Irony, information and the Rockefellers
Editor, the Times:
Robert Rock tarnishes his reputation as an organic chemist when he repeats a blind attitude toward the so-called “tar sands” in northern Alberta. Traditonally, tar is pitch, modified by man, from the wood and roots of pine by destructive distillation under pyrolysis.
Thus tar does not exist in nature at all, not even in Alberta. Tar comes into existence only through human processes.
Even the so-called “La Brea Tar Pits” near the Los Angeles County Museum actually contain asphalt, not tar at all.
Canadian oil sands, ignorantly called “tar sands,” contain sand or rock with bitumen or heavy crude oil. Crude oil is oil.
Rock appears to be slowly eroding his grasp of science.
Bad at science, Rock is worse at figures of speech.
He relies on the crude metaphor “doormat” to describe his homeland.
Maybe he tripped over our mat. Just for added cuteness, Rock recycles the worthless neologism “neocon” which, like “tar sands,” he takes from Americans.
Seventy years ago, George Orwell warned us of scribblers who rely on neologisms. By Orwell’s test in Newspeak, Rock’s writing is Duckspeak and Rock himself is a what Orwell called a Doubleplusgoodduckspeaker.
Not content with one crude figure of speech, Rock indulges in another unrefined metaphor when he smirks that the prime minister is a “shill for foreign oil companies.”
As columnist Harvey Enchin recently noted in The Vancouver Sun, we have foreign oil companies because Canadians themselves will not invest the needed capital in our oil fields. If Canadian banks lent the money, then there would be no need for foreign investment.
Far from being a shill, as Rock jeers, the prime minister shrewdly realizes that the oil industry produces high-paying jobs, union jobs. More important, the oil industry produces massive revenues that fund the social programs that Canadians take for granted.
By contrast, nasty, neorad foreign environmentalists do not produce one job or one dollar in tax revenue.
American environmentalists will ruin our social programs with their revenuegutting and force Canadians to race to the bottom – and then they will all go home.
How can American environmentalists keep a straight face when, as journalist Vivian Krause discovered, they are funded by the wealthy Rockefeller Foundation? Everyone knows that the Rockefellers made their money from oil. Does Rock shill for American oil wealth?
Greg Lanning
Abbotsford
