Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Gun culture, Virginia Tech and many questions

Apparently the student gunman at Virginia Tech was from South Korea. Too bad that poor ignorant country doesn't have something like the wonderful American gun culture and the Second Amendment. 

The silly idiot never had the benefit of childhood target gun classes. He never went deer hunting with his dad. He had probably hadn't even been to a gun show before arriving in Virginia! So he just fell apart when he found freedom in the US of A. Too bad that his parents didn't educate him in the proper responsible use of modern weaponry. And of course, if all the students were issued mandatory guns and NRA memberships and gun classes then he would have been gunned by the time he could have fired the second shot! 

If that happened he would have been just another statistic instead the holder of a record that demented people will try to beat for decades to come. Also too bad that the ignorant cops in Virginia didn't learn the lessons of the shooting at Columbine and just last year at Dawson College in Montreal. After two people are shot in mysterious circumstances did they shut the campus down or send out warnings or storm the place? 

 No they calmly waited two hours until the students crowded their halls of learning to await their fate. Were the police ignorant or just complacent? Perhaps two on-campus killings is no big thing in Virginia so they felt no reason to panic. They just thought that it was a domestic dispute and therefore nothing to worry about. Perhaps they felt that some student was just expressing his constitutional rights to free speech and to bear arms. I sometimes find it hard to believe that all these people live in the same world as I do. 

 Apparently all the people who could have stopped this tragedy had some sense and intelligence and training before things started. So how could things have gone so horribly wrong?

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Vancouver? All that glitters is not gold but some really is!

A friend wrote to ask about Vancouver's reputation for stock scams. David Baines has been writing these stories in the local press for years. I started to write a short reply which just grew and then got revised and partially deleted and then rewritten. This essay is the result. 
Vancouver Mining Companies 
There are a number of historical reasons for these things to get hung on Vancouver's collective neck. The Colony of British Columbia (aka BC) was founded in the days of the 1858 BC gold rush. Both Vancouver and Seattle first prospered in the effort to supply the miners rushing to the 1898 Yukon gold strikes. Since it takes millions or billions to explore and develop a mine, it was only natural that the Vancouver stock market evolved into a world centre for small exploration companies. This is still true today. 
There are many small mining companies exploring and operating in places like Peru and New Guinea that are based and financed from Vancouver. As they get larger and more established many of these companies move to the Toronto exchange. There have been many head office moves, corporate sellouts and company mergers in the last few decades. Many more large mining companies are based in places like Toronto and London than in Vancouver. 
Forestry and fishing are also key BC resources in the local economy but have never required financing to the same extent. It is much easier to set up a shake mill or buy a local fishing boat than build an operating mine or smelter. Eventually in the nineties the Vancouver Stock Exchange closed down its trading floor, merged with the Alberta exchange and was swallowed up by the much larger Toronto Stock Exchange. Many of the smaller exploration companies still operate on the Toronto Venture Exchange subsidiary.
Vancouver Penny Stocks 
All those brokers and traders working in Vancouver weren't quite ready to leave the Vancouver beaches to live in Ontario mining towns. After the mining promoters got educated in pumping and dumping mining stocks it was just a short step to using the same skills on lottery ticket scams and Internet promotions. Some turned their skills to the promoting and plugging and dumping on every profitable scheme that came their way. Just as California invented Pets.com and Calgary invented Bre-X Mining, I am afraid that many traders in Vancouver have had a fun decade operating lottery scams and pumping penny stocks.
 Small neighbourhood stores here still feature the weekly Northern Miner right between the daily Racing Form and the Western Investor
The local population 
Vancouver is still close to the wilderness in many ways. One can walk across a bridge from the city centre and within a few hours find wild deer, coyotes, bears and some of the world's tallest trees. 
This is the Terminal City where adventurous misfits end up. It is a new place only founded in 1886. It is not so strange that the people who have drifted here from "back east" or across the Pacific are more likely to include more rogues and scammers than the crowd of clerks and farmers that remained at home.
The BC drug culture must be part of this story. For many reasons there has been a long local tradition of tolerance for human idiosyncrasies and foibles. When you scratch the surface veneer of many a local law firm, real estate agency or car dealership you are likely to find a lot of drug money sloshing around. What better way to launder some of that money but to put it to work on some sort of shady promotion? 
BC Politics and oversight 
British Columbia has had some colourful politics. While we have a strong tradition of unionism and socialism we also have a slightly stronger right-wing political tradition. The wacky Social Credit party ruled this place for more than thirty years o my life. The Bennetts and Vander Zalms rarely saw a big project or big business that they did not love and appreciate. If that meant skipping a few steps in the rules for financing or stock market oversight that was rarely a problem. 
In the Socred years both the powerful BC Forestry Minister and the Vancouver Police Chief were convicted of bribery. (The local double speak is interesting. The BC Social Credit movement was anything but socialist and the current BC Liberal government is far from liberal). Knowing something of provincial politics is important when looking at stock market oversight. 
In many ways the Canadian provinces have a much stronger role in regulating the economy than the American states or even European Common Market members do. The Canadian provinces retain full ownership and regulation power over all onshore mineral and forestry resources. While the federal government creates criminal law, the provinces regulate stock markets, enforce the criminal law and set civil law regulations. We have the absurd situation where a bank or insurance company that operates country-wide has to follow 13 sets of regulations. 
Gold among the dross 
Finally I wanted to point out that not everything that glitters is Fool's Gold. Occasionally the gleam leads to true wealth. Two of the world's biggest mining companies, GoldCorp and Teck Cominco, still have BC headquarters. Some of those pink sheet and OTC stock companies are legitimate and some of them will lead to wealthy investors. The old rules still apply. Diversify your investments and if something is too good to be true it probably ain't. 
While investigating this blog I came across a company named Klondike Gold. (I am certainly not recommending this stock and I have certainly not evaluated its financial prospects at this time. The company president used to work with my father decades ago).
 My heart did beat faster as I read the names in the story and interview. Any Canadian's heart should beat a little faster when he reads about the Eldorado stake, the Sullivan Mine and Hemlo Gold. My intellect knows my investments should all go into steady and boring things like big cap mutual funds but the romance of striking it rich in the next gold rush remains close to my western Canadian soul. I am still just a little beguiled at the prospect of the next big discovery.

The Big Bee Story

This report on the possible connection between cell phones usage and the drastic dying off of honey bee hives might turn out to be the big story of 2007. It will be interesting to see what happens to the stock of phone companies and food producers in the next few weeks. Honey bees are important for a lot more than pollinating flowers.

Quoting from ebeehoney.com I see that:
Almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, cantaloupes, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, sunflowers, watermelon and many other crops all rely on honey bees for pollination. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about one-third of the human diet is derived from insect-pollinated plants and that the honey bee is responsible for 80 percent of this pollination.

Of course if this bee / electricity connection is proven, then it will put a lot of other human animal interactions in sharper focus. If our electrical and radio emissions are so harmful to bees why would they not be as equally damaging to sharks, whales, tadpoles, spiders and young children?

If this really is an electrical phenomena, then the bees should be surviving better in places like Alberta where there there is a relatively lower intensity of cell phones. (Alberta is the third biggest honey producer in North America). Many of the hives in the north are transported south to coastal BC each fall and returned in the spring. In addition thousands of queen bees are imported each spring from California. All this points to yet another extreme example of world reliance on species monoculture. (The photo shows one of the vast Alberta canola fields that are pollinated by bees).

As I have written elsewhere, it is simply not enough to save the baby seals. The earth is a global system and once mankind started tinkering with one species in isolation they became responsible for the whole shebang.

[April 18, 2007 Update: Here is an interesting relevant article.]

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Dog and Cat Food: 95 friggin brands!?

Who'd a thunk it?
 I knew that there were companies who manufacture and sell several brands out of the same factory. When you buy the house brand from Safeway or Kroger's the food does not come from a Safeway or Kroger's factory. But I was astounded that 53 brands of dog food and 42 brands of cat food could come out of just one humongous multi-national factory. 
So why does anyone buy the so-called better brands?
 Why on earth would we buy Alpo or Nutro Max when the Complements or Foodtown pet food is apparently made on exactly the same machine and with exactly the same ingredients? And of course why would anyone at all buy Pepsi or Coke when the house brand comes out of the same factory with the same ingredients? And do you really think that one hand bag is worth a thousand times another simply because someone named Paris or Brittany prefers the ridiculously expensive version? 
And what the heck is wheat gluten?
And why on earth would we be buying it from China? I thought that America was exporting food to Asia. I thought that China was making noodles and buns from Canadian Durham wheat. Apparently a portion of that flour is processed, mixed with as much as 6% melamine and shipped back to the USA for dog food. Outrageous!
 The part that no-one wants to think about. Do you really think that in all of China this was the only batch of wheat gluten mixed with melamine? Apparently the shipment responsible for the animal deaths comes from one exporter; and apparently that one company (Xuzhou Anying) makes something like 10,000 tons a year and ships about 1 percent back to North America. It is only common sense that something stinks in China.
 I am sure when the dust all settles on this story we will find that there was thousands of tons of contaminated food sold in China for humans. I would also be astounded if the contamination only happened in one batch last winter. Luckily for me and my pet i always thought that the chunks and gravy wet dog foods always seemed like an expensive way to buy water and gravy. So I have never fed my dog that crap. So far at least I am thankful that he is healthy. But I will continue to wonder what other food contaminations is going on. A hundred years after Upton Sinclair wrote his discoveries and exposures apparently there is a lot being adulterated and hidden from public view.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Knut cuteness and global fish stocks

Knut Cuteness
Well here I am back at "Active Alert World". I have started several blogs and this one was designed for world events, news and rants. So why am I writing about Knut?

Isn't he so cute!!!! Kawaii!!! (As they say in Japan).
 Knut is the adorable fluffy little CUTE polar bear born into a zoo in Berlin.
Have you ever seen anything so adorable?

Out here on the west coast of Canada though, this story raises a lot of unsettling thoughts. What about all the polar bears -- and other creatures of this planet -- that just are not quite so cuddly? Adult polar bears are lean mean predatory killing machines.
Apparently they are the only Arctic creature that will actively hunt humans. That is nothing strange or artificial. It is just the way that they were born and it is simply the niche that they fill in Arctic ecology.

They are also social creatures used to covering rather large territories. According to the news reports, Knut the Cute was rejected by his mother and hand-raised by human zoo keepers. Seems like a rather sad existence to me. He certainly can't be reintroduced into the wild again and his best future prospect is to live in a concrete zoo enclosure padding back and forth begging for peanuts. (The bear in my picture once lived in the Vancouver Zoo).

Yes the world population of polar bears is shrinking; and yes we should be controlling hunting and repairing the climate; but I hardly see where all this effort in hand rearing such a wild polar bear will actually help the wild population.

Seal Cuteness
As a Canadian that of course brings me back to the perpetual question baby seals. Of course they are cute and of course it is nasty and a dirty business to harvest them on the St. Lawrence ice flows. But please don't condemn the hunt simply because baby seals are cute! If I read that someone wants to stop all animal hunting for food; or if another wants to stop all use of animal fur; then I see these like sincere rally cries. But please don't pick or choose your targets according to their state of cuteness.

Is a cod cute?
Help save the Harp Seal! But also while you are at it:
Let us save Salamanders, Komodo Dragons and the Atlantic Cod.
In any case, humans have already intruded into all parts of the world's ecology.
We have entered an era of unintended consequences I am afraid. Once we decimated the commercial cod fishery the force of commerce caused the trawlers and draggers of the oceans to seek out the toothfish, dogfish, rockfish and sablefish of the seas to sell as Chilean Sea Bass, Red Snapper and Black Cod.
Of course -- this is the unintended
consequences bit -- decimating those mid-sized fish stocks will likely lead to a collapse of all those larger prey animals such as seals, walrus, sharks and killer whales that depend on those fish species for food.

And what do polar bears eat?
Well, when they are not seeking out a tasty Inuit snack, their favourite food is the lowly harbour seal or perhaps a baby walrus or two.

So I am not pleading for anyone to ignore Knut -- he really is CUTE! -- but I do plead for people to realize that ecology is about a total environment and interplay of species. It is simply not enough to save cute creatures without saving all the wallflowers species -- such as squid, sharks and eels -- that both feed and prey upon the cute ones.

The entire world is now a zoological park
We live in a small place now. There are only a limited number of top level carnivorous species, there are only a limited number of abundant food species and the amount of rotifers, shrimp and krill for them all to eat is also limited. We can't just worry about the ecology of a few species selected for cuteness and expect all the others to somehow get survive on their own. Ecology means the science of relationships and all those tiny relationships need preservation.