Early thirties. I'd watched Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome before going to bed that night. The scene where he measures the water vendor's tank with a geiger counter stuck. Also, I'd done quite a lot of reading about nuclear war in the last month.

I wonder if this has anything to do with climate change and melting arctic ice, like maybe part of the reason they were able to find it was because there's less ice now? The journalist claims on his blog that a member of the expedition is to blame for inaccurate expedition accounts and has access to both the Star and Stephen Harper. The current government is very anti-science and has been actively muzzling climate scientists, so I could definitely imagine them trying to alter the story to avoid any implicit admission of significant Arctic melting. Maybe I'm just being completely paranoid, but I'm having trouble imagining alternative explanations for why such a seemingly harmless story is being treated the way it is.

How does somebody else's homosexuality threaten one's own sense of masculinity though? I would think it would make prejudiced men feel MORE masculine by contrast if they equate homosexuality to femininity. Are they afraid too much time in the company of a gay man will make them feel too comfortable relaxing their gender rules? The article didn't seem to explore that question.

The locals?

I don't think I really grasped just how much blame Greece's creditors bore in this clusterfuck until I read through that article. Banks (mostly German and French) knew damn well what a horribly high credit risk Greece is due to its sketchy as fuck government, regardless of any zero risk weightings the EU tries to assign them. Lends them money anyway because of the returns they get through higher interest rates. Greece defaults (what a fucking surprise!). ECB and IMF bail out French and German banks by giving Greece money to repay loans to said banks, turning private debts into public debts. Banks come out clean as a whistle with a tidy profit to boot, and all blame is placed on Greece. This feels a lot like what happened with the US housing crisis, where the banks' fuckups were transferred to the taxpayers.

So we have all these corporations increasingly attempting to take away the ownership rights of citizens, and an impending Trans-Pacific Partnership that will grant them unprecedented power to influence or circumvent the laws of nations via lawsuits. I find this trajectory deeply disturbing. I fear a future where the nation state model of governance no longer exists, corporations are the new system of governance and you legally own nothing. I don't know, maybe my tinfoil hat is on too tight.

A lot of people are unaware. Its extremely alarming. I tell everybody about it now, though frankly I don't know what good it'll do.