… and Alberto Gonzales.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2006.
REGINA, January 30, 2006
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2006
(The author of this essay has asked to remain anonymous.)
A box of Life cereal.
Two cans of tuna.
A couple of smashed boxes of diet jello.
Two heads of iceberg lettuce.
A bag of crusty buns.
A large tin can with the label removed.
A bag of smashed muffins.
A head of cauliflower.
A small bag of what appeared to be potatoes.
A loaf of bread with today’s expiry date.
No brown eggs.”
TODAY I HAD MY FIRST FOOD BANK experience. I can’t remember ever being through anything more humiliating.
by Asad Ismi
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2006
China has emerged as a significant countervailing force to US imperialism, enabling newly defiant developing nations the world over to chart their own course of economic and social development beyond the sway of US power. But, as Asad Ismi writes, this opportunity has emerged on the backs of China�s own rural poor, among whom resistance is growing daily.
by John W. Warnock
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2006
Oil is a natural resource in a category all its own. Ever since the invention of the internal combustion engine, oil has been —quite literally—the fuel that fires economic growth. Transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, large cities—none could exist in their current form without oil. Indeed, the entire global economy as it is currently constituted would simply grind to a halt without it.
by Jim Trautman
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2006
The nuclear option, believed dead only a few short years ago, has a whole new lease on life, thanks largely to a cosmetic make-over as a “green” alternative to fossil fuels. But as Jim Trautman shows, nuclear is no panacea for our energy woes.
Geiger counters, screaming fans, and a question-mark-shaped cloud on the horizon
Stewart Steinhauer reflects on his own brush with uranium mining and the resurgence of nuclear power at the crest of Hubbert’s Peak.
Briarpatch Magazine
February 2006
IN 1976, AS A YOUNG MAN TRYING to make a living by market gardening on reserve in the north Okanagan, I went north for the winter months to work underground at Echo Bay (formerly Eldorado) Mines at Port Radium. All of the uranium had been mined by 1960, but the mine had just been drained and reopened to go after the silver deposits.
It’s official: the alt.humourists have declared open season on Stephen Harper.
There are now unconfirmed rumours that 100 commandos from the elite [Canadian] Joint Task Force 2 are leaving for Afghanistan this month to
The Americans are wisely treating this country as history. They are reducing their troops to some 10,000 based at Bagram, dedicated to pursuing George Bush’s Scarlet Pimpernel, Osama bin Laden. The rest is being handed over to role-hungry Nato. But Nato has no clue what to do. The French, Germans and Spaniards want no part in the madcap venture. The Canadians and Dutch are nervous, so much so that the Dutch may pull out.”
Simon Jenkins
Wednesday January 4, 2006
The Guardian
In the next few weeks, an army of 3,400 British troops expects to be deployed to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. This is nearly half the number deployed in Iraq. Everything I have heard and read about this expedition suggests that it makes no sense. British soldiers are being sent to a poor and dangerous place whose sole economic resource is opium. They will sit there as targets for probably the most intractable concentration of insurgents, Taliban, drug traffickers and suicide bombers in the world - until some minister has the guts to withdraw them.
