transportation

What’s left and what’s right? Usually it is obvious, but sometimes you have to take a step back and consider the bigger picture.
For example, the Toronto toll debate has exposed a lack of scrutiny of the leading source of corporate profit over the past century by many supposed leftists. Absent a political economy of the auto industrial complex, many Marxists have objectively allied themselves with the private car’s awesome political, cultural and ideological power.

The Border between Europe and Asia
The Ural Mountains run north to south roughly from the Arctic Ocean to what is now the border between Russia and Kazakhstan, about 400 miles north of the Caspian Sea. They separate Western (or European) Russia from Russian Siberia. So they don’t define national boundaries or separate cultures; they merely divide one country. They just happen to be a rather humble, 1600 miles long mountain range, with the highest mountain just 6000 feet high. These are no Himalayas, Rockies or Andes. They’re more like the Appalachians.

Americans are finally realizing they never lived in a democracy; Hacks and pranks can be a fun way to monkeywrench the New World Order; and people are turning abandoned homes into greenhouses.

Americans are finally realizing they never lived in a democracy; Hacks and pranks can be a fun way to monkeywrench the New World Order; and people are turning abandoned homes into greenhouses.

Neil Young singing to the junkies for oil. He's seen the needle and the damage done.by Gaius PubliusThe oil train dominoes are falling. Seems no one touched by oil at the transport end wants any part of it. Pipelines leak, 100- and 200-car trains blow up and burn, and fracking destroys health, lives and ground water.The key in all of these battles is local control, exercised by the very people in place to be the suffering recipients of all the damage done. Tony Bizjak writing at the Sacramento Bee (my emphasis):

A Metro should never be wrapped in car ads.
On Monday the whole front of Montréal’s Metro paper promoted Kia. All of page two and the back of a paper targeted at the city’s transit riders also promoted an unhealthy, lethal, inefficient and utterly unsustainable mode of transportation.

Fifty years ago this month (on September 9, 1966), President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety laws that launched a great life-saving program for the American People.
I was there that day at the White House at the invitation of President Johnson who gave me one of the signing pens. In 1966, traffic fatalities reached 50,894 or 5.50 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. By 2014, the loss of life was 32,675 or 1.07 fatalities per hundred million vehicle miles traveled. A huge reduction!

It is now almost six months since the Paris climate deal was agreed—the first legally binding commitment on curbing carbon emissions by all 195 United Nations countries. Nearly 170 of these countries have now formally signed the deal, notwithstanding concerns that the UK’s decision to leave the EU may jeopardise its full ratification. But what are the longer term prospects of governments drastically ramping up their mitigation efforts in order to meet the ambitious 1.5°C emissions target and prevent runaway global warming?

That’s a question currently being asked by legislators in the halls of Congress. Without a muscular pushback from the public, the big airlines could claim the American airspace as their own to tax and regulate, without any significant compensation to the American taxpayer and no oversight from elected officials. Talk about getting skyjacked!

If you want true food transparency, there’s nothing better than knowing that your food was grown at a farm within 5 miles from your home, or that your favorite wine comes from a winery across the beaten path. Now, France’s National Assembly (upper chamber of Parliament) wants to make local food an imperative with a law that requires 40% of all food served in ‘collective restaurants’ to be sourced locally.