Now That's a Good Ally

Well they may not have a democracy but at least they've decided to stop mutilating their female children. Egypt, second-largest beneficiary of US aid, has banned female circumcision. It seems that Cairo became enlightened after the death of a 12-year old girl resulting from the barbaric procedure.

This form of mutilation was ostensibly banned in Egypt 10-years ago but you know how these things go, eh? A 2005 study by UNICEF of Egyptian women aged 25 to 49 found 96% had been "circumcised."

Has NATO Finally Gone Too Far?

Another airstrike. More dead Afghan civilians. How many? At least 30, possibly a lot more. This account from The New York Times:

“Five houses were bombed,” the mayor said, who proceeded to name some of the victims: Hajji Noor Muhammad, Amanullah, Abdul Wajeed and Hajji Muhammad Qasam.

“These were all civilians, and the dead include women and children. There were also militants killed. We are sending a delegation to the village to investigate,” he said.

Some early reports painted an even grislier picture, putting the civilian toll at more than 100.

“People tried to escape from the area with their cars, trucks and tractors, and the coalition airplanes bombed them because they thought they were the enemy fleeing,” said Hajji Zahir, a tribal elder who said he had been in touch with residents of the effected villages. “They told me that they had buried 170 bodies so far.”

Just what are we doing in Afghanistan? The supposedly sovereign government of this country - its head of state and its parliament - have repeatedly demanded that we stop these strikes and yet we carry on regardless. If we presistently reject this country's sovereignty what are we but an army of occupation and by what right do we hold ourselves as conquerors of Afghanistan?

Just Because...

The Dangerous Downside of Carbon Trading

Once you create a market where polluters can buy carbon credits it raises the problem of just who's buying, just who's selling and what's up for grabs.

Coming up with carbon offsets can turn into a potentially big bucks proposition, especially given some of the controversial, even wacky, technologies being floated these days.

Enter a Vancouver-based company, Planktos, Inc. The company plans to sell carbon credits it creates by pouring iron dust into the ocean near the Galapagos Islands. The iron is supposed to induce the growth of phytoplankton that then suck up atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The World Wildlife Fund argues that Planktos is taking unacceptable risks in the quest for profit. The WWF claims that Planktos' meddling may trigger a change in the make-up of the phytoplankton bloom which is the bottom rung of the oceanic food chain.

“World Wildlife Fund’s concern extends beyond the impact on individual species and extends to the changes that this dumping may cause in the interaction of species, affecting the entire ecosystem,” said microbiologist Sallie Chisholm, a WWF board member. “There’s a real risk that this experiment may cause a domino effect through the food chain.”

Planktos' CEO Russ George denies the WWF claims and says the iron dust experiment will be not merely harmless but beneficial to the ocean ecosystem.

Nobel Laureates Condemn Iraq Oil Law

You don't hear much about this in our media and, Lord knows, it'll never cross Harpo's sanctimonious lips, but people are beginning to be heard in opposition to the greatest scam of the Iraq War - the Iraq Oil Law crafted by the occupation to transfer control of Iraq's oil and much of its oil wealth to Western (i.e. American) oil companies.

Five Nobel Peace Prize Laureates; Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi and Wangari Maathai; yesterday condemned the coercive law:

"In support of the people of Iraq, we the undersigned Nobel Peace Prize Laureates state our opposition to the Iraq Oil Law. We also oppose the decision of the United States government to require that the Iraq government pass the Oil Law as a condition of continued reconstruction aid in legislation passed on May 24, 2007. A law with the potential to so radically transform the basic economic security of the people of Iraq should not be forced on Iraq while it is under occupation and in such a weak negotiating position vis-à-vis both the U.S. government and foreign oil corporations. The Iraq Oil Law could benefit foreign oil companies at the expense of the Iraqi people, deny the Iraqi people economic security, create greater instability, and move the country further away from peace. The U.S. government should leave the matter of how Iraq will address the future of its oil system to the Iraqi people to be dealt with at a time when they are free from occupation and more able to engage in truly democratic decision-making. It is immoral and illegal to use war and invasion as mechanisms for robbing a people of their vital natural resources."

Mitt Romney's Dirty Little Secret

Actually it's dog dirt. About 25-years ago, Mitt Romney's Irish setter, Seamus, crapped on the car during a 12-hour drive from Boston to the family cottage in Ontario on Lake Huron.

Seamus, it seems, wasn't too happy about being stuck in his crate, strapped atop the Romney station wagon ( the "white whale" shown above) for the duration the trip.

"It is commonsense that any dog who's under extreme stress might show that stress by losing control of his bowels: that alone should have been sufficient indication that the dog was, basically, being tortured," Time Magazine quoted Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as saying.

California's Controversial Canuck

California's state Republican Party has hired a Canadian, Christopher Matthews, to serve as the party's Deputy Political Director beginning October 1st.

The problem is a US Federal Election Campaign Act which prohibits foreign nationals from having any involvement, direct or indirect, with campaign finances and decision-making powers in a political committee. In his new job, Matthews duties will include political research, involving microtargeting potential voters and technology.

The California GOP claims to have structured Matthews' job so as to avoid conflicting with the law.

Harper Burned in Maritimes

The good folks "Down East" aren't buying what Stephen Harper is selling on equalization. A Decima poll finds that 69% of maritimers side with the premiers of Nova Scotia, Labrador and Newfoundland on the issue. Harpo scores a staggering 6% approval.

It turns out most of us in the rest of Canada tend to side with the premiers. Wait, what's that I hear? It's the springs straining on the trampoline! Is Little Stevie getting ready for another of his now famous backflips?

No More Paris Hilton

Broadcast journalism's latest champion is MSNBC anchor, Mika Brzezinski.

Brzezinski, daughter of Zbigniew, rebelled when handed a news bulletin about the release of Paris Hilton. At first she simply refused to read the copy, saying, "No, I hate this story and I don't think it should be our lead." From the Times Online:

"After getting away with her refusal the first time, the story came up again as Ms Brzezinski was asked to read it at the top of the next rolling bulletin - after which she took a fellow anchor's cigarette lighter and tried to burn the script.

"The third time around, she was ready. She took the script straight to the studio shredder and fed it into the machine.

"The anchor's stand appears to have made her something of a heroine, at least among those Americans who have had enough of the Paris Hilton jail saga. "

You can watch the whole thing here on YouTube. It's priceless:

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=6VdNcCcweL0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fperezhilton%2Ecom%2F

Where Do You Put 50-Million Refugees?

Think about that for a minute. Fifty million people all looking for food, water and a roof over their heads.

A UN report says desertification could create 50-million refugees within ten years.

Ten years, in the greater scheme of things, amounts to scant moments in which to put into effect the measures that will be needed to respond to this threat. Yes, it's far more than just a problem, it's a threat.

The UN has identified sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia as the areas that will be most affected. The report notes that desertification currently affects the lives of between 100-200 million people and, in the long-term, could impact on a third of the world's population or two-billion people.

There are a number of causes for desertification but the main culprits are soil exhaustion from over-farming and excessive irrigation depleting groundwater resources. Naturally, global warming significantly compounds these effects.

Fifty-million refugees have an enormous spillover effect. The places into which they must first migrate and find sustenance will be those already stressed and least able to accomodate more mouths. It's an apocalyptic scenario.

"There is a chain reaction. It leads to social turmoil," said Zafaar Adeel, the study's lead author and head of the UN University's International Network on Water, Environment and Health.

What are the answers? Right now there aren't many. Whole economies need to be transformed and they really don't have the resources necessary for much choice in how to survive.

Perhaps before we worry about answers we'd do well to ask ourselves some hard questions. Are we willing to take responsibility for alleviating this looming crisis and, if so, just what are we able and prepared to do about it? Ultimately we may have to weigh how much of our wealth we're willing to surrender for these peoples' survival?

But What About Comrade Santa?

Russia says it has first dibs on the North Pole.

Moscow claims it has found a geological shelf that establishes its claim to much of the central area of the Arctic. The new areas claimed are shown in grey above on a map obtained from The New York Times.

Banking on the Lomonosov Ridge, Russia is claiming an additional 460,000 square miles of territory in the central Arctic.

Canada and Denmark have joined forces to claim that the Lomonosov Ridge isn't actually part of the Siberian continental shelf at all but forms part of the Canada-Greenland shelf.

Who cares? Canada, Denmark and Russia certainly do because at stake are potential shipping routes, mineral beds and fishing zones once global warming clears out the ice pack.

Speaking of Slums

The United Nations jabbed its big, multinational finger in the eye of the British Columbia and Vancouver city governments by shining a spotlight on Van's infamous slum, the "Downtown Eastside."

"It's one of the worst areas of urban blight that I've ever seen and I've travelled all over the world," said Patricia Leidl, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Population Fund.

The mayor's office defended Vancouver by changing the subject to something, anything else - such as how nice the other neighbourhoods are. Ms. Leidl replied that that's precisely her point.

They just don't get it. Of course while we're shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to host the 2010 Winter Olympics while griping that we can't afford healthcare costs, sometimes a few thousand homeless junkies just get overlooked.

A Planet of Slums

Depending on who you listen to either half the world's population now lives in cities or it will by next year. Was a time when the planet's population was predominantly rural and agricultural by vocation but that has been giving way to urbanization for a long time.

What may surprise you is that the pace of this urban migration is only expected to speed up. The United Nations warns that our already congested cities will likely double in population by 2030. What's being predicted is a planet of slums. From The Independent:

"'The growth of cities will be the single largest influence on development in the 21st century,' the report states. It maintains that over the next 30 years, the population of African and Asian cities will double, adding 1.7 billion people - more than the current populations of the US and China combined.

"In this new world the majority of theurban poor will be under 25, unemployed and vulnerable to fundamentalism, Christian and Islamic.

"Mike Davis, a population expert, described this emerging underclass in his recent work Planet of Slums as: 'A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs for the dispossessed.'

"George Martine, a demographer and the author of today's report, said: "The urbanisation is jolting mentalities and subjecting them to new influences. This is a historical situation. And now one of the ways for people to reorganise themselves in this urban world is to associate themselves with new or strong, fundamentalist religion."

Some highlights of the UN report:

* By 2008, more than half of the world's current 6.7billion population will live in cities.
* By 2030, the urban population will have risen to 5 billion, 60 per cent of the world's population.
* Half of the world's urban population is currently under 25. By 2030, young people will make up the vast majority of the 5 billion urban dwellers.
* Between 2000 and 2030, Asia's urban population will increase from 1.3 billion to 2.64 billion. Africa's population will rise from 294 million to 742 million, Latin America and the Caribbean from 394 million to 609million.
* Mega-cities do not have a monopoly on population growth. More than half of the urban world lives in cities with a population of less than 500,000.

The Not-So-Green Democrats

The environmental community is pretty much resigned to having to wait until George w. Bush clears out of the White House before getting a US administration really committed to tackling global warming. Right now a Democratic candidate seems most likely to become the next US president and they all seem to get the GHG issue, right? Sorry, but no.

Take the Democratic frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Surely they're green, right? There are some indications they're not. From The American Prospect:

"Last week, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed that despite efforts to build support with progressives suspicious of their close ties to corporate America, when it comes to real decisions and real votes, big business will often come first. This was reaffirmed when the two senators voted for an amendment to the energy bill offered by Montana Democrat Jon Tester that would have provided $200 million in grants and $10 billion in taxpayer loans for projects to turn regular old solid, black coal into new, shiny liquid coal to power cars and trucks. The coal companies love the idea, because replacing even 10 percent of gasoline with liquid coal would spur a 43 percent increase in coal mining, according to environmental groups. And proponents have tried to put coal liquefaction in the politically appealing framework of "energy independence" -- helping reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

"Alas, there are a few problems. At the top of the list is the fact that turning solid coal into liquid fuel requires massive inputs of energy. Indeed, liquid coal currently produces double the greenhouse gas emissions that regular gasoline does.

"... liquid coal backers had been peddling the argument that, with enough taxpayer subsidies, they could capture much of that dangerous carbon dioxide and bury it deep underground, keeping it safely out of the atmosphere for decades. "

"To answer critics who doubted the carbon sequestration promises, "[Montana Democrat Jon]Tester (a liquid coal backer) proposed his amendment requiring that any project that received taxpayer support had to produce at least 20 percent less global warming pollution than gasoline over the lifetime of the product, and initially capture at least 85 percent of the carbon dioxide.

"Faced with the possibility that they might actually have to live up to their promises, the Coal to Liquids Coalition (an unholy alliance between the coal industry and some elements of the AFL-CIO) suddenly changed its tune. In an about-face, the members opposed Tester's amendment, despite the subsidies windfall it promised. Rather than touting their ability to make liquid coal clean as they had in their Senate testimony, industry officials now said it would be unfair to require them to live up to the environmental standards they themselves had promoted.
"Imposing an unrealistic standard that specifically requires both a 20 percent lifecycle reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and an 85 percent capture of greenhouse gas emissions would all but end any chance America has of using CTL fuels to reverse our growing reliance on foreign energy," the Coal to Liquids coalition wrote to New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman.

"This was an admission that all their grand promises about the potential of "clean" coal -- including their testimony to the Finance subcommittee -- were just plain lies. Even with $10 billion in low-interest taxpayer loans, and $200 million in subsidies, they doubt their own ability to actually make coal clean. The switcharoo didn't bother pro-coal Republicans, however, who followed in lockstep with the industry and voted against the Tester amendment.

"In contrast, all the other major Democratic presidential candidates are on record opposing liquid coal subsidies. A spokesman for John Edwards, for example, explained the candidate's opposition to liquid coal: "He believes that federal resources should support research into clean renewable energy." This is an important point. The cost of reducing greenhouse gases from carbon-rich coal will always greatly exceed that of producing that energy from sources that are clean to start with, like wind and solar power.

On Global Warming - Get On With It

Every good lawyer knows never to ask a question unless you already know the answer. Ignore that rule and you're apt to get an answer you don't want to hear.

It's a lesson that's been lost on our EnviroMin George w. Baird. A while back he asked for advice on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions in Canada by 50 to 70% by 2050 and advice he got in the form of a report from Environment Canada.

From The Globe & Mail:

"The slower Canada is to put a price tag on greenhouse gas emissions, the greater the damage to the economy will be, a report commissioned by Environment Canada will say Wednesday.

"But if Ottawa acts now to put a price on emissions - either through a cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax, or a combination of both - the long-term costs will be manageable, says the paper by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy."

Caps? Carbon taxes? Say it ain't so, Johnny boy!

"'If the government neglects to clearly communicate the [greenhouse gas] price schedule well in advance, it risks causing serious economic dislocation ... because society's capital stocks will not be well prepared,' the report warns.

"Done right, however, the costs over the long term will be small. If the government gives clear signals about how emissions will be priced, and how that price will rise over the long term, then companies and consumers alike can make environmentally sound investment decisions.

"For example, Ontario and Alberta both need to make multibillion-dollar investments in energy infrastructure in the next few years. If they know what kind of environmental rules Ottawa will impose, they can invest accordingly. But if Ottawa dithers, and the provinces make inappropriate investments, the cost to fix those decisions after the fact will be enormous. Much of the country's machinery and equipment will roll over in the next 15 years, and so time is of the essence, the report warns.

"But the price of carbon, whether it is arrived at through a market-oriented cap-and-trade system or through government-imposed rules, is probably going to have to rise to levels higher than most businesses expect, the report shows.

"'On the basis of current technologies, it requires quite a price shock to lower greenhouse gas emissions,' said Don Drummond, chief economist of Toronto-Dominion Bank, who has been doing similar research himself. 'The sooner we get going, the better.'"

The report puts Baird and Harper on the edge of a precipice, right where they don't want to be. Do they take the leap, do they dither and stall for time or do they turn and run for cover?

What I don't understand about this report is that it seems to adress GHG reductions only from the perspective of the industrial sector. When it comes to 70% GHG reductions, we can't get there from here. Industrial restraint is only one part of the solution just as industrial activity is but one part of the problem.

While carbon caps and taxes for the business sector are probably a good place to start, the government can't succeed without addressing all contributing sources of GHG emissions, the fossil fuel problem, alternate energy and energy conservation issues. That means you and me but especially you. Don't think I don't know you drive a Hummer.

My guess? The report will be allowed to gather dust. Harpo will say we can't do it unless the rest of the major emitters join in. That means China and India as well as the US. Asia, of course, has already made it clear they expect us, the biggest emitters (historically and on a per-capita scale) to act first.

No, I think the advice is strong but the political courage is weak.

The Ghost of Progressive Conservatism

Poor Old Steve. When he jello-wrestled Peter MacKay into submission and a merger between the PCs and Alliance, Harper was adamant that "progressive" have no place in the new party's name. No sir, none of that Red Tory stuff for Harpo. He was going to lead a party and a nation along the path of Republicanism.

Global warming? A "socialist scheme" over "so-called greenhouse gases." Afghanistan? "Stay the course" and never "cut and run." On policy after policy, value upon value, Harpo quested to steer Canada to the far right.

And then he hit a wall. Thanks to the sponsorship scandal from the Chretien years, Stevie was able to squeak past Paul Martin and into power. The Liberals, or at least public anger at the Liberals, put Steve in power. It wasn't Harpo's doing at all.

Harpo took the reins of power like a real manly man and set about to steer our collective wagon onto his path until the wheels fell off. He began to realize that the Canadian people didn't want to go down his road and weren't going to put up with it.

Suddenly Steve had to reverse course and lighten the load. He couldn't quite shake his megalomaniacal grip on his own party and his caucus but he quickly began to jettison his vaunted principles, his purported integrity.

Instead of fighting Canadians' mild socialistic tendencies, Steve began to go along. The gun registry? My goodness, it's still here. Global warming? A socialist plot no longer. Even his most delicious red meat issue, Afghanistan, has gone by the boards. No more "stay the course" or pledges not to "cut and run" but, instead, a meek plea for consensus. Can't we all just get along?

How the mighty has been humbled. It's almost as though Stevie had a visit one night in his dreams, a visit from the ghost of Progressive conservatism. Something sure scared the hell out of him. Now he looks like nothing so much as a pretender to the old PC throne.

Rule of Law Takes a Beating Globally

For 35-years Freedom House has been keeping an eye on, well on freedom or the state of freedom around the world.

Lately the results of their studies haven't been good as made clear in Freedom House's report on the state of the Rule of Law in today's world:

"A global decline in the rule of law, particularly in Africa and Asia, was a major political development in 2006, data released today by Freedom House indicated.

"According to the subcategory findings from Freedom in the World 2007, the most notable change in freedom in 2006 was global deterioration in judicial independence, due process rights, protection from torture, and freedom from war and insurgencies. These declines occurred in geographically and culturally diverse countries such as Chad, South Africa, Somalia and Ethiopia, as well as Afghanistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

"These subcategory developments point to broader worrying trends noted by Freedom in the World 2007 that threaten the stability of new democracies and provide obstacles to political reform in societies under authoritarian rule. According to the survey, the percentage of countries designated as Free has failed to increase for nearly a decade, suggesting an ongoing “freedom stagnation.”

The entire report can be found at: http://www.freedomhouse.org/.

Somebody's Listening to Limbaugh

America's youth may get the picture but a surprising percentage of average Americans remain thoroughly confused about 9/11 and their president's war on terror.

A Newsweek poll of 1,000 adults, the magazine's first ever "What You Need to Know Poll" came up with some pretty disappointing results:

"Even today, more than four years into the war in Iraq, as many as four in 10 Americans (41 percent) still believe Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection. A majority of Americans were similarly unable to pick Saudi Arabia in a multiple-choice question about the country where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born. Just 43 percent got it right—and a full 20 percent thought most came from Iraq."

I guess there must be a lot more Dittoheads than I thought.

A New America? Youth Turn Left

It seems America's young people aren't as gullible or easily intimidated as their elders. A NY Times/CBS News/MTV polls finds Americans in the 17-29 age group leaning decidedly left. From the New York Times:

"Young Americans are more likely than the general public to favor a government-run universal health care insurance system, an open-door policy on immigration and the legalization of gay marriage, according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll. The poll also found that they are more likely to say the war in Iraq is heading to a successful conclusion.

"...more Americans ages 17 to 29 than four years ago are paying attention to the presidential race. But they appeared to be really familiar with only two of the candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"They have continued a long-term drift away from the Republicans. And although they are just as worried as the general population about the outlook for the country and think their generation is likely to be worse off than that of their parents, they retain a belief that their votes can make a difference, the poll found."

"By a 52 to 36 majority, young Americans say that Democrats, rather than Republicans, come closer to sharing their moral values, while 58 percent said they had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, and 38 percent said they had a favorable view of Republicans.

"The survey also found that 42 percent of young Americans thought it was likely or very likely that the nation would reinstate a military draft over the next few years — and two-thirds said they thought the Republican Party was more likely to do so. And 87 percent of respondents said they opposed a draft.

"But when it came to the war, young Americans were more optimistic about the outcome than was the population as whole. Fifty-one percent said the United States was very or somewhat likely to succeed in Iraq, compared with 45 percent among all adults. Contrary to conventional wisdom, younger Americans have historically been more likely than the population as a whole to be supportive of what a president is doing in a time of war, as they were in Korea and Vietnam, polls have shown."

As Far As Iraq Is Concerned, the Debate Is Over

The American media have finally thrown in the towel on the Iraq war debate. The Project for Excellence in Journalism or Journalism.org has found that media coverage of the subject has collapsed:

"News about the Iraq war last week also confirmed a recent pattern in the coverage. Given the significant U.S. military offensive and the announcement that 14 U.S. troops had died in a two-day period, events in Iraq constituted the second-biggest story. With a number of stories focused on care given to wounded veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, the impact of the war at home was also a top-10 story last week (eighth at 2%).

"At the same time, the Iraq policy debate—the Washington-based battle over war strategy—generated only 1% of last week’s coverage and failed to make the top-10 story list. Those findings are indicative of a trend in recent weeks in which coverage of the political debate over the war has diminished substantially.

"For the first three months of this year, PEJ found that the policy debate was the leading news subject by a large margin, accounting for 12% of all the coverage."

The group expects interest in Iraq policy to be dormant through the summer but surge again in September when US Commander, General Petraeus is scheduled to deliver his state-of-the-war report.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Pro-Abortion, Serial Divorcee Drag Queen

embraces Religious Fundamentalist Nutbar

10-Months for Dirty Steve Griles

Okay, a word about Steven Griles. He was a Bush appointee, serving as deputy-secretary, Department of the Interior from 2000-2004. What environmental credentials did Griles bring to the job? Well, he had been a highly-paid lobbyist for coal, oil and gas interests.

Never one to let conflicts of interest get in his way, Griles' record was called an "ethical quagmire" by an inspector-general.

Today Steve's karma came crashing down as he was sentenced to 10-months imprisonment on a felony conviction for lying to senate investigators about his dealings with Jailbird Jack Abramoff, former leader of the infamous K Street Gang.

The prosecution had asked for 5-months but the judge doubled it, saying, "Even now you continue to minimize and try to excuse your conduct."

Oh well, these days a criminal record is almost a badge of honour for a Bush Republican.

Jim Hightower Kicks Some O'Reilly Ass

Crazier Than a Cut Cat?

Ouch, that's gotta hurt! Ouch, ouch, ouch.


Jim Hightower weighed in on Bill O'Reilly today over the loudmouth's foaming outburst at a criticism of Fox News:

"What set him off was a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that O’Reilly’s network, Fox News, has been devoting twice as much time as other cable networks to the Anna Nicole Smith celebrity story, while spending much less time than other networks on Iraq, a story of real importance.

"This caused O’Reilly to have a double-barreled brain jerk. First, he blasted the other networks for covering the violence in Iraq, saying that they’re only doing it to embarrass the Bushites. 'All their reporting consists of is here’s another explosion,' O’Reilly declared. 'Bang. Here’s more people dead. Bang.'

"He then went loopy, asserting 'CNN and MSNBC are actually helping the terrorists by reporting useless explosions. Do you care if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No. It doesn’t mean anything.'

"Well, actually, Bill, I don’t think terrorists are setting off bombs just to get on CNN. I think they’re setting off bombs to kill people, including U.S. troops. That’s what we call “news.” It certainly does mean something to the families of the dead, to the soldiers who served with the dead, and to the progress (or lack thereof) of Bush’s war policy. It means something every freaking time it happens."

Isn't it fun being a witness to broadcast stupidity writ really, really large?

Dion Ranked Among World's Top Green Politicians

Enviro-website Grist.org has published what it considers the 15 most important "green politicians" in the world. Here's what they said about Stephane Dion, ranked number 10:

"Canada's other Dion, the recently elected leader of the Liberal Party, has pledged to unite the quest for a better environment, social justice, and economic growth into a holistic vision of sustainability. Called by one blogger "the environmental candidate for the non-environmentalist", Dion will be in the running to become prime minister of Canada when the nation holds its next election, expected sometime this year. He has proposed tax credits for energy efficiency and pledged to make a concerted effort to meet Kyoto Protocol goals; in fact, he loves Kyoto so much, he named his dog after it. No, really!"

See the whole list at http://www.grist.org/

When All Else Fails - Blame Osama

The former head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Christie Todd Whitman, appeared before a congressional hearing yesterday where she had to face accusations that she misled New Yorkers about the dangers of air pollution resulting from the 9/11 attacks. Caught red-handed, here's how she tried to duck and weave:

"There are indeed people to blame. They are the terrorists who attacked the United States, not the men and women at all levels of government who worked heroically to protect and defend this country."

"Was it wrong to try get the city back on its feet as quickly as possible in the safest way possible? Absolutely not... We weren't going to let the terrorists win."

NATO Shrugs Off Dead Afghan Civilians

Problem, what problem?

The deputy commander of both US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Brigadier Joseph Votel, says there's no need for any new procedures to cut down on civilian casualties.

He told Voice of America, ""No, there's no particularly new procedures that we are using right now. We think the procedures we have in place are good. They work. They help us minimize the effects on this."

Votel, naturally, blames the spate of civilian deaths not on his own side's excessive reliance on air strikes and artillery barrages against residential areas but on the Taliban.

John Sifton of Human Rights Watch says both sides are crossing the line. "The Taleban is committing violations of the Laws of War in almost everything they do," he said. "NATO and the United States, by contrast, is not setting out to violate the Laws of War across the board. However, they're failing to take precautions in a lot of cases, and may occasionally cross the line and violate the Laws of War themselves."

Endgame for Iraq

Foreign Policy magazine has published an interesting memo on how Iraq will end based on an actual memo prepared for the US government during the Vietnam war. The only changes are substitutions: Iraq in place of Vietnam; insurgents in place of communists; and Iran in place of the Soviet Union. It makes a chilling read:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3866&page=0

Britain's Permanent Underclass

Social mobility is worse in today's Britain than it was even in the 1950's.

A study by Britain's Sutton Trust finds that young people from poor homes are being condemned to a life of poverty as they are unable to get into a university or well-paid employment. The report follows on the heels of another report that found "white working class boys were becoming an unemployable underclass as they performed worse at school than any other racial group."

"Sir Peter Lampl, the chairman of the Sutton Trust, said that, despite 10 years of Labour government, the best schools remained "socially selective", with only middle-class children able to gain a place.

"He called for grammar schools to admit more children from deprived backgrounds and the return of a scheme - scrapped by Labour - to give poor pupils subsidised places at private schools."

Maybe They Would Make Good Priests

They're called "chimeras," human-animal hybrid embryos created in a laboratory. Britain will soon introduce a law allowing the creation of chimera with certain safeguards. One is a requirement that they be destroyed within two weeks of creation. Another is a prohibition on implanting chimera into a woman's body.

Britain's Roman Catholic Bishops are crying foul (or "fowl" perhaps) and have filed a submission arguing that the genetic mothers (egg donors) of chimera should have the right to raise them if they wish.

Chimera are created by injecting animal DNA into human embryos or vice versa. One purpose for the research is to determine if such creatures could be used to grow human tissue, perhaps even organs.

In their submission to the committee, they said: “At the very least, embryos with a preponderance of human genes should be assumed to be embryonic human beings, and should be treated accordingly.

“In particular, it should not be a crime to transfer them, or other human embryos, to the body of the woman providing the ovum, in cases where a human ovum has been used to create them.

“Such a woman is the genetic mother, or partial mother, of the embryo; should she have a change of heart and wish to carry her child to term, she should not be prevented from doing so.”

The World According to a Guy Named Newt

In an editorial in today's far right Washington Times, Newt Gingrich says what America needs now is not less Bush but more, much more.

"...the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, New Jersey, the JFK plot, the Algerian bombings, the Iranian nuclear program, the conflict in Lebanon and now the defeat in Gaza all point to the need for a war policy that is substantially bigger and more robust than Mr. Bush.

"As the forces of modernity are being ground up by terrorism, our political process is not producing a Churchill or Roosevelt to rally the democracies but instead embracing advocates of surrender withdrawal and defeat. As women are being oppressed, we remain silent. Faced with the weakness, vacillation and inarticulateness of the leaders of Israel and America, the people see the violence as senseless, the bloodshed as repugnant and the current strategies as too flawed to continue to invest in them."

Newt, predictably, has the solution. He begins by claiming that Hamas and Hezbollah must be utterly destroyed but notes that America will need a new strategy, doctrine and "techniques" to do it.

Second, he says, "... the indirect strategies of propping up corrupt dictatorships have to give way to direct people-to-people help, securing private-property rights and direct financial assistance so we can improve their families' lives and they can be empowered to defend their neighborhoods from evil men."

Next, Gingrich proposes scrapping the United Nations, "...the U.N. camp system of socialism with unearned anti-humanitarian charity has to be replaced with a totally new system of earned income and earned property rights to restore dignity and hope to every Palestinian."

Gingrich goes on to call for completely new schools for Palestinian children "dedicated to genuine education and to teaching human rights rather than jihad and hatred," and a general cleansing of mosques, along the lines of the de-Nazification programme in Germany in 1945. "The haters have to be defeated, disarmed and detained if the forces of peace and freedom are to win."

Newt warns that these steps are "only the beginning" but doesn't explain what would follow in the Gingrichian World Order. First, however, he'd better start tracking down those folks who don't find "bloodshed repugnant."

In case you're tempted to dismiss Newt Gingrich as yesterday's news, understand that he's waiting on the sidelines and watching to see if he should seek the Republican presidential nomination. This guy is serious.

Blair's Skeptics

Tony Blair hasn't been officially annointed Special Envoy to the Middle East but the unfinished formalities aren't preventing his skeptics from speaking out. Even the Times of London has some serious doubts:

"It is the haste with which Tony Blair has scripted his own sequel as the world’s envoy to the Middle East that gives the impression of self-absorption. The rush by his team to try to announce some kind of role by today, the last day of his premiership, seems designed to ease the sting of surrendering high office more than to solve the problems of the Middle East.

"It is not that the idea is ludicrous, if you take a long step around Blair’s role as one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, and his support of Israel’s military action in Lebanon. Many Arabs loathe him just for that, and in a region that sustains grudges so easily for hundreds of years, the grievances of the past decade are hardly going to be set aside. But Blair’s passion for tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beyond dispute.

"But the problem with any role for Blair is that it is impossible to define while the political route ahead remains so unclear, and that won’t be sorted out by a few hours of talks about what he is supposed to do. The speed with which Blair’s role has been written has left ambassadors and senior Foreign Office officials speechless in the past five days, gesturing with their canapés at garden parties to make up for an absence of words.

"The US-Israeli plan is now to pour resources into the West Bank, and to shore up Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, to make the contrast with Gaza as great as possible. But the hazards are huge. Abbas will not want to abandon the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza (nor to seem like a US-Israeli pawn). Any revival of the West Bank economy would depend on Israel relaxing control of Palestinian movement, as argued in a World Bank report last month that was highly critical of Israeli policy. Yet Israel can say that this would expose it to insupportable security threats; Hamas has a significant presence on the West Bank and it is not going away."

It remains to be seen whether Blair will have any credibility left in the Middle East after Afghanistan and Iraq. He starts out with the reputation of being George Bush's poodle. If he fails to engage Hamas constructively, he'll likely be written off as Washington's stooge.

George w. Baird on Kyoto

The Harpies are still working out of the Bush playbook. They especially like the part of say one thing and then do whatever the hell suits you.

Now that the Kyoto bill has been passed into law, the Tories are doing just that. They say they won't ignore their obligations under the law, they just won't honour them in any meaningful way. Isn't that cute?

Here's how our EnviroMin Baird put it, "We'll respect and won't be dismissive of an act that Parliament passed, we'll file the papers accordingly." They're going to file papers. That's it. Instead of introducing enabling legislation to effect the law's objectives, Harpo is going to put the Kyoto issue in the dustbin.

Is this really the issue on which Harpo wants to fight the next election? I don't know, what do the polls say?

Flawed Logic

In the campaign to fight global warming, Asia is becoming a real troublespot.

Asian nations, and particularly China and India, are undergoing an industrial metamorphosis as once-Western multinationals pack up shop and relocate to their part of the world in search of cheap labour and relaxed or non-existant regulation. To Asians it's seen as a long-overdue, economic miracle and one they're not keen on seeing restrained.

That's why several Asian nations are becoming quite vocal about the West's fledgling movement to arrest global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. They don't like what they see coming and they're waging their own pre-emptive strikes.

Asian business and government leaders have accused rich countries of hypocrisy, saying they run polluting industries with cheap labour in China and then blame the country for worsening climate change.

Malaysia's deputy finance minister, Nor Mohamed Yakcop, is the latest to weigh in, accusing the West of "green imperialism." The thinking goes that Western countries are hypocritical because they run polluting industries with cheap labour in Asia and then blame the Asian countries for worsening global warming.

The flaw in this logic is that it assumes Western states "run" the multinationals. In reality, we stopped running them when we adopted the mantra of free trade, the free flow of capital unfettered by tariffs. By surrendering most of our ability to control access to our markets, we surrendered a great deal of our sovereignty to globalization and the multinationals.

The Asians do have a perfectly legitimate claim that, per capita, our emissions are already several times higher than theirs but that's an argument that can only be entertained in a more perfect world in better circumstances.

We need to come up with a means of compelling Asian co-operation in the GHG battle and we have one very powerful tool at our disposal - access to our markets. The wealth that is accruing to Asia from their industrial revolution is in no small part dependent on the ability of the multinationals to sell their manufactured goods in our market. Restrict those markets and Asia's economic miracle wilts.

Just Who Are We Working For?

The fall of the Taliban seemed to happen so fast that most people never got to know the other guys, our allies - the Northern Alliance. When I ask people today they have no idea what this group, whose leaders have insinuated themselves into the top ranks of the Karzai government, really did beyond battling the Taliban.

It strikes me that we ought to know, given that we're asking our soldiers to give their lives to support a government made up of these thugs. And I can't think of a better way to shed light on them than to reproduce the following press backgrounder from Human Rights Watch, October, 2001:


What Is the United Front/Northern Alliance?

In 1996, when the Taliban captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, the groups opposed to the Taliban formed an alliance called the National Islamic United Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, commonly known as the United Front. The United Front supports the government ousted by the Taliban, the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA). The president of the ousted government, Burhanuddin Rabbani, remains the president of the ISA and is the titular head of the United Front. For the past year his headquarters have been in the northern Afghan town of Faizabad. The real power was, until his assassination in September 2001, the United Front's military leader, Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was also the ISA's minister of defense. The precise membership of the United Front has varied from time to time, but includes:

Jamiat-i Islami-yi Afghanistan (hereinafter known as Jamiat-i Islami). Jamiat-i Islami was one of the original Islamist parties in Afghanistan, established in the 1970s by students at Kabul University where its leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was a lecturer at the Islamic Law Faculty. Although Rabbani remains the official head of Jamiat-i Islami, the most powerful figure within the party was Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud's forces have received significant military and other support from Iran and Russia, in particular.

Hizb-i Wahdat-i Islami-yi Afghanistan (Islamic Unity Party of Afghanistan, hereinafter known as Hizb-i Wahdat). The principal Shi'a party in Afghanistan with support mainly among the Hazara ethnic community, Hizb-i Wahdat was originally formed by Abdul Ali Mazari in order to unite eight Shi'a parties in the run-up to the anticipated collapse of the communist government. Its current leader is Muhammad Karim Khalili.

Junbish-i Milli-yi Islami-yi Afghanistan (National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan, hereinafter known as Junbish). Junbish brought together northern, mostly ethnic Uzbek, former militias of the communist regime who mutinied against President Najibullah in early 1992. Its founder and principal leader was Abdul Rashid Dostum, who rose from security guard to leader of Najibullah's most powerful militia. One of Dostum's principal deputies was Abdel Malik Pahlawan.

Harakat-i Islami-yi Afghanistan (Islamic Movement of Afghanistan). This is a Shi'a party that never joined Hizb-i Wahdat, led by Ayatollah Muhammad Asif Muhsini, and which was allied with Jamiat-i Islami in 1993-1995. Its leadership is mostly non-Hazara Shi'a. Its most prominent commander is General Anwari. The group has received support from Iran.

Ittihad-i Islami Bara-yi Azadi Afghanistan (Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan). This party is headed by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. During the war against the Soviet occupation, Sayyaf obtained considerable assistance from Saudi Arabia. Arab volunteers supported by Saudi entrepreneurs fought with Sayyaf's forces.

The United Front's Human Rights Record

Throughout the civil war in Afghanistan, the major factions on all sides have repeatedly committed serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, including killings, indiscriminate aerial bombardment and shelling, direct attacks on civilians, summary executions, rape, persecution on the basis of religion or ethnicity, the recruitment and use of children as soldiers, and the use of antipersonnel landmines. Many of these violations can be shown to have been "widespread or systematic," a criterion of crimes against humanity. Although committed in an internal armed conflict, violations involving indiscriminate attacks or direct attacks on civilians are increasingly being recognized internationally as amounting to war crimes.

Abuses committed by factions belonging to the United Front have been well documented. Many of the violations of international humanitarian law committed by the United Front forces described below date from 1996-1998 when they controlled most of the north and were within artillery range of Kabul. Since then, what remains of the United Front forces have been pushed back into defensive positions in home territories in northeastern and central Afghanistan following a series of military setbacks. There have nevertheless been reports of abuses in areas held temporarily by United Front factions, including summary executions, burning of houses, and looting, principally targeting ethnic Pashtuns and others suspected of supporting the Taliban. Children, including those under the age of fifteen, have been recruited as soldiers and used to fight against Taliban forces. The various parties that comprise the United Front also amassed a deplorable record of attacks on civilians between the fall of the Najibullah regime in 1992 and the Taliban's capture of Kabul in 1996.

Violations of international humanitarian law committed by United Front factions include:
Late 1999 - early 2000: Internally displaced persons who fled from villages in and around Sangcharak district recounted summary executions, burning of houses, and widespread looting during the four months that the area was held by the United Front. Several of the executions were reportedly carried out in front of members of the victims' families. Those targeted in the attacks were largely ethnic Pashtuns and, in some cases, Tajiks.

September 20-21, 1998: Several volleys of rockets were fired at the northern part of Kabul, with one hitting a crowded night market. Estimates of the number of people killed ranged from seventy-six to 180. The attacks were generally believed to have been carried out by Massoud's forces, who were then stationed about twenty-five miles north of Kabul. A spokesperson for United Front commander Ahmad Shah Massoud denied targeting civilians. In a September 23, 1998, press statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross described the attacks as indiscriminate and the deadliest that the city had seen in three years.

Late May 1997: Some 3,000 captured Taliban soldiers were summarily executed in and around Mazar-i Sharif by Junbish forces under the command of Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan. The killings followed Malik's withdrawal from a brief alliance with the Taliban and the capture of the Taliban forces who were trapped in the city. Some of the Taliban troops were taken to the desert and shot, while others were thrown down wells and then blown up with grenades.

January 5, 1997: Junbish planes dropped cluster munitions on residential areas of Kabul. Several civilians were killed and others wounded in the indiscriminate air raid, which also involved the use of conventional bombs.

March 1995: Forces of the faction operating under Commander Massoud, the Jamiat-i Islami, were responsible for rape and looting after they captured Kabul's predominantly Hazara neighborhood of Karte Seh from other factions. According to the U.S. State Department's 1996 report on human rights practices in 1995, "Massood's troops went on a rampage, systematically looting whole streets and raping women."

On the night of February 11, 1993 Jamiat-i Islami forces and those of another faction, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf's Ittihad-i Islami, conducted a raid in West Kabul, killing and "disappearing" ethnic Hazara civilians, and committing widespread rape. Estimates of those killed range from about seventy to more than one hundred.

In addition, the parties that constitute the United Front have committed other serious violations of internationally recognized human rights. In the years before the Taliban took control of most of Afghanistan, these parties had divided much of the country among themselves while battling for control of Kabul. In 1994 alone, an estimated 25,000 were killed in Kabul, most of them civilians killed in rocket and artillery attacks. One-third of the city was reduced to rubble, and much of the remainder sustained serious damage. There was virtually no rule of law in any of the areas under the factions' control. In Kabul, Jamiat-i Islami, Ittihad, and Hizb-i Wahdat forces all engaged in rape, summary executions, arbitrary arrest, torture, and "disappearances." In Bamiyan, Hizb-i Wahdat commanders routinely tortured detainees for extortion purposes.

So, now that you know, is it any wonder that the new Afghan parliament's most significant legislative accomplishment to date has been to grant themselves amnesty for all of this?

This is what we're fighting for in Afghanistan and, on balance, it ain't much.

A GOP Coup to Oust Cheney?

Fred Thompson for Vice President? It's possible.

There's a growing movement led by Senator John Warner of Virginia, among others, to get Cheney out of the White House as soon as possible. For some reason, many Repugs now consider Cheney "toxic."

The thinking is to oust Cheney and install someone who has a chance to become president in 2008. It's not believed that Guiliani, McCain or Romney would want to be associated with Bush and the baggage he carries including Iraq. The Washington Post claims Thompson might just be the guy to pull this off:

"...Everybody loves Fred. He has the healing qualities of Gerald Ford and the movie-star appeal of Ronald Reagan. He is relatively moderate on social issues. He has a reputation as a peacemaker and a compromiser. And he has a good sense of humor.

"He could be just the partner to bring out Bush's better nature -- or at least be a sensible voice of reason. I could easily imagine him telling the president, "For God's sake, do not push that button!" -- a command I have a hard time hearing Cheney give.

"Not only that, Thompson would give the Republicans a platform for running for the presidency -- and the president a way out of Iraq without looking like he's backing down. Bush would be left in better shape on the war and be able to concentrate on AIDS and the environment in hopes of salvaging his legacy."

If there is a palace coup it's expected to take place this summer when Cheney has to undergo surgery to replace the batteries in his pacemaker.

Actually, replacing Cheney with Thompson might have another beneficial side effect - it could build a fire under the backsides of the Democrats in congress to actually do something. They've been acting an awful lot like a party that's waiting for the existing regime to enable them to win by default. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like a certain party up here.

Say It Ain't So

In the 60's, US soldiers in Vietnam often showed their disdain for the military and the war by decorating and altering their uniforms to their liking and sometimes even using weaponry as a sort of fashion accessory. Thus was born the Rambo image.

In the course of the Afghan and Iraq war, American soldiers have played it straight - regulation gear, properly worn. That's why this picture in today's New York Times struck me like a blast from the past:

There you have it. Bandana, no helmet, sleeveless tunic, tatoo, grenade bandolier, the whole deal. The soldier was involved with a surge mission in Baquba, Iraq.

No Takers For America's Military in Africa

Concerned about the expansion of Chinese influence into Africa, the US Military has been keen on establishing an Africa Command or AfriCom. The trouble is, the Pentagon can't find an African country that will have them.

A US delegation has returned home after knocking on the doors of Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Djibouti and with the African Union (AU) and finding nobody home anywhere. From The Guardian:

"The Libyan and Algerian governments reportedly told Mr Henry this month that they would play no part in hosting Africom. Despite recently improved relations with the US, both said they would urge their neighbours not to do so, either, due to fears of future American intervention. Even Morocco, considered Washington's closest north African ally, indicated it did not welcome a permanent military presence on its soil.

"'We've got a big image problem down there,' a state department official admitted. 'Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don't trust the US.'

"Another African worry was that any US facilities could become targets for terrorists, the official said. Dangled US economic incentives, including the prospect of hundreds of local jobs, had not proven persuasive."

They don't trust the US? What could they be thinking?

Outsourcing the Elderly

Norway is looking for ways to save money on caring for the country's elderly and one way it's found is to send the oldsters to sunny, balmy Spain.

Elderly Norwegians can wind up languishing in the Costa Blanca for from six weeks to forever. All that's needed is a doctor's note. Bizarre as this sounds this benefit works out very well for Norway. From The Guardian:

"In a new twist on care for the elderly, thousands of Norwegians are relaxing in the Spanish sun and taking health cures at a growing number of geriatric and rehabilitation centres run by Norwegian municipalities and staffed almost entirely by Norwegians in the Alicante region.

"'Instead of building a new treatment centre in Oslo, local authorities can just build one in southern Spain,' said Lotte Tollefsen, a spokeswoman at the Norwegian embassy in Madrid. 'It is easy to find qualified medical personnel and the climate is very beneficial to the patients. Compared to the Norwegian winters, it's a soothing balm.'

"Salaries, land prices and ordinary living expenses are also considerably lower in Alicante than in Norway, one of the most expensive countries in the world. Many doctors and nurses are even willing to accept lower pay in exchange for the chance to work for a year or two in sunny Spain."

Tony Blair New Mideast Envoy

Two days before he's officially out of work, British prime minister Tony Blair has been appointed a special envoy responsible for getting the Palestinians ready to negotiate with Israel.

Ah, there's the rub. Will Blair, who has always buckled to US pressure, engage Fatah, America's choice? If he does he will be turning his back on the democratically-elected Hamas. the landslide choice of the Palestinian people.

Blair will be representing the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

LA Drought

Southern California is in for a hot, parched summer. Residents are facing a major drought in the Los Angeles area. In the year ending June 30, LA has seen 3.2" or just 8.15 cm. of rain. That's for a whole year. A couple of thousand miles to the north, we get that much in a day.

The Los Angeles Times calls it the "perfect drought" when Mother Nature runs headlong into human nature:

"According to the National Drought Mitigation Centre, southern California faces "extreme drought" this year, with no rain forecast before September. One climatologist referred to the temperatures in Los Angeles as "Death Valley numbers".

"The Sierra Nevada mountains, which typically provide Los Angeles with 50% of its water, have provided just 20% of their normal volume this year, and the snowpack is at its lowest for 20 years. Pumping from an aquifer in the San Fernando Valley was stopped this month because it was contaminated with chromium 6.

"While the waters dry up, demand for the scarce resource increases. Not only has southern California seen a growth in its population of two-to-four times the national average in the past 50 years, but neighbouring states such as Nevada and Arizona are also experiencing population booms. And they all claim water from the same source, the Colorado River."

Is it global warming? That certainly seems to be one cause but it joins the line of over-population and excessive reliance on regional groundwater supplies. The American southwest is learning what other parts of the US, China, Africa and India are learning - you can't take groundwater at more than its "recharge" rate without running dry often when you need water most.

Whatever you do, please don't get smug about this. Canada may appear to have limitless sources of freshwater but appearances can be misleading. We don't get much more rain than a many other places and it's rainfall, not the number of lakes and rivers, that is the key. We can drain those lakes quickly with a canal system but it'll take a long time for them to fill up again. That's one inconvenient truth that those who want us to export our water would rather not discuss.

Stephen Harper's Non-Stop Photo Op

NatPo's John Ivison wrote an illuminating piece on Stephen Harper suggesting that, for Harpo, style trumps substance.

"...while Stephen Harper's Conservatives have proven adept at crafting a long-term strategy, they have looked embarrassingly inept when dealing with events they don't control.

"Mr. Harper has redefined how politics in Canada is practised by adopting the permanent campaign model elevated to an art form by former U.S. president Bill Clinton -- a strategy that blurs the lines between campaigning and governing.

"In his first 17 months as Prime Minister, Mr. Harper racked up 153 public events, 85 of them outside Ottawa, according to his Web site. This works out to nine events a month, more than half of which were on the road.

"By comparison, Paul Martin held 143 events in two years (outside of the 2004 election campaign), of which 39 were out of town. This breaks down to six events a month, fewer than two of which were outside the national capital region.

"Conservatives have been much more adept than their rivals at using marketing techniques to evoke feelings, both positive and negative. They have highlighted Liberal failures, used national symbols such as hockey and micro-targeted swing voters with policies and tax cuts.

"The success of this strategy explains why the Conservatives were nudging 40% support in late March. Yet their numbers have nose-dived since then, and one recent poll had them trailing the Liberals. The most obvious reason has been the inability of Mr. Harper and his immediate circle in the Prime Minister's Office to react to events beyond their control.

"The plan in crisis situations has been to avoid the media. One MP said the only advice the Prime Minister's communications director, Sandra Buckler, was able to offer to caucus was the location of the back door.

"A run of bad headlines has turned the Conservatives' biggest asset -- their leader -- into a liability. In recent weeks, Mr. Harper has negated much of the natural advantage of governing by taking combative positions, such as his dare to the provinces to sue the federal government over the Atlantic Accords.

"A number of Conservatives say Mr. Harper's aggressiveness is a cover for fundamental insecurity. 'He's the nerd, the chess player, who in his own mind is smarter than the other kids. He's got a chip on his shoulder that he and the kernel of people around him are against the world and he gets angry very easily,' said one source.

"This trait wasn't a problem when he was leader of the Opposition, a job that demanded a vitriol Mr. Harper did not need to contrive. But no prime minister can control all the moving pieces of government and when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, he is the one who has to defend the position. Mr. Harper's instincts are not defensive -- he prefers to get his retaliation in first -- with the result that television news clips have regularly shown him looking like an irate hockey coach protesting an unjust penalty."

The Oil That Binds Us

Only a small minority of Americans approve of the Iraq War. Most want it ended and US troops brought home to safety. The Repugs are terrified of the prospect of having to fight an election on the war.

According to the LA Times, Bush administration officials such as Gates and Khalilzad are hinting that a compromise is in the works. Having forced the Democratic congress to back down once, the Bushies apparently realize that this is one battle they just can't keep winning. And so, some sort of deal is being thrown together, a political peace offering.

Will the US leave Iraq? Don't bet on it. The Bush regime may deny that oil was behind their decision to invade but oil certainly is a major factor, perhaps the major factor that will force at least some US military presence to soldier on. It may be smaller than the 150-thousand strong force deployed today (it will have to be) but it will stay on.

It's all about oil or, rather, the prospect of the Middle East's oil wealth falling into Shiite control. If you take Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, you have the lion's share of Arab oil. Iraq is obviously going to be dominated by Shia just as Iran has always been. Most folks don't know it but Saudi Arabia's key oilfields are in areas where that country's Shiite majority dominate and they're becoming restless. The prospect of a Shia bloc with its hand on the tap of Middle Eastern oil is more than Washington could bear.

It is Iraq's very instability that has Washington shoving and pushing, threatening and cajoling the Baghdad government to approve its draft oil law. Ostensibly it's about establishing an equitable arrangement for distribution of oil wealth among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. That's the window-dressing. The real significance of the law is that it would vest control of much of Iraq's oil wealth in foreign, i.e. American, companies. Once American companies have long-term rights to develop, produce and control Iraqi oil, the US government has rights it can protect and enforce, militarily if need be.

And that's why the United States won't be leaving Iraq anytime soon.

Go and Surge No More

The answer to Iraq's horrific violence cannot be

an illusory military surge that aims

to bolster the existing political structure

and treats the dominant parties as partners.

- International Crisis Group

In its latest report, the influential International Crisis Group warns that Iraq is on the brink of collapse and that, if the US and Britain want to avoid that, they'll have to stop backing the same Shia bosses that rule the government in Baghdad.

"Far from building a new state," their Iraqi partners "are tirelessly working to tear it down," warns the ICG.

The think tank criticizes the US/UK coalition's "surge mentality" as counterproductive and points to Basra where British forces first gave it a go. From The Guardian:

"Operation Sinbad was a 'superficial and fleeting' success, and ended with British troops being driven off the streets in what was seen as an ignominious defeat by the city's militias, now more powerful and unconstrained than before. Some British data about its achievements, particularly about improved police performance, 'defies credibility', the group notes.

"The key failure in Basra, argues the report, has been the inability to establish legitimate government to redistribute resources, impose respect for the rule of law and ensure peaceful transition at the local level - a lesson it says has to be learnt across Iraq as a whole.

"'Basra's political arena remains in the hands of actors engaged in bloody competition for resources, undermining what is left of governorate institutions and coercively enforcing their rule. The local population has no choice but to seek protection from one of the dominant camps. Periods of stability do not reflect greater governing authority so much as they do a momentary - and fragile - balance of interests or of terror between rival militias.'

"'Should other causes of strife - sectarian violence and the fight against coalition forces - recede, the concern must still be that Basra's fate will be replicated throughout the country on a larger, more chaotic and more dangerous scale. The lessons are clear. Iraq's violence is multifaceted, and sectarianism is only one of its sources. It follows that the country's division along supposedly inherent and homogeneous confessional and ethnic lines is not an answer. It follows, too, that rebuilding the state, tackling militias and imposing the rule of law cannot be done without confronting the parties that currently dominate the political process and forging a new and far more inclusive political compact.'"

From a purely Iraqi perspective it's hard to disagree with the ICG's take on these surges. What they don't mention, however, is that the current surge is as much about Washington politics as Iraqi security. The "surge" was pitched to George w. Bush by the neo-cons such as Kagan as a way of rescuing his legacy and it now must be played out so that the US president can craft a scenario in which he can blame the Maliki government for failure and then withdraw US forces from an "undeserving" Baghdad government. It's all political theatre but, then, losing a war of this strategic magnitude is bound to be.

Is "The Mission" Dead?

Has Stephen "Rambo" Harper truly had a change of heart over Canada's mission to Afghanistan? He recently said he didn't want to extend our commitment to Kandahar past 2009 without a consensus in parliament and the country.

So what made Harpo stop banging his war drum and has he really decided that Canada has outstayed the course?

Thomas Walkom, writing in the Toronto Star, says "the mission" is all but dead:

"The reasons are twofold and intertwined. First, NATO's war against Afghan insurgents is not succeeding. Second, there is not enough political support for that war here at home.

"This does not mean Canada will be out of Afghanistan altogether. The Liberals – and even the NDP in some of its statements– say Canada should continue to play an undefined role there. Harper too made reference to that on Friday.

"But whatever that role is, it won't be the current one. Canadian troops won't be undertaking search and destroy combat missions in Kandahar. They probably won't be in Kandahar at all."

What happened? For starters, Canada suffered a chronic failure of leadership. De Hoop Scheffer, NATO's Secretary General, turned out to be a bag of stale wind; Harpo failed to persuade Canadians that Afghanistan was remotely worth it; and Generalissimo Rick Hillier acted like an encyclopedia salesman, a pitchman who made grand promises and utterly failed to deliver.

Under NATO's protection, the Karzai government steadily weakened and the Taliban grew steadily stronger. With our help Karzai had no choice but to reach out to the Taliban for a deal and even the Kabul parliament had to go along.

Sure we built some roads and a number of schools but that was still little more than window dressing for a people on the brink of starvation. The urban populations of Kabul and Kandahar city were better off, but only so long as the barbarians were kept from the gate. The countryside became the fiefdom of insurgents, terrorists, drug lords and common criminals. The narco-economy flourishes and we have utterly failed to come up with an alternative.

This whole, sorry business went wrong from the start, by which I mean the moment at which the Northern Alliance sent the Taliban and al-Qaeda running for the hills. The Bush regime was so unsophisticated and indifferent as to blithely swallow the "my enemy's enemy" nonsense. The reality was that we stepped into a gang war and helped one bunch of murderous thugs put the boots to their rival gang of murderous religious zealots.

Then we installed Hamid Karzai as boss because we knew he was someone we could work with but we failed to vet the people who would shortly become his lieutenants, the real power in the Karzai government. We told him we didn't want many of these in his government but completely failed to give him the support he needed to hold them at bay. Not surprisingly the warlords and criminals wasted no time in installing themselves in positions of power in the military and security services.

If you don't believe this, here's some proof. One of Karzai's long running complaints has been that NATO and US forces don't co-ordinate with their Afghan counterparts before running operations. In other words, we don't pre-clear our activities with the Afghans. Why do you think that is? Could it be because we know they're thoroughly infiltrated, hopelessly corrupt and little more than a conduit to the bad guys? We don't trust them! We have enough problems with ambushes already.

We went over there with token forces to wage a counter-insurgency war. Even NATO officials have admitted the job requires hundreds of thousands of soldiers, troops that don't exist. That leaves us hunkered down in garrisons and fortified outposts from which we run patrols and occasional search and destroy missions (think France in Indo-China). That, in turn, yields control of the countryside to the insurgents and leaves the villagers unprotected. Worst of all, our lack of numbers leaves us dependent on massive firepower in the form of air strikes and artillery barrages that far too often winds up killing innocent civilians. In other words, "the mission" is tailor-made to the needs of the Taliban. Oh sure we may whack a few of them every now and then but not enough to make an appreciable dent in their capabilities and, worse, we often cause as much, perhaps even more damage to the very government we're supposed to be defending. We don't have these guys on the run. They're bringing the fight to us.

Then there was genuinely awful military leadership from our very own macho-man, Rick Hillier. Remember that he pitched the Kandahar mission on the basis of an opponent he described as "a few dozen ...scumbags." That was the enemy for which he crafted a 2,500-strong force. Since then he's been on cruise control but never passing up a photo op.

Now we're facing not Hillier's "few dozen" but several hundred insurgents who come and go pretty much as they please, who control large parts of "our" Kandahar province and who have seized the initiative. When night time comes, we get our heads down and wait for the dawn. The telling part is that we're still trying to do the job with the same size force (although with a few tanks that aren't particularly suited to fighting a guerrilla war anyway).

If General Hillier supports the troops, why hasn't he been clamouring for an additional 15- 20,000 soldiers? Modern military thinking holds we'd need that number to actually control the 55,000 sq. km. Kandahar province and provide genuine security to its people. Why hasn't he been raising proper hell about the predicament we've dropped our soldiers into? It's not as though he hasn't had ample opportunity to speak out.

No, like Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Pace and Harper and O'Connor, Hillier has been stuck in "stay the course" gear, unable to shift into second or even reverse. Meanwhile Karzai is in decline while the Taliban ascends.

Yet another key failure has been our unwillingness or inability to deal with Afghanistan's narco-economy. We have had to let this flourish even as we knew the opium wealth was filling the Taliban's coffers to help them wage the war against us and the Kabul government.

You may have played Whack-A-Mole, a carnival game in which the player uses a mallet to try to hit mole-like targets that pop up at random from various holes on the board. The object is to whack them all. We're playing Whack-A-Mole in Afghanistan but our version is slightly different. We're only trying to hit one mole out of four. We aim at the Taliban moles but leave untouched the Narco moles and the Warlord moles and the Criminal moles. If you're only swinging at 25% of the targets it's mighty hard to win, eh?

So, the smart money seems to predict that Canada will bail out of Kandahar with the mandate lapses in 2009 and seek safer turf, presumably in the north. How much longer the Afghan north will remain safer is unclear. Let's face it. The warlords and narco-barons and criminals that have ensconced themselves in the Karzai government are there for what they can get out of it. If Karzai gets much weaker, how long before they jump ship and the democracy project is right back to square one, the country back in the direct rule of the warlords?

At the end of the day we're left with "support the troops." Just what does that mean? Is it putting a little plastic ribbon on the trunk lid of my car? I suppose but that really doesn't accomplish much. How about NATO supporting the troops by all those member states that have been dodging "the mission" taking their turn in the cauldron? If they're not (and they aren't) then it's facile to claim that NATO itself is supporting the troops. How about our politicians and our generals supporting the troops by demanding the necessary reforms, resources and commitment to make a lasting difference? They're not and so it's ingenuous to say they're supporting the troops. Just who, then, is supporting the troops? I don't know. Tell me.

Karzai Slams NATO

He's had it. With every civilian bombed or shelled into oblivion by NATO air strikes and artillery, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's government gets further undermined. Now, he says, NATO has killed up to 90-Afghan civilians in just the past ten days.

Karzai told reporters about the deaths of 52-Afghans in a NATO artillery barrage:

"In Chora, NATO, coalition forces fired artillery on Chora from Tirin Kot in which according to our latest information ... 52 of our countrymen were martyred," Karzai said, speaking at his palace in the capital.

The president also referred to strikes by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the southern province of Helmand early Friday that police said killed 25 people, including nine women and three young children.

The president said his repeated calls on the ISAF and US-led coalition to coordinate their operations with Afghan security forces to avoid hurting civilians had gone unheeded."From now onwards they have to work the way we ask them to work here. That's the line," he said.

This was happening because of "the extreme use of force, the disproportionate use of force to a situation and the lack of coordination with the Afghan government," Karzai said."You don't fight a terrorist by firing a field gun 37 kilometres (23 miles) away into a target. That's definitely, surely bound to cause civilian casualties," he said.

"...Afghan life is not cheap and it should not be treated as such," he said, reflecting a feeling among many ordinary Afghans who find the foreign forces arrogant and culturally insensitive.

Hey Toronto - Here's An Idea

The City of Boston is in the process of setting up a system that could be just the thing for Toronto. It's a gunshot detection system that's designed to curb shootings. From the Boston Globe:

"Mayor Thomas M. Menino touted the crime- fighting capabilities of the acoustic sensors that can pinpoint the location of gunfire within 30 feet of its origin and dispatch police to shooting scenes in less than 10 seconds.

"We need more tools in our arsenal to track shootings and have police on the scene within seconds," the mayor said at the time. "Delays always give criminals a chance to leave the scene."

Boston hasn't got the system up and running yet due to contract squabbles with the manufacturer, Shotspotter Inc. The technology is already in use in several US cities including Washington, D.C. The US Army has also bought fixed and mobile versions of the technology.

"The city first began looking at the technology more than a year ago, when Councilor Rob Consalvo asked the mayor and police officials to look at ShotSpotter, which was credited with a 31 percent reduction in violent crime in North Charleston, S.C., and with helping police in Gary, Ind., to catch shooting suspects with guns still in their hands."

A Dubious Secretary-General for NATO

It was all an unfortunate accident. That's the line of bullshit being spewed by NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to explain away last night's NATO airstrike that slaughtered 25-Afghan civilians including three babies and nine women.

“If these things happen, they are mistakes, it’s never intentional,” he explained.

“From our point of view, a civilian gets killed and it’s an error,” he said. “But just recall that last week the Taliban killed 35 policemen and civilians in Kabul and they continue to do this. They continue to blow bombs off in their cities with indiscriminate actions. They don’t care who gets killed.”

Let's see, what was the accident anyway? Were these houses targeted by accident? No. Is it an accident that people sleep in their houses at night? I don't think so. Did we hit the wrong targets? No, we got the houses we were aiming to take out.

Obviously there was no accident, none whatsoever. We, that being NATO, called in an airstrike on two houses in a village. Past experience, if nothing else, has shown us that when we target villages we usually manage to kill innocent civilians.

The inevitable consequence of bombing village houses in the dark of night is to kill those inside. We are all deemed to intend the logical consequences of our acts. Therefore NATO intended to kill everyone inside those houses knowing there was a good chance they would kill innocents.

I'm not going to get into the laws of war here or the duty to safeguard the lives of civilians but the very legality of targetting residences for precision air strikes is questionable at best.

"From our point of view, a civilian gets killed and its an error." Damn right that's his point of view. They're dead, it's an error, forget about it. Yeah, but his point of view, NATO's point of view on this sort of attack is not good enough, not nearly good enough. It was an error but a very intentional one.

If this is the attitude of NATO's top dog, there's no reason to believe these killings won't just go on.

How Not To Spread Democracy

The following passages have been excerpted from a speech delivered by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group, to Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Conference on Democracy in Contemporary Global Politics entitled "Hypocrisy, Democracy, War and Peace."

Evans describes some of the many flaws in our Western approach to spreading democracy, particularly hypocrisy:

"...what people most associate with politicians as a class, and most hate about them as a result, is hypocrisy, and all the familiar variations on that basic theme: double-standards, unprincipled inconsistency, saying one thing and doing another.

Hypocrisy and Democracy

"There are quite a few things we've learned about democracy promotion over the last few years, and most of them have emerged pretty clearly in course of discussion at this conference, so I will not labour too long over familiar ground.

"First, it is obvious now to just about everyone that democracy – or at least liberal democracy, the only kind that means anything – is about much more than holding elections. Protection of human rights, especially minority rights and those related to freedom of expression, and respect for the rule of law, are indispensable concomitants.

"Secondly, it is rather obvious now to everyone, except perhaps those most capable of doing it, that bombing for democracy – trying to deliver it on the tip of precision guided missiles, as my Crisis Group colleague Chris Patten puts it – is not, on the whole, a very good idea.

"Thirdly, and maybe not so obviously, democracy promotion can be rather bad news for democrats. I am thinking in particular of the cries of anguish we have been hearing recently from civil society and human rights activists in Iran, who have – following the US announcement that large dollops of democracy funding will be headed their way – been subjected to a rapid increase in state repression. ...at the very least we should be asking first those in whose interests we are supposed to be acting. Fighting for our principles to the last drop of someone else's blood is never very edifying.

"The fourth big thing we should have learned about democracy promotion, is that inconsistency is totally counterproductive: it is wholly damaging to the cause to advocate the case for democracy only when you are sure the that democratic process will produce an outcome you like.

"It has not been a pretty sight in this respect to watch the almost universal Western disavowal of Hamas after it won the Palestinian election that the West had so enthusiastically supported. An International Crisis Group report shortly after that election argued strongly that the international community needed to focus on encouraging Hamas to govern responsibly, not to force it out of government or make the government unworkable by imposing conditions that nobody believed could be immediately met, and we summarised the Hamas response as we found it as 'let us govern or watch us fight'.

"Another less than edifying experience has been the constant wriggling of Western, and in particular U.S. policymakers, in the face of Pervez Musharaff's continuing authoritarian rule in Pakistan, and in particular the contempt that continues to be expressed by so many of them – more veiled in public, but often quite open in private – toward the democratic parties as they struggle, with signs of growing popular and elite support, to recover ground.

"Of course we have to face the prospect in the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, that if full electoral democracy is introduced there is a prospect that Islamists will be elected – and a risk that cannot be ignored that the first such democratic election might be the last: Hitler was after all democratically elected. But it is absolutely critical to recognize that 'Islamism' or Islamic activism is not a single-stranded phenomenon, and that it is only a small minority of Islamists – which are in turn only a minority of Muslims – that would even be tempted to go down this absolutist path. "

The complete text of the speech can be found here:

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4906&l=1

Stop Killing Civilians, Damn It!

Has NATO completely lost its senses in Afghanistan or is it that its commanders and officers just don't give a shit about innocent Afghans any more?

NINE WOMEN, THREE BABIES and an ELDERLY MULLAH were among 25-villagers wiped out this morning in a NATO airstrike on an Afghan village. And, in case you're skeptical, that's the report from the Afghan police chief in Helmand province.

Standard pattern. An inconclusive firefight between Taliban guerrillas and NATO forces. The Taliban fall back into a village. NATO jets arrive and bomb the hell out of the place. Victory - dead villagers everywhere! And let's face it, the way NATO is going there's a good chance those babies would have grown up to become insurgents anyway, eh? And those women? Probably just breeders churning out more Taliban, eh? We sure showed those villagers, didn't we?

NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Mike Smith reported while an unknown number of innocents may have lost their lives, the fault for that was entirely the enemy’s: “In choosing to conduct such attacks in this location at this time, the risk to civilians was probably deliberate. It is this irresponsible action that may have led to casualties.”

For the record, Smith claims we killed 30-insurgents. Let's see - 25 dead villagers, five relatives for each vowing revenge on NATO, let's just round it off at an even hundred new recruits for the other guys.

No Colonel Smith, you cretin, the risk to civilians arose when NATO, that's our sided butthead, decided to greet the villagers with a display of aerial bombardment.

Why do we keep doing this? The Afghan president has begged us to stop. The country's parliament has demanded that we stop. The Afghan people are outraged by it and take to the streets in fury over it. They're coming to hate us for it. The only people who seem to want to do this are us - and, of course, the Taliban. They absolutely love it when they can goad us into doing something this insanely stupid. We're playing straight into their hands with every bomb and every dead kid.

This is disgusting and it's happening again and again and again. I've had it. There's no honour in this mission, none at all. It's a disgrace. Canada should have no part in this. Support the troops? I don't blame them, this is the doing of the brass and politicians, but I can't support them either while they're part of this butchery.

This Promises to be Very, Very Juicy

A quarter-century of CIA skullduggery is about to be declassified and publicly released next week and, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, "Most of it is unflattering."

The documents cover an era that stretched from the 50's through the 70's, secrets that are known within the CIA as the "family jewels." According to the Washington Post these documents " include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of 'unwitting' tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs."

Much of this has been the stuff of rich conjecture for decades.

At the time, Henry Kissinger fretted over the disclosure of these secrets in conversations with then President Gerald Ford. Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate."

Director Hayden said the documents, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."

Stay the Course - Forever?

NATO's Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is urging Canada to "stay the course" in Afghanistan after the mandate of "the mission" expires in 2009.

In Montreal to attend an international conference, Scheffer said, "I know how dramatic it is if Canadian soldiers pay the highest price," Scheffer said. "But I still say, you are there for a good cause ... You are there to defend basic universal values."

Fortunately no one called upon the Secretary-General to explain just whose "universal values" we are defending and what the Afghan people and their leadership think of those values. If we've learned anything surely it's that Afghan values and Western values don't always have a lot of universality.

Scheffer said it's important that all 26-members of the coalition carry on their missions. Carrying on and staying the course probably sounds pretty good to this guy because it avoids the fundamental issue of why some nations, such as Canada, are carrying far more than their fair share of the burden.

As Decent As They Come

In November, 1997, a gang of kids murdered 14-year old Reena Virk. They swarmed here and beat her up. Then two of the gang followed her, beat her again and drowned her in the Gorge in Victoria, B.C. It was a truly horrific, vicious murder.

Today the boy convicted of the murder, Warren Glowatski, was given day parole. Nothing particularly unusual about that except that, on hand to support him was Reena's mother, Suman Virk.

Following Glowatski's sentencing, the Virks made it clear they had no interest in vengeance and were saddened that, atop their daughter's death, these young people had ruined their own lives.

The Virks have kept an eye on Glowatski while he was imprisoned and they formed a profoundly compassionate opinion of the young man. That led them to attend Glowatski's parole hearing last Thursday to lend their support.

“He was an angry, scared little kid, who was trying to prove something in a negative way,” Suman Virk told the media after the hearing.

“Today I think we see a young man who has taken responsibility for his actions and is trying to amend the wrong that he did.”

Utterly remarkable people.

Fatah's Dirty Little Secrets on Display

Now that Abbas and Fatah have been forceably driven out of Gaza, Hamas is wasting no time in putting Fatah's execution and torture apparatus on display.

The current spin we're getting from the US, Israel and others, including Canada, has Fatah as the West's best friend, the good guys, and Hamas just a bunch of murderous Islamist thugs. Don't eat that stuff Charlie, that's horse shit.

Not only was Fatah corrupt but it ruled by murder, torture and terror. Der Spiegel's Ulrike Putz took a tour through the recently abandoned Fatah installations:

"The cells are small, perhaps six feet by six feet, with only an overhead lamp to provide light. The toilet is a hole in the floor behind a small wall. The prisoners have scribbled graffiti on the walls, including slogans like "Al-Qaida in Jerusalem" and "Islamic Jihad." One inmate even scratched the phrase "Mother, oh my mother" into the plaster.

"The headquarters of the Fatah-controlled security force in Gaza have been open to the public since last Thursday. Every day is open house now.

"For years the complex was a symbol of the horror disseminated by the security forces that reported directly to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. This is where Hamas men were taken after Fatah had arrested them. Some of those lucky enough to be eventually released reported that they had been tortured. Others disappeared forever.

"Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long voiced criticism of systematic human rights violations in the security force's prisons, both in Gaza and the West Bank. In this respect, the fact that Hamas captured the Fatah headquarters in Gaza last week was more than just strategically significant -- it was also a highly symbolic act.

"'This building is a symbol of injustice in stone,' says Abu Mohammed, an officer in Hamas's militant al-Qassam Brigades, who led the attack on the complex. He and his unit have occupied the compound since the building was captured, and Abu Mohammed is using the gatehouse as his office. 'We came because we wanted to see the place where our brothers were killed,' he says."

Pakistan Pushes Plutonium Production

ABC News has obtained a satellite picture that it claims reveals Pakistan is nearing completion of a previously unknown, third plutonium production reactor.

The highly unstable Musharraf government is believed to already possess some 60-nuclear warheads. The new reactor, and an earlier one also nearly complete, are believed to allow Pakistan to build another 10-warheads per year. It is also believed that with larger stocks of plutonium, Pakistan will be able to design smaller, lighter and more powerful warheads better suited to its lovely line of short and medium-range missiles.

Pakistan is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and so is not subject to inspections. The US, by contrast, is a signatory to that treaty but governs itself as though it wasn't.

America's Constitutional Quasimodo

Oh, I forgot. Quasimodo was a good guy, sort of. Dick Cheney, on the other hand, seems to think he too lives in some sort of bell tower, high above the American constitution.

Cheney is now claiming that the Vice-President of the United States is not part of the executive branch and therefore is exempt from a presidential directive governing the protection of classified information by government agencies. Let's see, he's not part of the judiciary, he's no judge although he's quick to judge. And he's not part of the legislative branch, no one elected him to congress. So, if he's not part of the third branch - why he's a big, greasy hunk of nothing!

There really is no end to this Dick.

Peter Brookes, The Times of London

Taliban Not a Long-Term Threat - Karzai

Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the BBC today that the Taliban, "...is not a threat to the survival of Afghanistan, its government, its future objective." This assessment flies straight in the face of the continual claims of NATO and mission-friendly supporters such as our very own Stephen Harper.

Mr Karzai also said international forces in the country should do more to prevent the killings of civilians. As for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Karzai said they don't "have the guts" to seriously threaten the Kabul government.

Mugabe's Monetary Meltdown

Have you ever heard a number as bizarre as "one million, five hundred thousand per cent"?

That's the estimate of the coming inflation facing the people of Zimbabwe says US ambassador Chris Dell.

Dell told The Guardian, "Prices are going up twice a day, in some cases doubling several times a week," said Mr Dell, who is approaching the end of his posting to Zimbabwe. "It destabilises everything. People have completely lost faith in the currency and that means they have lost faith in the government that issues it.

"By carrying out disastrous economic policies, the Mugabe government is committing regime change upon itself," he said. "Things have reached a critical point. I believe the excitement will come in a matter of months, if not weeks. The Mugabe government is reaching end game, it is running out of options."

I expect when Mugabe goes out, it'll be much like the end of Mussolini, with the tyrant hanging by his heels in some public square. It's hard to imagine him getting out of this alive.

NO, Not Again!

Guess who's planning on taking another bite out of the Democratic vote in the 2008 election? It's Ralph Nader, the "independent" without whom Al Gore would have defeated George Bush in 2000.

Nader, who took 2.7% of the vote overall, captured 97-thousand votes in Florida, the cornerstone state that Gore lost by only 537 votes, using George Bush's math and the Supreme Court's alchemy.

But for Nader Kyoto would have stood a vastly better chance of success, the Middle East would not be in flames and America would still have the respect of the world.

In an interview with the newspaper Politico, Nader said, "The two parties are still converging. I really think there needs to be more competition from outside. Democrats have become, over the years, very good at electing very bad Republicans. Democrats always know how to implode, how to waver, how to not be authentic."

Nader took a broad swipe at Hillary Clinton. "She is a political coward," Mr Nader said. "She goes around pandering to powerful interest groups on the one hand and flattering general audiences on the other. She doesn't even have the minimal political fortitude of her husband."

Ralph Nader - building a Republican dynasty, one stolen election at a time.

Evil Bastard

I woke up this morning and tried to catalogue the reasons to despise US Veep Dick Cheney. I went through the usual list - Iraq, fear mongering, Halliburton, lying, Afghanistan, secrecy, Halliburton, corporate democracy, the Taliban, suppression of civil rights, KBR, Saddam and al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, Bechtel, Saddam and WMDs, Iran, Halliburton, death and suffering and misery on a massive scale - you know, the same old same old - but then I noticed something was missing, overlooked.

Oh yeah, it was the black thing. As a Congressman in 1980's, Cheney voted against resolutions demanding the release from prison of Nelson Mandela. Cheney smeared Mandela as a "terrorist." There it is. Add that to his opposition to Martin Luther King day and you have all the fixins' of a genuinely evil bastard.

Actually I'm still not sure I got it all. How about it? Anything to add?

Why Hamas?

After 9/11 almost gave George w. Bush an excuse to conquer Iraq and after he got caught lying through his Texas teeth about Saddam's WMDs and links to al-Qaeda, Shrub fell back on his messianic delusion about bringing democracy to the Middle East. Elections would wash away all his sins. Democracy was just the ticket. So elections it would be.

Afghanistan had elections. Iraq had elections. So did Lebanon and Palestine. And just how did that turn out for the Champion of Democracy? Afghanistan elected a parliament with a solid representation of warlords, drug lords and common criminals. Not so good. Iraqis elected religious fundamentalists, the perfect formula for sectarian squabbling and sectarian violence. Even worse. In Lebanon, Hezbollah made out like bandits at the polls. Not what George was hoping for. And the Palestinians handed their votes to Hamas. Hmmm. That's four for four for the Frat Boy in the Oval Office, a sweep, all of them failures from Washington's point of view.

But just what made the Palestinian people shift their support from Fatah to Hamas anyway? UCLA Professor Saree Makdisi explains why in an opinion piece in the LA Times:

"...for one thing, the old government had been democratically elected; now it has been dismissed out of hand by presidential fiat. There's also the fact that the new prime minister appointed by Abbas — Salam Fayyad — has the support of the West, but his election list won only 2% of the votes in the same election that swept Hamas to victory. Fayyad and Abbas have the support of Israel, but it is no secret that they lack the backing of their own people.

"There is a reason the people threw out Abbas' Fatah party in last year's election. Palestinians see the leading Fatah politicians as unimaginative, self-serving and corrupt, satisfied with the emoluments of power.

"Worse yet, Palestinians came to realize that the so-called peace process championed by Abbas (and by Yasser Arafat before him) had led to the permanent institutionalization — rather than the termination — of Israel's 4-decade-old military occupation of their land. Why should they feel otherwise? There are today twice as many settlers in the occupied territories as there were when Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat first shook hands in the White House Rose Garden. Israel has divided the West Bank into besieged cantons, worked diligently to increase the number of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem (while stripping Palestinian Jerusalemites of their residency rights in the city) and turned Gaza into a virtual prison.

"People voted for Hamas last year not because they approved of the party's sloganeering, not because they wanted to live in an Islamic state, not because they support attacks on Israeli civilians, but because Hamas was untainted by Fatah's complacency and corruption, untainted by its willingness to continue pandering to Israel. Fatah leaders were viewed as mere policemen of the perpetual occupation, and the Palestinian Authority had willingly taken on the role of administering the population on behalf of the Israelis. Hamas offered an alternative.

"Has Hamas done unspeakable things? Yes, but so has Fatah, and so too has Israel (on a much larger scale). There are no saints in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Palestinians, frankly, see a lot of hypocrisy in the West's anti-Hamas stance. Since last year's election, for example, the West has denied aid to the Hamas government, arguing, among other things, that Hamas refuses to recognize Israel. But that's absurd; after all, Israel does not recognize Palestine either. Hamas is accused of not abiding by previous agreements. But Israel's suspension of tax revenue transfers to the Palestinian Authority, and its refusal to implement a Gaza-West Bank road link agreement brokered by the U.S. in November 2005, are practical, rather than merely rhetorical, violations of previous agreements, causing infinitely more damage to ordinary people. Hamas is accused of mixing religion and politics, but no one has explained why its version of that mixture is any worse than Israel's — or why a Jewish state is acceptable but a Muslim one is not.

"A genuine peace based on the two-state solution would require an end to the Israeli occupation and the creation of a territorially contiguous, truly independent Palestinian state.But that is not happening. Fatah seems to have given up, its leaders preferring to rest comfortably with the power they already have. Ironically, it is Hamas that is taking the stands that would be prerequisites for a true two-state peace plan: refusing to go along with the permanent breakup of Palestine and not accepting the sacrifice of control over borders, airspace, water, taxes and even the population registry to Israel.

"Embracing the "moderation" of Abbas allows the Palestinian Authority to resume servicing the occupation on Israel's behalf, for now. In the long run, though, the two-state solution is finished because Fatah is either unable or unwilling to stop the ongoing dismemberment of the territory once intended for a Palestinian state.

"The only realistic choice remaining will be the one between a single democratic, secular state offering equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians — or permanent apartheid."

A Draft By Any Measure?

US Embassy, Baghdad

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has lowered the boom on her department's diplomats who haven't been too keen on applying for openings at the embassy in Baghdad. At the moment the vacancy rate is just 1% but a lot of the people holding down those jobs are coming up for rotation and there's been a real drop in interest from the replacement pool.

Yesterday Rice sent a cable to all US embassies and missions which read, in part: "We must ensure that these top priority requirements are met before any other staffing decisions are made. To that end, we have decided to take the unprecedented step of creating a special country-specific assignment cycle for Iraq, commencing with the release of this message.''

In US diplomatic-speak that means Rice could hold up appointments to other posts and force, or "direct,'' some diplomats to accept positions at what is the largest U.S. embassy in the world.

A senior State Department official allowed that Iraq is an extremely dangerous hardship post with near daily insurgent mortar attacks on the fortified Green Zone where the embassy is located but accused the American Foreign Service Association (the diplomats' union) and some in the State Department of attempting to hamper policy by advising Baghdad candidates not to go and warning of potential career damage.

The US embassy in Baghdad occupies about the same amount of land as the Vatican and comprises 27-buildings, making it by far the biggest US embassy in the world.

Gaza - More Fuel for al Qaeda

There's another dimension to the Hamas/Fatah civil war. Al Qaeda may be poised to pick up the pieces. As Soumaya Ghannoushi writes in The Guardian, Washington and London may have done it again:

"Since declaring jihad in 1998, al-Qaida has aspired to acquire the legitimacy of representing the Palestinian cause, well aware of its rich symbolism within the Arab and Islamic collective conscience

"When Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri issued their "Jihad against Jews and Crusaders" statement on February 28 1998, responses to their declaration varied from apathy to amusement. They were an obscure group lost in the faraway emirate of the Taliban, a pathetic remnant of the fight against the USSR during the cold war. Their role looked historically defunct and their discourse archaic.

"Things could not be more different now. Al-Qaida has become an intensely complex global network, with a decentralised, flexible structure that enables it to spread in all directions, across the Arab world, Africa, Asia and Europe. Whether pursuing active cells or searching for sleeping ones, the security world is haunted by al-Qaida's ghost.

"The organisation's penetration of Palestinian politics is the climax of a long, still unfolding process. Rapidly expanding from one location to another, al-Qaida currently boasts branches throughout the Arab region. ...Nationalist demands and aspirations of liberation of Palestine, independence from foreign dominance, and sovereignty over resources, began to be spoken with an Islamic voice, in a region where the national and the Islamic have always been intimately intertwined.

"With the severe restrictions imposed on them by their western-backed governments and the evaporation of American promises of reform and democratisation, this "democratic Islam" currently finds itself in the grip of a crisis. The greatest beneficiary is al-Qaida. In the Middle East, its battles are fought on two fronts: against "traitor" regimes and their western backers on the one hand, and against popular Islamist oppositions deemed "deviant from the true path of jihad" on the other. In a speech recently broadcast on the al-Jazeera satellite channel, al-Zawahiri scolded Hamas for straying from the path of resistance by participating in the political process.

"Events on the ground give further credibility to al-Zawahiri's words. Arabs have watched with horror as Palestinians have been severely punished for their electoral choices, isolated, starved, and propelled towards the bottomless pit of internecine feuding. The message from Washington and London seemed to be: don't bother with the ballot box - only through bombings and violence is change possible. Between occupation and obstruction of peaceful change, the US is creating the ideal environment for al-Qaida to flourish, the product of a sick geopolitics and a deformed view of the region and its needs."

He's Done Such a Good Job in Iraq - He's a Natural!

The Bush maladministration is floating the idea of Tony Blair as a Special Envoy to the Middle East representing the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. Blair's job would be to sort out the Palestinian fiasco and help Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas create a viable Palestinian state.

Why Blair? Well, he'll soon be out of work. He's immensely distrusted and unpopular at home which gives him a great deal in common with George w. Bush. He knows so much about the Middle East that he was invaluable in helping George w. set the whole place on fire. He's a war criminal. Arabs don't trust him, excluding of course those who might get billion pound bribes. He fervently believes George w.'s messianic fantasies. At times delusional himself, he's also got a well demonstrated and finely honed talent for lying through his teeth. His evangelical devotion to democracy won't get in the way of dismissing the democratically-elected Hamas party from this missionary project to redeem the pagan Palestinians. All things considered, Blair would make an excellent Paul Bremer style proconsul for the hapless Palestinian people who, after all, can't even be trusted to vote properly.

Sounds like Blair would fit Washington's bill perfectly.

More Pressure For a Broken Army

Pentagon planners expect George w. Bush to demand an extension of the Baghdad "surge" and they know that will mean yet another tour extension for the already stressed out volunteer military. According to a report in The Guardian, the Pentagon is about to demand more

"...the Pentagon's mental health taskforce reported that US troops were undertaking higher levels of sustained combat duty than during Vietnam and the second world war; and the strain was telling.

"The taskforce found that 38% of soldiers, 31% of marines, 49% of national guard members and 43% of marine reservists exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety or other psychological problems within three months of returning from active duty.

"Symptoms of PTSD and traumatic brain injury - the two so-called "signature injuries" associated with service in Iraq and Afghanistan - included nightmares, insomnia, anger and alcohol and substance abuse, it said.

"It also questioned the practice of returning soldiers to front-line duty while they were taking medication, such as lithium and Prozac.

"The US currently has about 155,000 troops in Iraq. Most typically spend 15 months in combat zones with a guaranteed 12 months at home - a breach of the Pentagon's own rules that say equal time should be spent on and off duty."

This is the work of a president who is more concerned with not getting tagged with defeat than with genuinely supporting his troops. While casualty levels have not reached anything close to the losses taken in WWII and Vietnam, extending the combat tours of soldiers already so damaged shows anything but support.

Was Gaza a Fatah Ploy?

That's the question being asked by McClatchey News Service. Reporter Dion Nissinbaum questions why Fatah seemingly yielded Gaza with hardly a fight.

"...there was no last stand. Instead, Fatah leaders fled the Gaza Strip by boat and on foot, leaving lower-level fighters feeling betrayed.

"In five days of fighting, Fatah never put up a real fight. The question is why not.

"In interviews with McClatchy Newspapers during and after the fighting, Fatah foot soldiers said they felt abandoned as they realized that there'd be no counterattack, not even a last-ditch defense.

"Some of them thought incompetent political leaders had done them in. But this land has long been fertile soil for conspiracy theories, and others wondered whether Abbas had deliberately ceded the Gaza Strip to Hamas in an attempt to isolate the radical Islamic group and consolidate his power in the much larger West Bank.

"'There was total frustration and disappointment,' said one Abbas security officer who was among the last to abandon the presidential compound on Thursday night, June 14, and asked to be identified only as A.R. because of fear of retaliation. 'We felt like there was a conspiracy to hand over Gaza to Hamas.'

"Whether it was conspiracy or collapse, Fatah's downfall in Gaza has created an unexpected opportunity for Israel, the United States and others to re-establish full relations with Abbas and the pro-Western emergency cabinet he's installed to replace the elected, Hamas-dominated Palestinian government."

The Rape of Nanking - Never Happened, Nope

It was perhaps the most barbaric military atrocity of the last century, the "rape of Nanking." That is until yesterday when a group of legislators from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic party got together to call the whole thing a fabrication. They claim Beijing is using the incident as a "political advertisement."

300,000 Chinese died in this incident. Officers used some to demonstrate their beheading skills with their Katana swords. Enlisted men used others for bayonet practice. Women were raped and then killed, sometimes in unbelievably perverse ways. Children weren't spared the butchery either.

"Japan's occupation of Nanjing was nothing more nor less than an ordinary battlefield," the group said at a news conference where it presented documents it said supported its views.

Nariaki Nakayama, head of the group, said members could not let "lies and deceit be spread around the world" on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the city's fall.

So, who do you believe, the self-serving Chinese or the much-maligned Japanese? The nice thing is you don't have to believe either side to know the Japanese are lying through their teeth.

The Japanese atrocity in Nanking happened in December, 1937, four years before Japan went to war against the Western nations. Because of that there were plenty of Westerners in Nanking when the Imperial troops arrived. A number of these Westerners recorded what they witnessed. Many took photographs, including a number of pictures taken by a UPI photographer. The photographs record acts by Japanese soldiers that can only be called barbaric and disgusting.

To the anger of Japanese commanders, the Westerners refused to leave and even created a safety zone which saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Among those who protected the innocents was a German, John Rabe, a Nazi.

The Japanese legislators who are pushing this are as vile and loathsome as any Holocaust denier and their government's credibility hangs on whether they are ousted from their party. If Stephen Harper wants to lecture another country, this one's easy meat.

Three More Canadian Soldiers Lost in Afghanistan

It was a roadside bomb, naturally. Our soldiers were in an unarmoured, all-terrain vehicle, "travelling a short distance" to resupply a checkpoint.

Apparently, one or more Taliban insurgents managed to slip through our lines and back out undetected to plant the device.

Who knows what he was thinking but Brig. Gen. Tim Grant is quoted as calling the attack "an unfortunate accident." Memo to Tim: there wasn't a damned thing accidental about this.

After that Grant broke into the standard refrain of pious grieving and unbridled praise for three soldiers who had to lose their lives to an insurgent booby-trap planted by a bunch of murderous thugs in our own back yard.

NATO, meanwhile, has dismissed the recent outbreak of suicide and roadside bomb attacks as "militarily insignificant." Now, if only the Taliban were fighting a military war, instead of a political war, that assurance might mean something. The Taliban isn't seeking to be "militarily significant" in these tactics. Why do these people not seem to understand that?

"We find ourselves in the midst of the so-called fighting season, when what we had predicted is taking place: an increase in suicide bombings and more desperate attempts by the enemies of peace and stability to present the illusion that they are stronger than they are," said Lt. Col. Maria Carl, spokeswoman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force. Actually the insurgent goal is to create the appearance that we're much weaker and far more vulnerable than we claim to be and, according to a number of recent accounts, it's working.

The Abu Ghraib Cover-Up

The New Yorker magazine has given us a reminder that the public knows only a fraction of what happened at Abu Ghraib prison and who was involved in the sytemic torture of prisoners captured by American troops.

By now the picture of the hooded prisoner standing on a box with electrodes fastened to his body has become iconic of the depravity of the jailers but there's more, much more and those responsible have been shielded by the Bush administration.

The two-star Army General who led the first military investigation into human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq claims that when his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, told Congress that he'd only just seen the prison pictures, he was wilfully misleading them. According to Major General Antonio Taguba, the pictures and his report had already been in the Pentagon for several weeks by the time Rumsfeld testified. In other words, either Rumsfeld did see the pictures or he deliberately chose not to see them to cover his ass. I guess that's what is called the "ostrich defence."

Okay, let's see. Rumsfeld, the ultimate micromanager, commissioned the report and then didn't look at it or the pictures until it all broke loose in the media? Right.

Major General Antonio Taguba also claimed in an interview with The New Yorker magazine published yesterday that President George Bush also "had to be aware" of the atrocities despite saying at the time of the scandal that he had been out of the loop until he saw images in the US media.

Taguba passed his own judgment on the former defense secretary, "Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There's no way he's suffering from CRS - Can't Remember Shit. He's trying to acquit himself."

And what pictures they were. Taguba says the images kept from the public and not even mentioned in the trials included such interrogation techniques as an American soldier sodomizing a female Iraqi detainee and images of sexual humiliation between a father and son.

Taguba complains that he was instructed only to investigate the military police at the prison and go no further. "Somebody was giving them guidance but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box." He adds: "Even today ... those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."

And how was Taguba rewarded for his investigation? You guessed it, forced retirement.

Taguba's candid revelations tell us a lot about the Bush regime, our Stephen Harper's American Idols. And, from the top down, those "civilian and military leaders responsible" still control our lead partner in the Bush "war on terror."

"Thinking In Terms of Decades"

Britain's new ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, calls the UK mission "a marathon not a sprint."

"'I've said the task of standing up a government of Afghanistan that is sustainable is going to take a very long time,' he said.

"'It's a marathon rather than a sprint. We should be thinking in terms of decades.'

"He added: 'We're not [talking] about a long-term military presence but we are serious about a long-term development presence, because this country does matter to us and to the region in so many ways.'

"'Mistakes have been made. I know that, we all know that, we regret them deeply,' he said. "But the Taliban are responsible for five times as many civilian casualties as the coalition forces here.'"

"The population's main concern 'is not about us staying. It's about us going,' he said. 'The great thing about the Taliban is that they haven't been reading their Chairman Mao. They don't have popular support. They're trying to swim in a sea that doesn't exist.'

"He claimed that recent Taliban attacks, such as the suicide bombing of a police academy bus in Kabul at the weekend which killed 35 people, was a sign the organisation was getting desperate and was 'on the back foot'.

Coles' claims sound just like a brand new bucket of the same old crap we've been hearing for the past six years. Ever notice how each one of these guys takes his turn assuring us the Taliban are done, finished and yet they somehow defy the predictions and come back stronger and more murderous than ever? But Sir Sherard clearly knows who's paying his rent.

China Takes First Spot on GHG Emissions

The United States is no longer the top dog when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. Years earlier than predicted, China has now overtaken the US.

According to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, soaring demand for coal to generate electricity and a surge in cement production have helped to push China's recorded emissions for 2006 beyond those from the US already. It says China produced 6,200m tonnes of CO2 last year, compared with 5,800m tonnes from the US.

It's important to remember that China's increase in GHG emissions isn't offset by reductions somewhere else. It's in addition to the already massive emissions from other nations, particularly the industrialized West.

The Desertification of the People's Republic

China has but 7% of the world's arable farmland to feed 20% of the world's population. The math isn't good and it's getting worse by the day.

Fully one-third of China is now desert and that's spreading. From the Associated Press:

"In a problem that's pervasive in much of China, over-farming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland. Authorities have ordered farmers here in Gansu province to vacate their properties over the next 3 1/2 years, and will replace 20 villages with newly planted grass in a final effort to halt the advance of the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts.

"The relocation program is part of a larger plan to rein in China's expanding deserts, which now cover one-third of the country and continue to grow because of overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and droughts.

"The shifting sands have swallowed thousands of Chinese villages along the fabled Silk Road and sparked a sharp increase in sandstorms; dust from China clouds the skies of South Korea and has been linked to respiratory problems in California.

"The battle against deserts is playing out across much of western China. Desertification has caused as much as $7 billion in annual economic losses, the China Daily reported.

"Over the past decade, Chinese deserts expanded at a rate of 950 square miles a year, according to Wang Tao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Lanzhou.

"'There are quite a few countries with this problem but none on the scale of China because it is so big,' said Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute. 'You only have to go to northwest China and see that the numbers and size of dust storms are increasing.'

"Expanding deserts have contributed to a nearly six-fold increase in sandstorms in the past 50 years to two dozen annually, Wang said.

"Global warming will worsen the problem, as rising temperatures lead to widespread drought and melt most glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, depriving lakes and rivers of a crucial water source, according to the U.N.-funded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

The Other Side of the Coin

While the global warming denialists are back at it again, a group of the most prominent climate change experts are warning that the latest IPCC reports have actually understated the true dangers of global warming.

"'Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures,' the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add. From The Independent:

"The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming.

"The other scientists were Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.

"In an email to The Independent, Dr Hansen said: 'In my opinion, among our papers this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control.'

"The unnatural 'forcing' of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a 'flip' in the climate that could 'spark a cataclysm' in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write.

"Dramatic flips in the climate have occurred in the past but none has happened since the development of complex human societies and civilisation, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes if they occurred now.

"'Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end,' the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth's remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. 'To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built,' they say.

"Dr Hansen said we have about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far worse by the "albedo flip" - when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water.

"'The glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland in the northern hemisphere, and the western Antarctic ice sheet in the south, both show signs of the rapid changes predicted with rising temperatures. '

"'The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice sheet collapse,' the scientists say. 'We argue that the required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less.'

What it all comes down to is that, if these eminent scientists - the people who've been focused on this problem for the past two decades - are right, we don't have enough time left to afford the sort of windowdressing measures envisioned by Harpo. If they're right, our earth and our civilization are in very real peril right now.

It comes down to a question of who and what you want to believe. If you don't want to believe these claims do yourself a favour and don't go near the vast body of scientific literature upon which they're based. If you don't want to believe it, read the next post and you'll find out how to make it all go away.

NatPo's Week of Denial

The National Post is at it again. It's "Junk Science" week at NatPo, meaning a whole week of drivel from business reporter Terence Corcoran.

The bottom line is that any finding that doesn't suit Corcoran's pro-business/pro-growth biases is simply junk. Why? Because Corcoran says so.

Don't take my word for it. Do a quick Google search on Corcoran and you'll find all you need to know about this crank. It's no coincidence he's at Asper's National Post.

Who Can Tell?

These are Taliban. You can kill these.

These are kids. Don't kill these.

More fighting in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban evidently didn't get the message that they've been reduced to hit and run tactics, the victory message that NATO proclaimed to us just weeks ago.

Accounts from the battles seem confused. What is known is that Taliban forces have taken two areas, one in the Dutch-held province or Uruzgan and the other in Canada's Kandahar province.

An official close to the governor of Uruzgan said 70 to 75 civilians were killed or wounded, while more than 100 Taliban and more than 35 police were killed.

NATO spokesman Maj. John Thomas said he doubted that Afghan officials could tell the difference between civilians and militants, suggesting some of the wounded who claimed to be civilians were insurgents. I don't know whether the Afghan officials can tell the difference but what is obvious is that NATO itself either can't or can't be bothered. Hey guys, look for the beards! That's a dead giveaway.

The Friendly Skies Erupt in New Aircraft Sales

One of the key problems in global warming is aircraft emissions.

The world's fleet of roughly 17,000 commerical aircraft produces a terrific amount of greenhouse gases which it also emits at high altitude where the effects are considerably more pronounced. Even the aircraft condensation trails (those white plumes you sometimes see overhead) are problematic because they trap the heat of sunlight.

The trouble is, nobody wants to take the blame for aviation GHGs. As George Monbiot explains in his book Heat, Tony Blair's ambitious target for British GHG emission reductions doesn't take into account aircraft emissions or their planned increase. He notes that, even if Britain otherwise meets its GHG reduction targets, the increased GHG from expanded commercial aviation will more than offset that. As Monbiot points out, Britain is embarked on an ambitious aviation expansion programme including new airport construction that adds the equivalent of one Heathrow per year.

Is this really true? All you need to do is read Boeing press releases to see that it's very true. Four years ago, Boeing predicted the commercial fleet would double to 34,000 aircraft by 2022. Boeing last week estimated that the global market would grow by almost 27,000 planes worth $2.8 trillion in the next 20 years, with 36% of that growth coming from Asia-Pacific.

This represents a massive increase in commerical aviation in just two decades and, despite the faint promises of cleaner technologies to come, we're going to be stuck with today's technology for the foreseeable future.

The biggest problem at the moment is that world governments continue to be reluctant to recognize this problem. Nobody wants to add aviation GHGs to their carbon equation. That would throw the books right out the window. Ultimately only governments can take responsibility for curbing aviation GHG emissions. Until that happens, take any of their climate change promises with a very large grain of salt.

Mission Accomplished - Iraq & Afghanistan Failed States

The West has been tinkering with Afghanistan for six years, Iraq for four, and all we have to show for it are two, Top Ten Failed States. Now, to be fair, Afghanistan only ranks #8. Iraq, however, comes in at a strong #2 trailing only Sudan.

The 2007 Failed State Index, published in Foreign Policy magazine, noted that conditions have steadily worsened in both Iraq and Afghanistan:

"Iraq and Afghanistan, the two main fronts in the global war on terror, both suffered over the past year. Their experiences show that billions of dollars in development and security aid may be futile unless accompanied by a functioning government, trustworthy leaders, and realistic plans to keep the peace and develop the economy. Just as there are many paths to success, there are many paths to failure for states on the edge."

Compounding the worsening state of these two nations is the fact that the people of the Western states whose armies are propping them up are growing impatient and want their forces out. This is a reality already impacting on the conflict in both countries. Let's face it, the bad guys know we're lost our zeal for this half-hearted effort.

While the Afghan and Iraqi people may pay the price for our foolishness, there are valuable lessons to be learned by Western leaders with no understanding of war and little military knowledge.

Don't wage war unless it's absolutely essential.

Don't wage war without the means and the commitment to see the fight through to real victory within a reasonable time. Go Big and then Go Home. Wars without end don't sell for long.

Fighting a tactical war isn't enough. You must also fight a strategic war.

Don't take public support for granted. Explain clearly what the war is about and how you intend to achieve your goals. You can't wage protracted war on a foundation of platitudes. Be honest and completely candid. Your people have to know and they have to approve. Don't make promises you can't fulfill. There is no surer way to undermine public support.

Never underestimate the size of the war you're undertaking to fight. Go in prepared for the worst case and, once in, focus your attention and your forces on winning the fight.

One reason that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are going so poorly while public support for our intervention evaporates is that our leaders - Bush, Blair and Harpo - have ignored these basic principles. They never went big, they went small. They've been waging their war on a foundation of platitudes. They haven't explained what these wars are truly about or how they intend to win because they don't know. In both cases they woefully underestimated the size of the fight, causing the conflicts to drag on inconclusively. In many respects their lack of planning and shortage of resources has allowed the tactical initiative to fall to the bad guys. They've saddled their forces with a tactical war and no means to fight, much less win, the strategic war.

When these wars are consigned to the history books there will be plenty of blame to spread around but the lion's share will have to go to an utter and chronic failure of political leadership. Today's Afghanistan and today's Iraq are very much the product of inept Western leaders.

The Coming Climate Exodus

It's already begun. Thousands have been fleeing the drought parched sub-Saharan regions in a desperate attempt to find refuge in Europe. But that's just a sneak peek at what's to come.

Reuters reports that another group has concluded that the earth could see a billion climate-displaced refugees by 2050. Think about that. One billion people looking for a new place to live, not to mention water and food and other resources from the places they migrate to.

Logic holds that the first places they will reach won't be much better off than the places they left. These migrants will arrive and look to survive off lands and people already under climate stress. Who is going to get the food and who is going to get the water? How do you think those questions will be decided? A lottery perhaps or a gun?

A lot of the migrants will probably die or be killed off before they get more than a few hundred miles but plenty will get through. From Reuters:

"'All around the world, predictable patterns are going to result in very long-term and very immediate changes in the ability of people to earn their livelihoods,' said Michele Klein Solomon of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM).

"'It's pretty overwhelming to see what we might be facing in the next 50 years,' she said. 'And it's starting now.'

"People forced to move by climate change, salination, rising sea levels, deforestation or desertification do not fit the classic definition of refugees -- those who leave their homeland to escape persecution or conflict and who need protection.

"But the world's welcome even for these people is wearing thin, just as United Nations figures show that an exodus from Iraq has reversed a five-year decline in overall refugee numbers.
Governments and aid agencies are straining to cope with the 10 million whose plight risks being obscured by debates over a far larger tide of economic migrants -- and perhaps future waves of fugitives from environmental mayhem."

"'They used to be welcomed as people fleeing persecution, but this has been changing -- certainly since 9/11, but even before then,' said William Spindler, a UNHCR spokesman in Geneva.

"'Growing xenophobia, intolerance, political manipulation by populist politicians who mix up the issues -- the whole debate on asylum and migration has been confused,' he said.

"Whatever their motives, migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and as human beings, he added. 'We have seen people in the Mediterranean in boats or hanging onto fishing nets for days while states discuss who should rescue them.'

So while we debate the niceties of just how little GHG Canada produces and why we should have to accept even the modest Kyoto targets until China does, remember that we're not going to be immune from this exodus. In fact, given our advantaged position, we'll probably be a prime target.

Yeah, But Can Baird Drive?

So, while they're working furiously to persuade Canadians that they really do get the whole global warming thing, Harpo and his Harpies have decided the way to show their green credentials is to sponsor a fossil fuel guzzlin', GHG spewin' NASCAR race machine.

Yeah, sure Steve, global warming is the greatest threat facing mankind, eh? When you said that you really meant it, eh? Maybe on the hood of the car you could paint the conservative logo and, underneath that, the worlds "greatest threat facing mankind." Eh?

By the say, Steve, it'd be a great touch to get Baird behind the wheel, eh?

In Greenland, Spring Springs Ahead

Danish scientists have determined that spring is arriving in the Arctic a full two weeks earlier than just a decade ago.

Ice in north-east Greenland is now melting an average of 14.6 days earlier than in the mid-1990s. In a region where the period between snow melt and freeze up has normally been just a few months, the lengthening summer is a marked change.

The Danes acknowledge that some critics consider the 10-year study period as not long enough to reach their conclusions but note that their findings have been put to independent peer review and were found satisfactory by the consistency of the results.

Tricks of the Trade

The global warming deniers like to trot out graphs to lend credibility to their claims. One of the current stars of their community is a German school teacher E.G. Beck. In books and pamphlets and through television appearances, Beck disputes the notion of man-made global warming. He's even come up with the graph above to prove his contention that it was warmer in medieval times than today and that all we're experiencing today is a peak in a natural, 1500-year cycle.

The chart above shows temperatures climbing and dropping in wonderfully predictable sine wave cycles. Clearly Beck has proved his point. But wait. What are those two broken, diagonal lines on the bottom time line? If you notice carefully, to the left of the break, time is measured in 400-year gradations. To the right, it's in 200-year spans. But, then again, manipulating time lines is necessary for Beck to come up with his tidy little graph.

But note also that Beck shows temperature peaks at 400 BC and 12oo AD, a 1,600 year cycle. Fair enough. Add a 1,600 year cycle onto a 1200 AD baseline and when will Beck's next peak be? He claims it's now, year 2000. By his own math it'll be the year 2800 AD.

Just another trick of the trade for the global warming denialists.

The Liberal Malaise

Stephane Dion doesn't have to worry about my vote and he probably doesn't have to worry about yours either. That said, your vote and mine aren't going to make or break Dion and the Liberal Party in the next election. That fate rests in the hands of the great many, uncommitted Canadian voters. They're the votes that Dion has to win over and, according to the latest Angus Reid poll, he's not doing it.

At 25 per cent approval, Dion's numbers are well behind those of the Liberals who sit at 34%. That suggests there are quite a few people willing to support the Liberal party despite Dion's lacklustre leadership. For a leader whose claim to fame is the environment, the poll numbers are even more gloomy. While the Greens came out as the top party on the environment, the NDP outpolled the Libs on Dion's forte issue 2:1.

The incredible shrinking Liberal leader needs to get his act together - pronto! If he continues to be seen as a milquetoast, the party will pay a big price for it in the next election. When the Tories ran those ads attacking Dion as a leader, they weren't trying to change public opinion, merely reinforce it. They had obviously done their own polling and determined this was where Dion was truly vulnerable.

So, Stephane has to show he's not what so many now think he is. He's got to come out as bold and dynamic and even aggressive. This is not a time for wallflowers. With an election as potentially close as the next one, perception becomes almost everything.

You see, this problem goes far beyond the next election. Dion needs solid public support and trust, not just to oust the Harper conservatives but to make real progress on selling the Canadian people on the sacrifices that will be necessary to begin combatting global warming. If you can barely get elected, you don't have a snowball's chance of getting anywhere on global warming.

Damn It, Stop!

They're not even denying this one. "US-led coalition jets" brought the gift of modern aerial bombs to a compound in Afghanistan today killing "some" insurgents and 7-children.

For all our side says, and they say it so very often, that they're trying to really stop this sort of thing, their actions put the lie to their claims.

They like to use words like "compound" instead of "a cluster of houses." Compound doesn't sound like a place where kids would be sleeping when you drop a few 2,000 pounders on them.

The day that the US and NATO want to stop killing civilians is the day they use soldiers, not air strikes, against residential targets. Until that day comes, all those soothing assurances are plain old barnyard bullshit.

An Appeal To End the Vietnam Air War

Danielle Trussoni's dad fought in Viet Nam and it took his life last year at the age of 61.

Trussoni's father died of the effects of Agent Orange as she related in an editorial in today's New York Times:

"I had seen a video of the C-123 cargo planes swooping low, just above a blanket of crenellated canopy, the fusillade of white clouds fanning out, pretty as powdered sugar. The chemicals worked through the top layers of foliage, moving down to the rice paddies and sinking into the red soil. In the video, the defoliant appeared almost tonic, like cool talcum powder falling from heaven.

"My father walked in the wake of those planes. He remembered the defoliants’ descent over the jungle, slow as snow. He recalled the white coated leaves, the way his throat burned when he breathed the humid air, the strange discoloration he found when he blew his nose. He remembered bathing in a bomb crater, dead birds floating on the surface. Last year, after five years fighting throat cancer that he and his doctors attributed to exposure to the dioxin in Agent Orange, my father died. He was 61.

"Today the federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, is scheduled to hear oral arguments against Dow, Monsanto and 35 other companies that manufactured Agent Orange and related herbicides used during the Vietnam War. In addition, 16 appeals by American veterans will be heard, as well as an appeal by a group that represents Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

"One of the Vietnamese civilians taking part in this appeal is a woman named Dang Hong Nhut, who lived in Cu Chi during the war, the very same part of Vietnam where my father spent his tour. After losing numerous babies to miscarriage and deformity, Dang Hong Nhut sent a biopsy abroad for analysis. The results showed that, years after the war, her body still retained traces of dioxin. In a television interview, she said: 'It doesn’t matter if the companies won’t admit their crimes. What really counts is that people see that a crime took place.'”

A Job Well Done

British police have instigated a world-wide sweep that has bagged 700-suspected pedophiles from 35 countries.

It all began with the arrest of a 27-year old Briton ten months ago. That ped pleaded guilty to 9 counts of possessing and distributing indecent images. The British police then used that arrest to infiltrate the peds' chat room and collect evidence against the other members.

25-Years. My God, Where Has the Time Gone?

The troop ship Canberra returns to Southhampton

after the Falklands are retaken.

I have a crisp recollection of the time. I was lunching in the faculty lounge with law professor Donovan Waters (if you're a lawyer you get it). A couple of days earlier Margaret Thatcher had sent a slapped-together fleet into the South Atlantic.

The subject came up and Dr. Waters asked what I thought. I told him that British air power was going to doom the Argentinians who had seized the Falkland Islands. A day or two earlier I'd gone through some reports dealing with the remarkable performance of the Harrier in an lengthy battle test. Seems it was an astonishingly reliable and resilient aircraft. I assured my English friend that the Argie A-4s and Mirages didn't stand a chance. A number of weeks later Donovan told me how relieved he was that I'd been right. Unable to maintain air superiority, due mainly to the Harriers' presence, the Argies couldn't reinforce or resupply from either sea or air. Nor could they prevent the British landings.

Why does this come up? Only because I just found an item in The Guardian about a 25th anniversary victory fly-over in central London. Twenty five years? My lord, there was a time I would have considered 25-years a rough approximation of a lifetime. Now I can recall some events 25-years past clear as day.

Next to watching your children grow up, that sort of news flashback really reminds you that this is a one-way street and you've been on it for a while. Happy Father's Day!

Going to Bat - On Hillary

If Hillary Clinton has any serious skeletons in her closet, expect to hear about them soon, very soon. As the Democratic frontrunner, she's become the prime target for a right-wing smear job.

A movie is in the works which is intended to "expose the truth about her conflicts in the past and her liberal plot for the future."

The anti-Hillary campaign is being modeled on the highly successful Swift Boat campaign that was used to defeat John Kerry and its backers' names include the usual suspects.

Anti-Hillary web sites are popping up including the likes of StopHerNow, StopHillaryPAC and HillCAP. One of them even accuses Clinton of illegal fundraising and seeks to have her prosecuted.

Then there will be the books. These include "The Extreme Makeover of Hillary Rodham Clinton", by Bay Buchanan, sister of former Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan, and "Whitewash" by Brent Bozell, a veteran conservative who will try to show that Clinton is a pawn of the liberal media. Another book, "God and Hillary Clinton", will look at her religious beliefs and her pro-choice position on abortion.

"The Republican approach has been to maintain a distance between the dirty tricks-style operators and their senior figures. 'It is all based on plausible deniability, so that mainstream Republicans can dissociate with anti-Clinton activists,' said Shawn Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California.

"However, there is some clear overlap. For example, Texan businessman Bob Perry has joined Republican Mitt Romney's campaign as a fundraiser. In 2004, Perry gave more than $4m to the Swift Boat campaign.

"Her campaign is prepared for a conservative attack, no matter how dirty. On the campaign trail, one of her slogans is: 'I know how Washington Republicans think, how they operate and how to beat them.' Her staff have vowed not to repeat Kerry's 2004 mistake with the Swift Boat campaign when he delayed responding to their accusations that he did not tell the truth about his war record.

A Question Unanswered

The latest edition of The Walrus features an interesting assessment of "the mission" to Afghanistan and how it's really going.

The article quotes Brigadier Richard Nugee, chief spokesperson for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, as saying, "The single thing we have done wrong and we are striving extremely hard to improve on is killing innocent civilians."

Assuming General Nugee isn't implying that NATO needs to get better at killing innocent civilians, the question becomes how it intends to stop killing so many innocent Afghans? The way to cut civilians deaths is to stop relying so heavily on air strikes and artillery bombardment, especially in built-up areas but breaking that reliance also means massive increases in troop levels.

The authors raise and then skirt the real issue:

...even if the political will is there, the resources may be lacking. Peace-building experiences in Africa and the Balkans suggest that the overall international contribution to Afghanistan remains substantially below the levels of military and economic support usually necessary to rebuild a state. ...However, this conclusion suggests and uncomfortable set of alternatives: either we aren't truly committed to Afghanistan, or such nation-building projects are beyond our capacity.

Bingo! There it is, asked but not answered. Are we going to truly commit to Afghanistan and, if so, where are going to find another 25,000 soldiers and billions more in aid or have we taken on a task that is simply far beyond the capacity we've established there? Can we really achieve more in Kandahar province than the other NATO nations are willing to do in the rest of the country? Is pulling more than our fair share apt to make a lasting difference in Afghanistan's future or are we just putting in time at the expense of our soldiers' lives?

Leaving In Disgrace

Tony Blair isn't getting out of No. 10 without a few good kicks on the way. Even before he yields the reins of power former aides and associates are telling all and their accounts make Tony look like a hapless chump - at the very least.

Britain's controversial Channel 4 has produced a documentary in which certain credible types say that, contrary to the assurances he gave the British people at the time, Blair committed his troops to battle knowing the US had no real post-war plan. From The Guardian:

"In one of the most significant interviews in the programme, Peter Mandelson says that the Prime Minister knew the preparations were inadequate but said he was powerless to do more.
'Obviously more attention should have been paid to what happened after, to the planning and what we would do once Saddam had been toppled,' Mandelson tells The Observer's chief political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, who presents the documentary.

"'But I remember him saying at the time: "Look, you know, I can't do everything. That's chiefly America's responsibility, not ours."' Mandelson then criticises his friend: 'Well, I'm afraid that, as we now see, wasn't good enough.'.

"Blair's most senior foreign affairs adviser at the time of the war makes clear that Blair was 'exercised' on the exact issue raised by the war's opponents. Sir David Manning, now Britain's ambassador to Washington, says: 'It's hard to know exactly what happened over the post-war planning. I can only say that I remember the PM raising this many months before the war began. He was very exercised about it.'

"Manning reveals that Blair was so concerned that he sent him to Washington in March 2002, a full year before the invasion. On his return to London, Manning wrote a highly-critical secret memo to Blair. 'I think there is a real risk that the [Bush] administration underestimates the difficulties,' it said. 'They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.'

"Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's envoy to the postwar administration in Baghdad, confirms that Blair was in despair. 'There were moments of throwing his hands in the air: "What can we do?" He was tearing his hair over some of the deficiencies.' The failure to prepare meant that Iraq quickly fell apart. Greenstock adds: 'I just felt it was slipping away from us really, from the beginning. There was no security force controlling the streets. There was no police force to speak of.'"

These revelations, coupled with earlier insights including leaked memos, puts the lie to Blair's flimsy claim that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. It is beyond dispute now that Blair had a full year before the attack on Iraq in which he knew that conditions were perfect for the whole thing to turn into a quagmire after the invasion. Despite all the warnings he still committed his forces to Bush's folly. The interviews make clear that Blair misled his own people and stayed perfectly mute when he knew that George w. Bush was lying to his people.

Have we heard the end of this business? Don't count on it. There are plenty of others with plenty to tell and, now that the floodgates have been opened, it's hard to imagine they'll be willing to put their own reputations at risk to protect their fatally-wounded former leader.

Much as Tony Blair should have been able to see the Iraq invasion as a fiasco waiting to happen, he also should have understood that he stood even less chance of his real actions remaining secret.

Never, ever let a guy who ever looked like this

send your kids to war!

Defining Optimism

Shivcharan Jatav must be the world's champion optimist. He's been trying to pass his Grade 10 exams since 1969. Now 73, Jatav has just failed for the 39th time. Undeterred he says he'll get it next time.

38 years ago Jatav set out to get his Grade 10 qualifications so that he might make it into the Indian Army. That option is long closed but he's determined to pass the exams. Why? Because he's convinced that it will improve his job and marriage prospects.

"I could not get married as the girls told my family members that I was not properly educated. It's my fate that deprived me of education and a married life," he said. Sorry hopefuls, I've searched the internet and there's no picture of Shivcharan to be found.

Foreign Policy Schizophrenia

No one can claim that George w. Bush hasn't pursued an aggressive foreign policy. His weakness may be in getting caught in too many, conflicting foreign policies due to far too much aggression.

Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine - all are paying the price of this incompetence. As noted by Malcolm Rifkind in a previous post on this page, Afghanistan will never be sorted out until its boundary dispute with Pakistan is resolved and until India is told to back off from Afghanistan. Bush doesn't want to push Pakistan or India. There's a dubious fear that nuclear Pakistan can fall into Islamist hands unless Musharraf is kept in power. At the same time, Washington has chosen to draw closer to India in hopes of gaining a counterfoil to China.

Then there's the Sunni/Shia chasm that has the US taking both sides. At first it was all about confronting and defeating Sunni al-Qaeda. That was followed by toppling the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. The reward for that was the installation of a Shia-dominated government in Iraq with close ties to its religious brethren in Iran.

Iran was said to be fomenting trouble in Lebanon and Palestine by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. To counter this the US began arming Lebanese Sunni groups linked to al-Qaeda. At the same time it cinched the lid on the pressure cooker that is today's Palestine.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, US commanders opted to provide arms and assistance to the Sunni insurgents - the same bunch who routinely target American soldiers - on the strength of the insurgents' promise to use those weapons to hunt down al-Qaeda forces. Meanwhile the Baghdad government of al Maliki is widely believed to be in league with the Shiite militias and violence continues to spread through Baghdad and other Arab Iraqi centres while the Kurds are on the brink of launching their own civil war of independence that may bring Turkey into the fray.

Even a genuine statesman would find this melange of contradictory forces and alliances utterly daunting but there are no real statesmen in Washington, just a bunch of ideologues who started this madness in the belief that, with a healthy dose of American military supremacy, all would be made well. Oh, and al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that sparked this whole thing? They're doing just fine and spreading throughout the Muslim world.

What to do? For starters, scrap the messianic delusion. Cutting one's losses isn't cutting and running. Stop expecting the Islamic states to do your bidding. That's not working, even in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Focus, instead on how to put out all the fires you started.

First and foremost. Enforce a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Impose it - on both sides - if necessary. Israel withdraws to its pre-1967 borders. Jerusalem is made an open city. Israel either grants a right of return or offers full compensation for displaced Palestinians. Create a demilitarized zone between the parties and have it occupied by neutral peacekeepers who have authority to use force where necessary. No more negotiations if only because there really isn't time for yet another succession of failures. The West created Israel and has every right to dictate these terms.

Promote genuine democracy and start that effort where you can do the most good right now - Saudi Arabia and Egypt. If you want democracy to flourish in the Arab Middle East, that's where it has to begin. Parlour games in Iraq or Iran are no substitute. Make it clear that autocratic rule and suppression of democratic reform is over.

Reduce tensions between Pakistan and India while you still can. Draw attention to India's role in Afghanistan and how it is undermining Pakistan's security. Make India back off. Then compel Pakistan to establish ordinary, civil authority in the tribal lands. Tell Afghanistan (and they're in no position to argue) to accept the Durand Line for the border between the two countries.

Accept that the West cannot prop up a corrupt and feeble regime in Kabul indefinitely. Understand that Afghanistan may need to find its own way to democracy, in its own good time, and may be better off with strongman rule until then.

Decide whether democracy truly has a chance in Iraq without your perpetual military intervention. If not, have the country carved up fairly. Don't leave Iraq's Sunnis at a desperate disadvantage that could draw in regional Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia and ignite a much larger Sunni/Shia conflict that will spill over Iraq's borders.

Do the best you can, do it quickly and then get out. Leave. The genie is out of the bottle and you're never going to drive it back in. You can no longer demand to micromanage the agendas of these nations or their region. These people have an awful lot of sorting out to do. At times it will probably be bloody and you may even feel guilty for unleashing this instability but, at this point, that can't be helped.

Try to unravel as much of this as you can in the time remaining in your term. Don't dummy up with "stay the course" in hope of escaping responsibility for your failures. Don't let this brew boil until your successor moves into your office. Admit you messed this up. That's something the Islamic world needs to hear if only to let them begin to hope that you genuinely want to set things right. Then apologize to your own people and to the world.

China's Strategic Reserves

The US government has long maintained a strategic oil reserve. It's a large quantity of oil that can be made available to offset supply disruptions in the event of emergencies.

China, too, has a strategic commodity reserve only the Chinese aren't hording oil but pigs. And right now the Chinese government has opted to dip into the strategic porker reserves to stave off potentially destabilizing food price increases.

What's behind China's recent spate of food price instability? Asia Times reports that the culprit is ethanol:

"Current hikes in both grain and pork prices are blamed on the same culprit - the ethanol industry, whose explosive growth has been gobbling up a growing share of China's corn (maize) harvest traditionally preserved for food and animal feed.

"Having promoted the production of the environmentally friendly gasoline additive for years, Chinese economic planners now fear the sector has grown too much and too quickly, presenting them with an uncomfortable dilemma of choosing between the country's green agenda and its national food security.

"Pig feed, which is made mostly of corn, simply followed increases in corn prices. Prices of the commodity have risen by up to 30% since the latter half of last year, according to the ministry.

"What is more, producers have ignored a government limit on converting about 3 million tonnes of corn into ethanol a year and used up to 16 million tonnes of the crop in 2006, the ministry said in April. China has been encouraging the production of biofuel such as ethanol and bio-diesel from renewable resources to satisfy the country's voracious appetite for energy and reduce its growing dependence on imported petroleum. "

It's Just Nuts

Federal Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn seems to think Stephen Harper is a lunatic. Referring to Saskatchewan's decision to accept Harpo's challenge to "sue me" over equalization entitlements, Lunn said, "I just think it's nuts." So Gary, your Boss went a bit squirrelly. What else did you expect besides nuts?

Criminal Negligence Causing Death

Can you think of the last time Iraq had a day without a violent death or two or a dozen? If you're like me, you no longer read the daily accounts of the killings because they've lost their meaning except as statistics.

In Iraq people are routinely killed by al-Qaeda terrorists or Sunni insurgents or Shia militiamen or Iraqi security forces or US and coalition ground and air forces. Iraq may not have electricity of even oil but it has no shortage of armed people wandering around looking to kill people. And, when it comes to blame, there's more than enough to spread around.

A good share of the blame for each death that occurs in Iraq today and tomorrow and next month lies with something that's no longer around, the Coalition Provisional Authority, that was put in place by Washington to restore order to Iraq in the wake of the conquest. The CPA was headed, as you may recall, by Paul Bremer who served as pro-consul. His top British aide was Andrew Bearpark who stayed on the job until the CPA was wrapped up.

Bearpark has now accused the Coalition Provisional Authority of criminal negligence. In an interview with The Guardian, Bearpark described a totally dysfunctional civil administration. As an example he cited the total lack of planning for restoring essentials such as electricity:

"...when he asked for details of the plan to restore the Iraqi power supplies, he was given a one-page piece of paper with a list of a dozen Iraqi power stations and their potential output, amounting to what he describes as 'a wish list'. 'That was the CPA plan.'

Mr Bearpark said: "If we are going to take upon ourselves the right to invade people's countries and kill people - which is what we do with maybe the most laudable objectives - it puts an incredible moral responsibility upon us to do it as well as we possibly can."

A veteran of reconstructions in Bosnia and Kosovo, Bearpark, " insists there was a window of opportunity in 2003, following the invasion in April, when the coalition had the support of the Iraqi people, but by the winter 'we were losing them since we were unable to control security'. By January, the people realised the situation would not improve."

And the rest, as they say, is history. He supports the call for an official British enquiry into the failure of planning for the postwar occupation.

Bush's Daddy Made Him the Man He Is Today

Destined for Greatness?

So George w. Bush is a "paranoid megalomaniac," so what? It's not his fault. Blame his dad.

A neat Fathers' Day article in the Toronto Star says that a lot of the most notable leaders in the world were either orphans or children of single-parent families.

"According to Dr. Justin Frank, a prominent Washington psychoanalyst and author of Bush on the Couch, the younger Bush is a 'paranoid megalomaniac,' partly because his father was emotionally and physically absent during his childhood, which 'triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge in George W.'

"Frank's analysis seems at least partly in line with research I did, showing that a majority of the 500 most influential people in history came from what society would term a dysfunctional home. More than 300 major historical figures were orphans or rejected by their parents, including Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gamal Nasser, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Golda Meier, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and the "father" of the United States, George Washington.

"Some 40 per cent of U.S. presidents lost a parent when they were young, four times the national average. "A serious loss in childhood is a real motivator,' says professor Robert Albert of Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who studies high achievers.

"'People go into politics, especially, to overcome loneliness and early deprivation of love.'
In fact, some psychologists believe the so-called "daddy hole" is an integral part of American culture, where people often seek to fill emotional needs with achievement."

When You Stand Shoulder to Shoulder with America's Army

You stand shoulder to shoulder with the military of the nation that did this and simply left it in its wake. It's Agent Orange and it makes the horror of 9/11 look like kids' play. Vietnam has a population of 84-million. It's estimated that upwards of three and a half million of them have suffered disease or birth defects from the American use of Agent Orange during its Vietnam War.

9/11 ended on 9/11. Vietnam's Agent Orange curse will keep killing and deforming for generations. The chemicals bond to the soil and leach into the water, ensuring that this terror from a past war will linger, perhaps for centuries.

America, naturally, disputes the Vietnamese estimates of Agent Orange victims and - wait for it - says more research is necessary to establish a link between the defoliant and the birth defects. Now we're nearing almost four decades since this stuff was sprayed over the Vietnamese countryside and just how much research has the US done? You guessed it. However if you were a US soldier who got 'exposed' (as opposed to doused with it), you got your compensation cheque a long time ago.

According to the Associated Press, the US Congress recently set aside $3-million to address dioxin contamination in Vietnam.

A lawsuit seeking compensation from Agent Orange manufacturers, filed by the Vietnam Agent Orange Victims Association, is to be heard by a U.S. appeals court on Monday.

Ambassador Marine said in an interview that the U.S. does not plan to provide direct compensation. But he noted that, on top of the US$3 million Congress approved, Washington has spent US$43 million since 1989 helping Vietnamese with disabilities, regardless of their causes.

Fortunately for Iraqis and Afghans caught up in the current war, Agent Orange is no longer being used. They, however, will have to wait and see what effects await them from the depleted uranium shells America likes to use so freely in their countries.

If you're interested in the Agent Orange fiasco, a Canadian firm, Hatfield Consultants have done a lot of work in Vietnam. At their web site http://www.hatfieldgroup.com/ you can find links to numerous books and documentaries on this shameful mess.

Honest Conservatives - US Style

US economics professor Brad DeLong has pondered the meaning of "honest conservative" and has formulated the following categories to assess Republicans:

Class of 2000: People who in 2000 said, "George W. Bush is not qualified to be president, and we should be really worried about this."

Class of 2001: People who in 2001 said, "I supported Bush in 2000, but George W. Bush is not listening to his honest conservative policy advisers, and we should be really worried about this."

Class of 2002: People who in 2002 said, "I supported Bush in 2000 and 2001, but 9/11 has unhinged the administration; its detention and other policies are counterproductive; it needs to be opposed."

Class of 2003: People who in 2003 said, "I supported Bush over 2000-2002, but enough is enough. That's it. I supported the invasion of Iraq because I was certain there was evidence of an advanced nuclear weapons program--otherwise invading Iraq was just stupid. Well, there was no advanced nuclear weapons program. Invading Iraq was just stupid. Plus there's the Medicare drug benefit. These people need to be evicted from power."

Class of 2004: People who in 2004 said, "I've been a Bush supporter. I'm a Republican and a conservative, but I've had enough: I'm voting for Kerry."

Class of 2005: People who in 2005 said, "I voted for Bush in 2004. But I made a mistake. A big mistake."

Class of 2006: People who in 2006 said, "I know I supported Bush up to last year, but that shows I'm not the brightest light on the clued-in tree."

The class of 2007--people who are now opposed to Bush only because they think Bush will drag the Republicans down in 2008--doesn't count. Dead-enders who are still claiming that Bush is Teddy Roosevelt don't count. They aren't honest conservatives. They are only worth scorn, and fit objects for nothing but mockery. One just doesn't joust with them in honorable intellectual combat. It's not done.

I say divide "honest conservatives" into the classes of 2000 to 2006, rank them by seniority according to the date of their public honesty, and use that as a ranking for who to read, who to respect, and who to promote as worthy intellectual adversaries."

Exxon Pleads Not Guilty, Really

Exxon has come out swinging to lay claim to the mantle of environmental consciousness. Yeah, they get it, they really do. Really?

"Kenneth Cohen, vice-president of public affairs for Exxon, said: "Our company has been put in this bucket of not taking the climate issue seriously and that is flat wrong... Those who meet with us understand we are not a denier.

"'We believed then and today that Kyoto is not the right approach... Our opposition to Kyoto has been seen as opposition to climate change and I regret that.'" He said Exxon's long-term aims were to respond to rising energy demand but also to planetary warming.

The firm's funding of third-party thinktanks, which have produced papers questioning the human role in climate change, has recently been heavily criticised in a Greenpeace report.
Exxon retaliated yesterday by saying some of Greenpeace's facts were "just flat wrong" and in one case "absurd", though the company hinted that it may stop funding the controversial thinktanks."

Yeah, right. Exxon long ago promised the Royal Society that it would stop funding these supposed thinktanks yet its cash is still finding its way into their budgets. So long as that continues, don't rely on Exxon's hints.

The Upside of Global Warming

GardenEarth.com brings us the Top 10 Best Things About Global Warming:

10. Why pay for tattoos when melanoma's free?

9. No more pesky weeds. In fact, no more pesky plants.

8. Nile Encephalitis: not just for Egyptians anymore.

7. Furnaces convert easily into tornado shelters.

6. Helsinki: the new Riviera.

5. Middle East oil producers feel right at home— everywhere.

4. Golfers only need a putter and a sand wedge.

3. For those who can't get enough of global warming. One word: Venus.

2. Steaks, medium rare, on the hoof.

1. Three thongs and you're dressed!

This Won't Go Down Well With Washington

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has shoved a thorn in George Bush's side with the announcement that Venezuela will purchase five and up to nine submaries from Russia. A Russian news agency reports Chavez will be in Moscow next week to sign a deal for five Project 636 diesel subs with an option to buy four Project 637 Amur subs at a later date.

Chavez has indicated he wants the subs to thwart any attempted US embargo of Venezuela and to protect the country's oil rich offshore shelf. Last year Venezuela puchased two dozen SU-30 fighters, a number of helicopters and 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles. The country is the second largest customer for Russian arms.

The 636 is an updated version of the Russian Kilo submarine.

Libby Ordered Jailed

According to UPI, Dick Cheney's former right hand man, Scooter Libby, has lost his bid to avoid jail pending the outcome of an appeal against his convictions for perjury and obstruction.

The judge ruled Libby must begin serving his 2-1/2 year sentence without delay but gave the defence team 10-days in which to appeal his decision.

The decision may increase pressure on President Bus to pardon the former White House aide. Libby's lawyers had hoped that could have been put off until nearer the end of Bush's final term in office.

UN Food Envoy Slams Biofuels

Diverting sugar and corn crops to biofuels could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, according to the UN's frontman on the "right to food" issue.

Jean Ziegler said, "There is a great danger for the right to food by the development of biofuels. It (the price) will be paid perhaps by hundreds of thousands of people who will die from hunger."

From Reuters:

"Ziegler said more and more sugar cane plantations in northern and eastern Brazil were being used for biofuels, leaving less land for subsistence farmers.

"Brazil is the world's biggest producer of cane-based fuel ethanol, most of which is destined for the domestic market to meet rapidly growing demand from flex-fuel motorists.

"In some regions of Mexico, the price of maize rose by 16 percent last year, because of rising demand for use in biofuels, according to the independent U.N. envoy.

"'I can understand the Brazilian and Mexican policies which as very indebted countries want to earn hard currency .... But from the point of view of the right to food, which must be the decisive one, it is a catastrophe,' Ziegler said.

"Some 854 million people worldwide -- or one in six -- suffer from hunger, according to the sociologist and former Swiss parliamentarian, who cited U.N. figures."

No Guantanamo for Britain

In a decision that is bound to upset the Blair government and the British Ministry of Defence, the House of Lords has ruled that the British Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights do apply to British soldiers serving abroad.

The Law Lords made the ruling in a case of Baha Musa, an Iraqi hotel receptionist who died in September 2003 after being detained by British troops. The 4-1 decision rejecting an appeal by the Ministry of Defence means that a public inquiry may now be held into the Musa death.

The Blair government argued that the soldiers should not be subject to the British or European laws because they were serving in a conflict in a foreign country.

Human rights campaigners were elated by the decision, which they said held the government to account and meant any British detention facility anywhere in the world was now covered.

"Our law lords have today ensured that there can never be a British Guantanamo anywhere in the world ... there can be no British detention facility where the law does not apply," said Shami Chakrabarti of rights group Liberty.

If the FBI Calls, Pick Up the Phone

The FBI is about to contact a million computer users to notify them their computer has been hijacked by cyber criminals. From BBC:

The FBI has found networks of zombie computers being used to spread spam, steal IDs and attack websites.

The agency said the zombies or bots were "a growing threat to national security".

The FBI has been trying to tackle networks of zombies for some time as part of an initiative it has dubbed Operation Bot Roast.

This operation recently passed a significant milestone as it racked up more than one million individually identifiable computers known to be part of one bot net or another.

The law enforcement organisation said that part of the operation involved notifying people who owned PCs it knew were part of zombie or bot networks. In this way it said it expected to find more evidence of how they are being used by criminals.

In a statement about Operation Bot Roast the FBI urged PC users to practice good computer security which includes using regularly updated anti-virus software and installing a firewall.

For those without basic protections anti-virus companies such as F Secure, Trend Micro, Kaspersky Labs and many others offer online scanning services that can help spot infections.

The organisation said it was difficult for people to know if their machine was part of a botnet.
However it said telltale signs could be if the machine ran slowly, had an e-mail outbox full of mail a user did not send or they get e-mail saying they are sending spam.

Good News for the TarSanders

The Independent ran a feature today on the dwindling future of oil.

BP released a study yesterday claiming that we have enough reserves to meet the existing level of demand for up to 40-years. BP's optimistic forecast was immediately criticized by the London-based, Oil Depletion Analysis Centre. They maintain that the peak for regular, easy to extract and process oil passed in 2005 and that the peak for global oil production from all sources is expected to arrive in the next four years. The warning came from Dr Colin Campbell, "a former chief geologist and vice-president at a string of oil majors including BP, Shell, Fina, Exxon and ChevronTexaco."

"This scenario is flatly denied by BP, whose chief economist Peter Davies has dismissed the arguments of "peak oil" theorists.

"'We don't believe there is an absolute resource constraint. When peak oil comes, it is just as likely to come from consumption peaking, perhaps because of climate change policies as from production peaking.'"

Of course economist Davies is right. He must be, he works for BP. They don't make mistakes, not even in Alaska. Of course there is no absolute resource constraint, not if you're willing to wait a couple of million years and put up with the inconvenience of a couple of mass extinctions. Besides we can all rely on climate change policies to dry up the demand for oil long before then, right? Big Oil really is beginning to sound exactly like Big Tobacco.

Global Warming Denier Man of the Year - Lennie Asper

Back in February the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC released its last major update report on global warming. Unless you've been locked up in somebody's basement for months you'll know the IPCC report warned of the advance of global warming and the urgent need to take remedial action.

Now the IPCC is only 2,500 of the top climate scientists in the world. But there are other voices. Now those other voices may be the same folks who took RJ Reynolds money way back when to boldly deny the link between cigarettes and cancer and they may be the same ones who now take the filthy lucre of Exxon to deny global warming but, hey, that are a contrary voice. That's why Asper's CanWest flagship, the National Post countered the February IPCC report with a whole series of articles from the global warming deniers. Scientist for scientist, CanWest gave the deniers a perversely disproportionate amount of attention.

But the best is yet to come. The February IPCC report received brief and passing coverage in the NatPo but the dodgy denial series is still front and centre on the paper's web page. It may well be the longest lasting series in NatPo history. Who cares if it's bullshit carefully crafted to sow confusion and doubt? Not Leonard Asper.

It's Getting Worse, And Harper Knows It

We know the Chretien Liberals began the Afghanistan mission and we know why. The Martin Liberals, with the support of the opposition, kept that going. However "the mission" found its natural father in the arms of Stephen Harper and, it seems, he can't get enough of it. Harpo loves the mission so much that he's already talking about staying past February, 2009 and making dire pronouncements of what might befall Afghanistan, its people and our friend, Hamid Karzai if we leave. The Harpies even have the Bush lexicon down pat, stuff like "cut and run" and "stay the course."

When Harpo speaks of Afghanisnam, he's careful to be upbeat. He knows the Canadian people aren't happy with the war and the casualties our soldiers have been taking. So he has to talk about saving the Karzai government and driving the Taliban out of southern Afghanistan and all the success we're having.

If he believes that upbeat pitch it's only because he's convinced himself. The Globe & Mail has used the Freedom of Information Act to pry a copy of the PMO's true assessment of the situation over there and it's markedly at odds with Harpo's swill:

"The Taliban resurgence has been dramatic," stated a document dated Nov. 9, 2006.

It describes how the faltering insurgency was given a huge boost by support from sources in Pakistan, the Gulf states and "Jihadi-minded groups and individuals."

"The unpredicted success that suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) had in southern Afghanistan last winter further reinforced the spiralling growth of financial assistance, recruitment, training, equipping and morale improvement" of the Taliban, it said, noting that insurgent spirits were particularly raised with the high-profile shooting down of several helicopters.

"Because of expanding poppy cultivation and the growing insurgency, the analysis noted, the deterioration of security had effectively created "two Afghanistans" with the North and West advancing while the South and East remain "fractious and relatively stagnant."

"As for Mr. Karzai, the PCO analysis noted that his leadership is "continuously challenged and eroded by the many problems facing Afghanistan and the complex relationships over which he has no control. Consequently, Karzai's support may be weakening to a new low."

"It adds that Mr. Karzai faces "questions of legitimacy for his governance team - both in Kabul and out in the provinces.'"

Two remarkable aspects of this assessment. The first is that it almost precisely parallels every other objective assessment coming out of Afghanistan. The second is that it is so directly at odds with the spin and propaganda we get fed to us by the Harpies, an act of sheer contempt for the Canadian people.

They Sure Will Now, Jack

Jack Granatstein has just explained to the Taliban why they should pay special attention to Quebec's own Royal 22nd Regiment when they ship out to Afghanistan.

The Toronto Star interviewed Granatstein, a real booster of Canada's newfound military muscle, about the Van Doos:

"Historian Jack Granatstein said insurgents know that opinion in Canada is split and will try to capitalize on that as more than 2,000 troops from CFB Valcartier, near Quebec City, begin to deploy over the coming months.

"'I fully expect the Taliban to target the Van Doos,' he said yesterday in an interview, referring to the famed Royal 22nd Regiment.

"'I think (the Van Doos are) going to do very well militarily but I think they will take casualties and that's the difficulty.'"

An Interesting Pair

This is Fred Thompson - Senator, television and movie actor, and now candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Beside him is Mrs. Fred Thompson who may just become America's next First Lady.

A Sign of the Times? Formula One Leaving?

The United States could lose its one and only Formula One car race to - India. F1 racing is huge around the world but not in the states where NASCAR, drag racing and CART dominate. Still, F1 is the world standard.

Formula One boss, Bernie Ecclestone said it isn't necessary for F1 to retain a presence in the US, "There are bigger markets for us to be in other parts of the world. We could be in India soon instead of the United States. We don't have a lot of sponsors from the U.S., no American teams and only one driver."

Ecclestone's take, however, isn't shared by some of the key manufacturers such as Mercedes and BMW. Their firmly opposed to F1 leaving America and for good reason - that's where they sell more of their cars than anywhere else. The sole American F1 race is held at Indianapolis.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Comedy Central is gearing up for a new show, Lil' Bush. From The Guardian:

"Lil' Bush portrays the Bush administration as a gang of children - Lil' Bush, Lil' Condi and Lil' Cheney - running wild in the White House and worldwide.

"Compare Lil' George speaking about his role in life - "I hate doing what I'm told. I want to be a decider" - with Mr Bush's: "My job is a job to make decisions. I'm a decision - if the job description were, what do you do, it's decision maker. And I make a lot of big ones and I make a lot of little ones."

"Lil' Bush began life in the autumn as a series of short cartoons made specifically for mobile phones.

"But the first of the made-for-televison episodes was due to reach a much wider audience last night with its debut on Comedy Central, which has about 90 million subscribers. It began with Lil' George visiting Iraq to hunt for some good news as a Father's Day present for dad, the first President Bush.

"In the second episode Lil' Cheney, who bites the heads off chickens and sucks their blood, has an affair with Barbara Bush, with scenes that might be too crude for some tastes."

"According to Donick Cary, creator of the new cartoon series, the transformation of Mr Bush into a cartoon character proved to be relatively easy: his short, simplistic and often confused statements helped.

"Mr Cary, whose credits include the Simpsons, said: "Somehow, this president that we have lends himself to thinking in a simplistic, cartoony fashion. He's always been about soundbites, one-word answers, move ahead, act from the gut."

BattleCreek Gets a Conscience - Bravo!

Major kudos to Kelloggs.

Kellog has announced it will phase out advertising its products to children under age 12 unless the foods meet specificnutrition guidelines for calories, sugar, fat and sodium.

Kellogg also announced that it would stop using licensed characters or branded toys to promote foods unless the products meet the nutrition guidelines.

The voluntary changes, which will be put in place over the next year and a half, will apply to about half of the products that Kellogg currently markets to children worldwide, including Froot Loops and Apple Jacks cereals and some varieties of Pop Tarts.

The president and chief executive, David Mackay, said those products would either be reformulated to meet the nutrition guidelines or would no longer be advertised to children.

“It is a big change,” Mr. Mackey said. “Where we can make the changes without negatively impacting the taste of the product, we will.”

A Brit Soldier on NATO Firepower in Afghanistan

Last year Leo Docherty was a British soldier serving in Afghanistan. He took part in the tough fighting to winkle the Taliban out of the village of Sangin in Helmand province. The following is an excerpt from a piece Docherty wrote for The Guardian:

"...During our advance an 11-year-old boy was killed in the crossfire, shot in the head accidentally by our allies, the Afghan national army. Despite this we established our base in a local government building, the district centre, and patrolled the bazaar every day. We bought mangos and chatted to the locals - who seemed ambivalent about our presence.

"Just below the surface, however, tension simmered. The boy's death made us a threat to the local population. Despite promising development we had nothing to show for all our big talk. Crucially we had no real answers to questions about the future of the all-important poppy, the basis of Sangin's economy. To the locals, we were clumsy, interfering foreigners, whose arrival presaged conflict and the destruction of their livelihood. Days later Sangin exploded into violence, seeing some of the fiercest fighting by British troops since the Korean war, and which continues as I write.

"Sadly, many more civilians across Afghanistan have met the same end as the 11-year-old. Recently in Sangin an estimated 21 civilians were killed by bombs dropped from Nato planes after US and British soldiers were ambushed. In the eastern city of Jalalabad in March, US soldiers shot dead 19 civilians in the aftermath of a bomb attack. And yesterday seven policemen were killed by "friendly fire" in an air strike in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

"Often outnumbered and outgunned by militia men, the immediate response of Nato troops is to call on overwhelming firepower delivered by artillery, helicopter gunships and jets. The troops aren't wicked, they're just keen on staying alive. But these weapons are blunt-edged and indiscriminate. The price of overwhelming firepower is the death of nearby civilians.

"But accidental or not, civilian deaths catastrophically undermine the entire Nato effort, as relatives of the dead, bent on vengeance, flock to the Taliban cause. As Pashtuns, the inhabitants of Helmand hold Badal, the pursuit of revenge, as a central concept of their social code, which is devotedly adhered to. "A Pashtun waited a hundred years for revenge," a local saying goes, "and was pleased with such quick work." Indeed, the Taliban are ruthlessly exploiting this mindset by deliberately engaging Nato troops from villages.

"Afghans are sick of foreign armies killing their people. Their president, Hamid Karzai, has publicly criticised Nato's methods and warned that "bad consequences" will follow if civilian deaths continue unchecked. The Afghan parliament has called for a halt to Nato military offensives, and for negotiations with Afghan members of the Taliban. In Kabul last month, I met displaced civilians from Helmand province, some of the 80,000 to 115,000 people the UN estimates have lost their homes in the fighting in southern Afghanistan. "Why do British planes kill our people?" they said. I struggled to answer.

"The British command in Helmand should heed the president's warning. The Taliban now control 50% of Helmand province. Development is happening nowhere, and opium production has reached record levels. Unless we immediately de-escalate the level of violence and prevent further civilian deaths, all of Helmand will be lost.

"In Sangin today the district centre is a battle-scarred fortified position where more than a dozen British troops have been killed fighting from trenches. Soldiers no longer sit on the roof to enjoy the view. The town lies in ruins, with little trace left of the once thriving bazaar. A peaceful, developed Helmand cannot be won by the sword, and the longer we try, the greater the tragedy."

Who to Believe, What to Believe

No matter how badly and persistently exposed and discredited they become, the stalwarts of the global warming denial industry just keep at it. Give them a moment of your time and you'll be overwhelmed with information, some of it distorted and a lot of it deliberately made up. The worst part is that a lot of this nonsense gets distributed and thereby effectively validated by the right-wing media.

What to do? If you want the other side of the story, truth instead of fiction, go to http://www.realclimate.org/ the site that bills itself as "Climate Science from Climate Scientists." Some of the articles are, admittedly, directed to scientists but they make an effort to include a lot of information that is digestible by lay people like me.

They also post a convenient index of sources you can reference, sorted by the reader's existing knowledge of global warming science.

There's going to be a lot of debate in Canada over global warming and what to do about it. The more you know the easier that debate will be to understand.

What the G8 Really Agreed To

For all the bluster about the great environmental breakthrough at the G8 conference, here's what they actually agreed to, the actual text:

"We take note of and are concerned about the recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. The most recent report concluded both, that global temperatures are rising, that this is caused largely by human activities and, in addition,that for increases in global average temperature, there are projected to be major changes in ecosystem structure and function with predominantly negative consequences for biodiversity and ecosystems, e.g. water and food supply.

"We are therefore committed to taking strong and early action to tackle climate change in order to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Taking into account the scientific knowledge as represented in the recent IPCC reports, global greenhouse gas emissions must stop rising, followed by substantial global emission reductions. In setting a global goal for emissions reductions in the process we have agreed today involving all major emitters, we will consider seriously the decisions made by the European Union, Canada and Japan which include at least a halving of global emissions by 2050. We commit to achieving these goals and invite the major emerging economies to join us in this endeavour."

If that sounds less than inspiring - well it is. It's going to take something with a lot more substance than this drivel before we're going to see any genuinely meaningful global action.

An Inside Job at Samarra?

The 2006 Attack

The big news out of Iraq today is the bombing of the Shiite Samarra shrine, the Al-Askariya Mosque. A similar bombing at the mosque in 2006 sparked the current wave of sectarian violence. Today's bombing took out two minarets.

At first it was thought to be just an al-Qaeda effort to fan the flames. Now it seems it may have been an inside job in which Iraqi security forces colluded with al-Qaeda saboteurs

U.S. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, told CNN he believes members of the Iraqi security forces who were guarding the site either assisted or directly took part in helping al Qaeda insurgents place and detonate explosives at the mosque's minarets.

Mixon said there was no evidence at all that this was an attack using mortars or anything of the like and said that this was an inside job. 15 members of the Iraqi security force at the mosque have been arrested.

Afghan Deaths on NATO Agenda

NATO defence ministers will get together tomorrow to review the alliance's mission in Afghanistan. One topic for discussion will be civilian casualties or "collateral damage" as they call it. At this late stage (better late than never) they want to review procedures to find ways to reduce the deaths of civilians that threaten to undermine the NATO mission and the Karzai government.

Here's a prediction. The one thing that won't cross their lips is the only solution - stop using artillery and air strikes to make up for a gross shortage of troops on the ground. Waging war on the cheap inevitably results in unnecessary civilian deaths.

Did you ever notice that when we have these airstrike catastrophes, it's almost always when our troops are on the defensive. We send them out on patrols. They get ambushed. To save their own skins our troops have to call in air support. Civilians get whacked - by mistake of course.

We get ambushed because the bad guys control the territory, not us. If we controlled the territory they wouldn't have the freedom of movement to set up ambushes at their leisure and to take our troops by surprise when and where they like. No, we claim that we control this territory but they're the side setting up the ambushes.

We don't control the territory because our forces are grossly understrength. The NATO ministers know that and so do their generals. But they'd rather drive stakes through their hearts than admit it. Admitting it would mean that we have our soldiers over there giving their lives to buy time for a failing and corrupt government that continues to lose popular support. That's a candle that's burning at both ends.

The irony is that the problem is a woeful shortage of troops but the answer isn't more troops. The answer lies across the border as the following item explains.

Why We Can't Win in Afghanistan

The preceding item deals with NATO's conundrum on how to stop killing so many Afghan civilians in the war with the Taliban. However we also need to accept that we're not going to defeat the Taliban militarily and that this war will drag on, if the Karzai government can survive, until there are some fundamental changes involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Malcolm Rifkind, former British foreign secretary and secretary of state for defence, laid it all out recently in The Independent:

"...when under pressure the Taliban, and their al-Qa'ida colleagues, retreat to the wild frontier area on the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In these regions, nominally part of Pakistan, the writ of Islamabad does not run, and the rebels can find respite, reorganise, train and recruit.

"... it is widely known that elements within Pakistan, particularly in the army and the intelligence service, are either helping the Taliban or, at least, are turning a blind eye to them.

"...the United States and Britain are at fault for not fully understanding why the Pakistanis are reluctant to dismantle the Taliban. It is not because of any sympathy for terrorism or admiration of al-Qa'ida, a distinct organisation from the Taliban. It is because of longstanding Pakistani national interests that have been largely ignored by the West.

"The first point to realise is that the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan has never been recognised by successive Afghan governments, and remains a bone of contention. Given that the Pashtun and Baluchi people straddle the border, this has alarming implications for Islamabad.

"The Pashtuns are the leading tribal grouping in Afghanistan and there have been several insurgencies by the Baluchis in Pakistan's southernmost province. The issue is, however, even more complicated, linked as it is to the dispute between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, and to wider India-Pakistan relations.

"During the Cold War, the Afghan monarchy allied itself with the Soviet Union and India in an attempt to obtain weapons to use against the Pakistanis, who were, in turn, supplied by the United States. The Indians, for their part, were happy to see a Pakistan weakened and distracted by frontier problems on their western border.

"Against this background, the Pakistanis, who have always been sensitive about the integrity of their state, welcomed the Taliban as they were religious fundamentalists, not Pashtun nationalists, and therefore had no claim on Pakistani territory.

"The five years of Taliban rule in Kabul were the only exception to 60 years of poor Afghan-Pakistani relations since 1948. Barnett Rubin, a regional analyst, has remarked that from a Pakistani perspective Taliban rule is very acceptable: 'An unstable Afghanistan is the second-best option to a stable one ruled by your friends.'

"If the United States and Britain want more wholehearted co-operation from Pakistan they need to work with the grain of Pakistani self-interest. This could be achieved in three ways. First, Mr Karzai and his government must be pressed to recognise the current frontier with Pakistan, known as the Durand Line. Second, India should be encouraged to reduce its presence in Afghanistan. It has opened two consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad. The Pakistanis fear that these are being used as bases from which to foment mischief. Third, Musharraf must be encouraged to introduce more normal politics into Waziristan and the frontier areas. At present, political parties are banned, giving Islamic jihadists and their allies a free run at winning local hearts and minds.

"Winning in Afghanistan means defeating the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in Helmand. It means winning the support of the Afghan people through social reform and economic growth. But all that effort may be wasted if the frontier region of Pakistan remains a safe haven."

If you've read this far you may have the sinking feeling that we've misplayed our hand in Afghanistan for the last six years. That leaves us having to decide whether we just write that off and start again or accept our defeat and try to work out some deal between Kabul and the Taliban - just like the Kabul government wants.

This Dick Is Up To His Old Tricks Again

The creepiest veep in American history is at it again. The Dick really, really wants to whack Iran before the villagers arrive at the White House with their pitchforks and torches to drive out the monsters. As he did with Iraq six years earlier he's trying to launch his next war on a bed of carefully crafted deception.

The Inter Press Service reports that, this time however, the military isn't rolling over:

"The allegation that Iran has reversed a decade-long policy and is now supporting the Taliban, conveyed in a series of press articles quoting "senior officials" in recent weeks, is related to a broader effort by officials aligned with Vice President Dick Cheney to portray Iran as supporting Sunni insurgents, including al Qaeda, to defeat the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

"An article in the Guardian published May 22 quoted an anonymous U.S. official as predicting an "Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive in Iraq, linking al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies" and as referring to the alleged "Iran-al Qaeda linkup" as "very sinister".

"That article and subsequent reports on CNN May 30, in the Washington Post Jun. 3 and on ABC news Jun. 6 all included an assertion by an unnamed U.S. official or a "senior coalition official" that Iran is following a deliberate policy of supplying the Taliban's campaign against U.S., British and other NATO forces.

"Both Gates and McNeill denied flatly last week that there is any evidence linking Iranian authorities to those arms. Gates told a press conference on Jun. 4, "We do not have any information about whether the government of Iran is supporting this, is behind it, or whether it's smuggling, or exactly what is behind it." Gates said that "some" of the arms in question might be going to Afghan drug smugglers.

"The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. McNeill, implied that the arms trafficking from Iran is being carried out by private interests. "[W]hen you say weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting these weapons here," he told Jim Loney of Reuters June 5. "That's not my view at all.'"

Dick by name, Dick by nature. Cheney already has manipulated his country into a draining, unwinnable war that it cannot even escape. Rather than working to resolve that fiasco, he'd rather get the US in yet another megawar. After all, Halliburton makes out like a bandit, win or lose, and these days the business of war is one of the most profitable businesses to be found.

A Serious and Chronic Insurgency

Tony Blair says Afghanistan could become a hotbed of anti-Western violence, another Iraq. Well, Tony - duh.

In the now standard Tony Blair on-the-way-out performance, The British PM marked the beginning of his second-last week in power by trying to fudge any responsibility for fueling Islamist extremism in Iraq:

"The mistake was not understanding the fundamentally rooted nature of this global movement that we face and that actually in a situation – whether Iraq or Afghanistan – where you are trying to bring about a different form of government, these people will try to stop us,” he said after a speech on media at Reuters headquarters in London.

Blair might even get away with that nonsense except for the facts that get in his way. The Anglo-American war on Iraq did fuel Islamist extremism but not just in Iraq. It gave al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups a hell of a boost everywhere from West Africa to Europe to Asia. Let's make it perfectly plain - George w. Bush and his lapdog, Tony Blair, personally became al-Qaeda's top recruiting officers. Shrub, in particular, also made recruiting much harder for his own military. Mission Accomplished, I guess.

And just how are things going in Afghanistan? The Harpos and Hillier tell us everything's going great. What do you think? “We face a serious situation … clearly in the south and east there is a serious and chronic insurgency,” Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan, said.

Al Gore on Where Democracy Went Wrong

Excerpted from The National Review:

Democracy is a conversation. And the way any conversation unfolds has implications for what kind of conversation it is, what results or conclusions are reached. American democracy was intended to be a robust and vigorous multi-way conversation that individuals could join freely without any significant barriers. ...To an extent that was not appreciated at the time, that conversation was based on a particular kind of expression, the printed word.

Just as the printing press had overturned the medieval information monopoly that supported feudalism, a half-century ago the printing press itself was replaced as the dominant medium by electronic broadcasting in the particular form of television - over the air, over cable, over satellite ...To take one example, in the last elections in the contested races, candidates in both parties spent an average of eighty percent of their campaign budget not on the Internet or pamphlets or magazine ads but on thirty-second television ads. That's what works now and the way it works is troubling. It's not a multi-way conversation or even a two-way conversation. It is often a manipulative exercise utilizing the tools of persuasion that were developed by advertisers of commercial products in conjunction with psychologists and researchers who plumb the inner workings of our thought process in order to devise ways to de-emphasize logic and facts and reason.

I feel more confident than ever before that democracy will prevail and that the American people are rising to the challenge of reinvigorating self government. Broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes. As a society we are getting smarter. Network democracy is taking hold.