teenager. We now have high schools that declare all of the students to be valedictorians. The honest truth behind that is that if every student is a valediction, then none of the students are valedictorians.

Some time ago, I was talking with some recent high-school graduates, who told me that their grade-points were four point five out of four point zero. When asked how they could be even greater than the highest achievement of those who came before them, they insisted that they were “smarter” than all of the other students before. I found it sad and almost inconceivable that they were, in point of fact, believing that they were smarter than the students who graduated before them. This was, in my opinion, unfair to the students to be told this distortion, as well as unquestionably inconsiderate and disrespectful to the students before them. But then, youth have, at best, a spotty record for respecting elders.

Generations of the past have made mistakes, but that is not a justification to discard their entire value system. There are few, if any at all, societies that have a perfect past, but that does not demand that they are to be resented or discarded in their entirety. 

The flaws of past societies are models for advancement and understanding, not justifications for discarding all of the values of those societies.

The flaws of past societies are models for advancement and understanding, not justifications for discarding all of the values of those societies. In the history of thinking, we once believed that the truth would make you free; whereas now, the truth is a tool that rationalizes resentment and encourages those who believe that they were mistreated to seek reparations. Reparations from who? The laws of American society do not allow the living to suffer punishment for the crimes of one’s fore-bearers, nor should they. We have encouraged the youth of America to create their own truth, and ignore objections that disprove their veracity. Where education has failed, is to teach students that everything in history occurs within a context of events, beliefs and ideologies, and there is a considerable difference between learning from history and becoming enraged and acting out because of it. 

As Aldous Huxley said: “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of all history.”

To Quote George Weigel from First Things published January 17, 2024: “Hard as it may be for normal people to grasp, the notion that there is only “my truth” and “your truth,” but nothing properly describable as the truth, is virtually axiomatic in the humanities departments of American ‘elite’ universities, and has been for some time. Now, following the Orwellian script in Animal Farm, the woke plague has created a situation in which some of those personal ‘truths’ are deemed more equal than others’ ‘truths’—the superior truths being the ‘truths’ of political correctness.

As dean of the Harvard faculty, Claudine Gay was a vigorous proponent of the new axiom that some truths are truer than others. But in her apology, she reverted to the basic, postmodernist absurdity that ‘truth’ is a matter of personal conviction rather than conviction anchored in reality. Her downfall thus illustrates another axiom, one that antedates postmodernism by almost two centuries: The Revolution devours its children (Jacques Mallet du Pan, writing from Paris 1793 as the tumbrils rolled).”

Academics today will tell you of “my truth” and do not attempt to disprove or disparage it. In present-day academia, personal truth has taken the place of verifiable, legitimate facts. No longer presented as a point of view or perspective, these notions are to be carved into stone and worshipped. Except the stones are crumbling, withering away when exposed to the onslaught of reality. 

Academia has adopted a policy that will not serve it, or this nation, well. Where views once were described as “opinions” are now considered facts, they will eventually be recognized for what they are, simply views, and not truth. To quote Weigel one last time: “We must hope and pray that Claudine Gay and the rest of the postmodern academic establishment—which has turned ‘elite’ American higher education into a playpen for rabid anti-Semites, pampered snowflakes, and madcap ideologues” – My suggestion is to stop referring to views and opinions as facts before any more children are devoured.

Jeffrey Neil Jackson

Jeffrey Neil Jackson is an
Educator & Literary Mercenary

Atlantic Rainforest #SOS

South America’s other species-rich tropical assemblage, the Atlantic Rainforest, is in dire shape.

This priceless hotbed of life has mostly been razed, four out of every five trees are gone.

Five hundred years ago, this coastal and inland masterpiece was almost two times the area of New South Wales. The brunt of this remaining biome exists in Brazil (92%) with two slivers shared by Paraguay (6%) and Argentina (2%).

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Scorched Earth Clock

Hey Sleepwalkers
COP28 furnace goers!
Fossil fuel HEAT
Discombobulator,
Wreck’d Mother’s clock,
Seasonal untimedness,
Plants rousing
Four times faster,
Insect pollinators sleeping in.

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The Tiring of TikTok’s Tenure

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In a November 6, 2023 article at the Wired website, writer Jason Parham has finally realized something. Millennials are finally “getting it.” To quote the article: “This is how it goes now, in what is being christened the twilight of an era of social media that redefined community building and digital correspondence. For many first-gen social media users—millennials between the ages of 27 and 42—there is a developing sentiment that the party is over.”

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Avoiding Adverse Appellations; Political Correctness in Troubled Times

It seems that almost a month doesn’t go by that the media will invent a new term. Generally, the new terms are part of a lexicon used to describe events or people in society. One of the more troubling additions to the prevailing jargon is the “social engineer.” These “social engineers” are people who are adept at “psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information.”

In fact, the much -vaunted Artificial Intelligence, known as AI, is being successfully applied to mimic the voice of a young person, and that AI voice calls the grandparents, claims to be a grandchild in a jail, and needs thousands of dollars in cash to bail them out. The savior of society, AI, is already being used to steal from people, and, as it becomes more prevalent, this will only get worse. What would be the proper punishment for one of these “social engineers” who took away an elderly person’s life savings? If the punishment is to fit the crime, it is to take away everything the “social engineer” has made, via crime or any other endeavor.

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