in Calgary

• connected to the internet
  
• working on Precautionary Principle Env paper
  
• should probably not go into environmental law; human greed and stupidity is too depressing
  
• maybe I'll go into Family law and spend all my time with abusers and people who would sell their own family for crack; they seem far less evil than corporate bigwigs and politicians who live in their corporate pockets
  
• will try to tone down the language for my paper
  
• looking forward to tomorrow and freedom

I love Jay

"The United States is putting together a Constitution now for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It's served us well for 200 years, and we don't appear to be using it anymore."
— Jay Leno

The Precautionary Principle

[I]f I'm asked under oath: 'Does smoking cause lung cancer?' I have to answer truthfully ... The simple fact is - however inconvenient it might be for people to hear it - despite 50 years of research the biological mechanisms between smoking and the cause of diseases are still unknown.
— Gareth Davis, Imperial Tobacco chief executive, November 13, 2004

Smokers have a 70% greater chance of dying from Coronary Heart Disease than non-smokers.
- Surgeon General, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1984.

‘There Has Been No Net Global Warming for the Past 70 Years’
- Title of Editorial, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, 2000

Frequently Asked Questions About the Science of Climate Change
FC.1: Has the world warmed?
Response: Yes. The average global temperature at the Earth's surface has warmed by about 0.6°C since the late 19th century.
- Environment Canada: Meteorological Service of Canada.

Precautionary Principle — The government's actions to protect the environment and health are guided by the precautionary principle, which states that "where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."
- Canadian Environmental Protection Agency Preamble

That's the beginning of my EnvLaw paper. And it plunges precipitously downhill from there. So far I'm done my intro and Part I, and have 6 of my 20 pages done. Intro and Part I are barely coherent gibberish; the rest of it aspires to reach the lofty height of incoherent gibberish.

::sigh::

I can't think. I'm tired, sleepy, wishing I was out having fun with the rest of my family, and so very, very screwed. And I've eaten three big spoonsful of creamy peanut butter, which we don't keep in our house precisely because I have all the self-control of a strung out crack junkie when it comes to creamy peanut butter.

Hate hate hate hate hate...

• ...my paper, because it's worth 75% of my mark and that means I really, really can't blow it off, no matter how much I want to - and boy, do I want to
  
• greedy rich people, just on principle
  
• myself, for not getting going on this damn thing so that I could actually do a good job on it instead of just hoping to not fail a bloody essay because that would be utterly humiliating

The one bright spot in my world right now is that I have at least gotten the bloody thing to be approximate English. I think it'll require another two hours to get to a passing grade.

Damn it, why did I do this to myself? You'd think that by age 33, after two undergraduate degrees, I would know better.

You'd be very, very wrong.