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Sun News : Hey hey, ho ho! They don’t know

The first thing I learned is these protesters were clueless about the pipeline they were protesting, and about oil and economics in general.

I asked one of the protesters, Mike Roy, why he is only protesting the pipeline now, even though it’s been operating without incident since the 1970s. He seemed genuinely surprised to learn this. I asked him why he only opposes the plan to put Alberta oil in it, but was fine with it pumping OPEC crude for decades.
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How could people who were so clueless about what they were protesting also be so passionate, too? That’s the second thing I learned. I did what many reporters simply don’t do — I Googled the names of a half dozen protesters there. Mike Roy was from London. So was Bailey Lamon. And Dan Beaudoin. Jeff Hanks was from out of town too.

They’re professional protesters, who go from town to town on whatever the cause of the day is — Occupy, Idle No More, anti-GMO food, whatever. That’s why they didn’t know anything about the pipeline. They didn’t care. They just like protesting.

But it got darker. Because the more I looked, the more I realized these protesters were not just idealistic young people trying to heal the world. They were dominated by an inner circle of hard-core anarchists. Like Peter Hopperton. He was sentenced to five months in prison for rioting at the G20 in Toronto in 2010. Dave Prychitka was there too. He also rioted, but charges against him were dropped. Roy, Lamon and Beaudoin have all been charged with crimes too.

Twitter / climate_ice: Big snow event 17 Aug probably ...

Big snow event 17 Aug probably shuts down melting along west Greenland @greenlandicesmb http://ow.ly/i/2Uo54  http://www.polarportal.dk

Arctic Update | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

Sea ice extent minimums are normally reached around the 10th September, but,given the fall in temperature and barring external factors such as storms, we could well see the minimum reached earlier this year, maybe even as early as the end of August. The earliest minimum on record was the 2nd September 1987.