Mission Accomplished, Jerk. Russia Suspends CFE Treaty

Dammit, where is Lee Harvey Oswald now that we need him?

You may never have heard of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty but it was a critical element in easing of military tensions between West and East at the end of the Cold War. That was the deal where we all said we were going to play nice for a change so that we could get a good night's sleep at long last.

It worked real well for a while until a moronic frat boy and his diseased, demonic sidekick arrived on the scene and decided to stir things up by putting missiles and radars on the other side's doorstep.

The upshot of this Oval Office lunacy? Big Vlad Putin has signed a law suspending the CFE. From the New York Times:

"The treaty, signed in the last days of the Cold War, limited the number of tanks, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, artillery and other heavy weapons that both NATO and Russia could deploy in Western Europe and the western part of Russia.

The U.S., the European Union and NATO had all urged Russia not to suspend the treaty, which was regarded in Europe as a cornerstone agreement in maintaining security on the continent."

America's Number One Nitwit has done a truly monstrous job at shredding the fabric of peace woven with enormous effort by his predecessors. Like an unruly little punk he got away with it because there was no one around able to slap him down when he needed it.

Now we have arms races foraging ahead in every corner of the northern hemisphere. Why? So these despicable Chickenhawks who ducked the fight at every turn when it was their turn can now act tough, maybe even manly. What a joke.

Who Says Brian Mulroney Took a Dime from Schreiber?

Ask yourself this, when did Brian Mulroney admit taking $300,000 from Karlheinz Schreiber? When has he acknowledged taking Dime One from Schreiber? Have you ever heard him say it? Have you ever read where he's actually said it to anyone? I haven't and I'll bet neither have you.

We've heard Schreiber say it. We've learned about it in the great reporting from the Fifth Estate and the Globe & Mail but I can't recall anyone even getting a chance to ask Mulroney if he got the $300,000 he's alleged to have received.

Okay, okay, I know, Mulroney's supposed spokesman, Luc Lavoie, seems to have acknowledged the fact, even called it his boss's worst mistake. But that's Luc Lavoie, not Brian Mulroney. We've all heard about Mulroney promoting Schreiber's pasta venture of the Bear Head armoured vehicle plant proposal - but we haven't heard that from the mouth of the one guy who, at this point, truly matters - Martin Brian Mulroney.

Coming into the upcoming inquiry, Mulroney is seemingly trapped by facts. No one can know what he's facing better than Mulroney and his counsel. But take a hard look at the facts that confront him. For all we know, he may have a case built up that will blow Schreiber out of the water and make Lavoie look like an ill-informed,loud-mouth klutz.

Schreiber is vulnerable, that much we know. Lavoie can always say he was working from assumptions. Get enough of the clutter out of the way and all Brian Mulroney may have to overcome is Brian Mulroney.

That's not to say he doesn't have a lot of explaining to do. It's merely to say that a lot of what appear to be hurdles that lie in his path probably aren't as daunting as we might see them. What I'm also saying is that we're beginning to let assumptions get the better of us and, in these matters, that's like leading with your chin.

Has Hillary Peaked?

For a while she was seen as having a virtual lock on the Democratic presidential nomination. Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, that was then, this is now and she still has a lot of "now" left before Dems decide who will run for them in 2008.

Hillary's problem isn't money or profile. It certainly isn't Bill. It's the American people. They don't like her. It's not that they disagree with her policies, they just find her disagreeable. When Zogby reports that fully 50% of Americans say they would "never" vote for her, a number that's trending upwards, Hillary slips from the asset column into the liability column for the Democrats.

Worse still, she continues to bleed. She led Obama by 23 points in September, that's now down to 14 and falling.

It's bold and ambitious having the two top candidates, a woman and a black, when Americans have never elected anyone but a white man to the job. But will it get the job done for the Democrats in November? Can the Dems afford to take the chance of losing the White House? If the Democrats field a black or a woman and that person loses in an election that is very much the Dems to lose, when will a woman or a black even be considered seriously again?

The Walls Close In on Brian Mulroney

How is he going to talk his way out of this one?

Until today I figured Mulroney was going to claim he earned the $300,000 he received from Karlheinz Schreiber by promoting the Thyssen/Bear Head armoured vehicle project. The story about Schreiber's pasta business seems to have turned into a pile of damp semolina, so the weapons plant seemed to be the last refuge.

Except the door on that one seems to have been slammed shut by Mulroney's own former top aide, Norman Spector. In a Canadian Press interview, Spector confirmed that Mulroney did indeed intervene to support the project to build light-armoured vehicles in Nova Scotia. The only problem is that, if he got paid by Schreiber for his services, this was long before Mulroney stepped down as Prime Minister.

Spector has added to the record being instructed by Mulroney to make Bear Head a reality. With that, Mulroney was transforming the proposal from a bureaucratic issue into a political matter. Spector also said that the sun set on the Bear Head deal when he informed Mulroney that the project would cost the government $100-million.

The ever dutiful scribe, Spector was even able to tell Canadian Press the date of the final discussion 16 December, 1990, and Mulroney's response: "In that case, the project is dead."

This seems to suggest that the Bear Head business was over, as far as Mulroney was concerned, in late 1990, while he was still prime minister.

If Bear Head is ruled out and the pasta story is just that, a story, what's left? Don't look at me, I'm not even going to say that.

After Drought, Rain Can Be Deadly

After an extended drought you might think that heavy rainfall would be welcome. Not always. In fact, in parts of California recently swept by brush fires, the rain can turn out to be even more deadly.

The fires wiped out trees and brush, vegetation that is essential in preventing flash floods and mudslides when the rain hits.

In parts of San Diego county, rainfalls as heavy as two inches, caused evacuation orders to be issued in some canyons. Malibu is also under a rain watch.

Gay Rights for the US Military

28-retired US generals and admirals have signed a letter to Congress asking that gays and lesbians in the American military be treated like first-class citizens. The group want Congress to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" law.

President Bill Clinton wanted a total end to the ban on homosexuals serving in the US military but was forced to accept the "don't ask, don't tell" law as a compromise.

Among Democrats, Senators John Edwards and Barak Obama are strong supporters for scrapping the existing law. Obama compares it to the integration of blacks in the armed forces as both a moral issue and an achievable goal.

The Pentagon, however, isn't showing much enthusiasm at moving to fully integrate homosexuals in the armed services. No Republican presidential candidate supports scrapping "don't ask, don't tell."

Evel's Last Ride

Evel Knievel has jumped the celestial Snake River Canyon. The 69-year old daredevil died today from diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis.

I think he wrote his own epitaph: ''No king or prince has lived a better life. You're looking at a guy who's really done it all. And there are things I wish I had done better, not only for me but for the ones I loved.''

Vancouver's Game Mascots

Some clever BC'er figured out how to tweak the Vancouver game mascots

An Offer Too Good to Refuse? Yeah, Sure

The Toronto Star has a John Wayne moment today, an article describing how Canadian army officers in Panjwai are getting all macho with the villagers. Here's an account of an ultimatum given the local chiefs:

"Align with us against the Taliban, the Canadians told the chieftains, and the people of embattled Panjwaii will reap untold rewards, starting with a large stack of Ottawa-and-Washington-backed development dollars poised for the first whisper of actual security.

"Remain mere observers to lawless insurgency and – here comes the stick – Panjwaii will be forgotten. Unless the elders soon seize their tribal entitlement to power and influence and take a stand, the spoils of stability will go to a more hospitable patch of Kandahar province.

"Though the ultimatum came without a deadline, there was an unmistakable urgency in the Canadian message yesterday to a rare full quorum of the Panjwaii tribal council. Repeated separately by three different officers, the or-else scenario was clear. Just how deeply the warning registered with the Afghan elders, less so."

The reality of the ultimatum is that it asks the chiefs to sign their own death warrants - for themselves and their families.

To accept this deal the villagers need to know that Canada will maintain sizeable forces in and around their villages, 24/7 for ever and ever amen. Because, if we don't, (and we won't) the Taliban will do what they always do. They'll come into their villages and kill them and their families for collaborating. Barbaric as that is, it's how insurgencies function. And, according to the report, the villagers know the deal:

"You tell me, how can we provide security?" asked Haji Ghulam Rasool, representative of the Noorzai clan in council, who said the foreign soldiers have an inflated sense of the tribal leaders' leverage over the local population.

"We are empty, we don't have weapons. I am a leader, but I am also really just a farmer. The authority of the tribe is weak. And until we have something in our hands to offer, plus stronger police and government to back us up, how are we supposed to act?"

The worst part of this ultimatum nonsense is that it has put the Canadian forces' credibility on the block. We've given them an offer they can't afford to accept and threatened them with consequences we can't afford to impose. They don't have much choice but to call our bluff. Are we going to let Panjwai fall under the control of the Taliban because the villagers don't have the ability to hold them off? Whatever we do, the result will say a lot more about us than about the chiefs or the Taliban and it'll be a message that'll spread quickly throughout Kandahar.

What a boneheaded stunt.

The US Supreme Court's Mute

US Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas is never short of words when he wants to slag liberals but, on the bench, he's a mute.

This guy has to be the most disinterested judge in history, save for those old farts who just nod off (they really do exist, truste me). The thing is, Clarence somehow stays awake and yet he still has nothing to say.

Now, good judges usually allow counsel to have their say without undue interruptions. Every now and then, though, especially at the appellate level, they do need to question how a lawyer contends certain case law or statutes ought to be applied to the facts of a given case. It's at the highest levels that the law truly evolves to suit society's evolution.

So what's the deal with Thomas? In the course of this year's hearings, US Supreme Court justices spoke out 2,244 times. Justice Thomas' contribution to the legal discourse? 0, nothing, nil, nada... zip.

In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal's law blog, Supreme Court Justice Thomas, hasn't even farted since February, 2006. He's not asked a question, he's not made a comment, in almost two years.

No wonder he's got time to write tomes slagging liberals.

Has It Really Come to This?

Is the best way to deal with climate change to arm ourselves to kill off those we've harmed most?

That's Naomi Klein's take on an apparent recent surge in investment bucks, not toward green technologies, but into the weapons and security industries.

Klein gets this hot tip from "Douglas Lloyd, a director of Venture Business Research, which tracks trends in venture capitalism. 'I expect investment activity in this sector to remain buoyant,' he said recently. Lloyd's bouncy mood was inspired by the money that is gushing into private security and defence companies. He added: 'I also see this as a more attractive sector, as many do, than clean energy.'"

"According to Lloyd, the really big money - despite all the government incentives - is turning away from clean-energy technologies, and is banking instead on gadgets that promise to seal wealthy countries and individuals into hi-tech fortresses.

"So why is "homeland security", not green energy, the hot new sector? Perhaps because there are two distinct business models that can respond to our climate and energy crisis. We can develop policies and technologies to get us off this disastrous course. Or we can develop policies and technologies to protect us from those we have enraged through resource wars and displaced through climate change, while simultaneously shielding ourselves from the worst of both war and weather. (The ultimate expression of this second option is in Hummer's new television adverts: the gas-guzzler is seen carrying its cargo to safety in various disaster zones, followed by the slogan "HOPE: Hummer Owners Prepared for Emergencies". It's a bit like the Marlboro man doing grief counselling in a cancer ward.) In short, we can choose to fix, or we can choose to fortress. Environmental activists and scientists have been yelling for the fix. The homeland security sector, on the other hand, believes the future lies in fortresses.

"As Lloyd explains: 'The failure rate of security businesses is much lower than clean-tech ones; and, as important, the capital investment required to build a successful security business is also much lower.' In other words, finding solutions for real problems is hard, but turning a profit from those problems is easy.

"Bush wants to leave our climate crisis to the ingenuity of the market. Well, the market has spoken: it will not take us off this disastrous course. In fact, the smart money is betting that we will stay on it."

Is Klein just some Doomsday fantasist? I wish but I don't think so. This is a candle we're burning at both ends - increasing carbon emissions at one end, time to implement practical solutions at the other. As those two ends draw ever nearer, the pressures of climate change(compounded by other environmental challenges such as desertification, water exhaustion, resource depletion, peak oil and all the other problems) will inevitably draw more and more support toward defensive options over the remedial alternatives.

Unfortunately, I agree with Mr. Lloyd. In the West, too many people don't want to really think about these problems and what is really needed to deal with them. If you want examples of how populations in great nations from the past either didn't see or chose to simply ignore what was consuming their civilizations, read Jared Diamond's great book "Collapse." As a species, we're quite capable of doing ourselves in, we really are. We're also capable of overcoming enormous challenges, but only when we make conscious decisions - in time - to solve our problems.

Playing Semantics With Global Warming

Define "major emitters."

EnviroMin John Baird revealed his disingenous commitment to the fight against global warming today when he fell back on the old saw that all major emitters of greenhouse gases must agree to reduce their emissions or there'll be no deal, at least not for Canada.

Of course, Baird's con game is to ignore per capita emissions and consider solely total emissions. That completely ignores population disparities among nations. For example, India is now a "major emitter" of GHGs based on its overall population but not when you work out how much the average Indian emits compared to the average Canadian.

Baird wants a sweetheart deal for the white folks, you and me. We'll pretend we're not the real problem and haven't been for the past half century or better.

It's clearly open to the Indians to argue that they'll meet our conditions just as soon as Canada's per capita GHG emission levels come down to their own. How patently unreasonable. That would mean we'd have to cut our emissions by 90% or more, just for starters. Don't these backward (i.e. non-white) types know that we have some God-given right to be energy hogs and GHG swine? It's not our fault if they come in at a billion plus population.

Maybe what Baird should be saying is what he really means. If you want to play in our league, get rid of a billion or so of your people and then we'll have a level playing field. Now don't forget, Baird and Harper are the same Con-men who won't give up their "intensity-based" swindle for the TarSands.

Defending the Great Lakes

U.S. environmentalists are calling for stronger laws to defend the Great Lakes against demands for fresh water from the drought-striken southern states. From the Buffalo News:

“The Great Lakes are facing the one-two punch of global warming and water diversion,” said Noah Hall, an environmental law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and a co-author of the report. “We have known for many years that existing laws are inadequate to protect the Great Lakes from diversions and overuse. Now we know that climate change is certain to put additional stress and pressure on the Great Lakes.”

The National Wildlife Foundation published the report, with the backing of Environmental Advocates of New York and five other environmental groups from across the Great Lakes states.

In some ways, Lake Erie, because it’s a very shallow lake, is facing a bigger problem,” Hall said. “This could really change the surface area and the shoreline.”

More shoreline will be exposed, thereby making current lakefront properties less attractive, the report said. In addition, docks and marinas may have to be relocated, and ships may have to reduce the amount of cargo they carry to avoid scraping bottom.

And that would be just the beginning of the region’s problems. Noting that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential candidate, recently suggested a national water policy — and said “Wisconsin is awash in water” — environmentalists fear that the parched Southwest and South could try to divert water from the Great Lakes.

Great Lakes states have a chance to prevent that by ratifying — and getting Congress to ratify — the Great Lakes Compact as soon as possible, environmentalists said.

The proposed compact is an eight-state agreement that would call for joint management of the Great Lakes. The deal also would ban new or increased water diversions either within the Great Lakes basin or to other parts of the country.

If you think this problem is overblown, take some time to look through southern papers such as the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Then head west and check out some papers from Nevada and Arizona. There's a very serious drought going on down there and that's coupled with enormous population growth over the past two decades. Something has to give.

Mountie Who Shot Ian Bush Exonerated

The head of the commission for complaints against the RCMP has ruled that Constable Paul Koester acted in self-defence when he shot and killed Ian Bush.

"After carefully considering the circumstances, I concluded that Constable Koester had a reasonable apprehension of death and believed that he could not otherwise preserve himself from death other than to use lethal force. Accordingly, Constable Koester acted in self-defence."

Here's the nub of the problem. From Global News:

"Koester, who stands 6-4 and weighs 180 pounds, insisted the six-foot, 187-pound laborer was atop his back choking the life out of him when he managed to free his gun.

In a physical feat even RCMP investigators conceded was worthy of a contortionist, the Constable got the gun behind his own back, up to the back of Bush's head and shot him.

He refused to reenact what happened for investigators and the coroner's inquest that was held earlier this year. "

Koester "refused to re-enact" this amazing feat but you can try it for yourself. Lie on the ground. Have a friend stradle your back and place his hands around your throat. Then, face down, reach around behind your back and point your finger into the back of your friend's head. Don't worry about the extra distance that would be required to accomodate a gun, just try it with your finger. See if you can "re-enact" the shooting of Ian Bush. Then ask yourself why no one, including Koester, has been able to re-enact this self-defence shooting scenario. And then draw your own conclusions.

Paul Kennedy's punchline came in this astonishing finding: Kennedy said the RCMO conducted a highly professional investigation "free from any manner of conflict of interest, bias or partiality" into the slaying. Here's how the investigation into one of their own was conducted, you be the judge:

The force didn't interrogate the shooter, Koester, for three months after the killing. Investigators succumbed to the constable's demands that they submit questions in writing to him in advance. Koester was obviously treating the incident as a homicide, why weren't the investigators?

Free from any manner of conflict of interest? When the RCMP investigates one of its own there's an inherent appearance of conflict of interest. When you don't talk to the shooter for three months and then give him your questions in advance, that smacks of bias and partiality. Sorry Mr. Kennedy, you'll have to do better than that.

If It Walks Like a Duck

Trying to uncover what actually transpired between two suspect individuals is rarely easy and the outcome is even more rarely tidy. Counsel trying to unravel questionable dealings don't count on finding the great smoking gun. It does happen, but rarely. Instead, they usually have to be content with uncovering a fabric of little lies, half truths and inconsistencies. It's the way they point when they're all put together that settles the issue.

How does one go about that? There are techniques that can be pretty effective. One of these is to steer clear of the principals at the outset. Leave them be while you pursue paper trails and get the evidence of knowledgeable third parties. There'll usually be some credible individuals out on the periphery of any suspect deal - lawyers, bankers, managers, clerical staff - the sort of people involved in any legitimate deal. Individually they may not have the big picture but it can be astonishing how much they know about key parts of the scheme.

What you get, or hope to get, from this approach of working from the periphery toward the centre are building blocks of evidence. They may seem almost useless until you find something else with which they fit and, gradually, you may get to something that becomes recongizable. One makes sense of something else or corroborates part of the emerging picture.

Slowly what develops will become more focused and directed. That's when you can tuck your documents, facts and analyses into your pocket and start talking to the principals.

Let's say somebody claims to have been involved in a particular venture or project. If they're telling the truth there ought to be documentary evidence to corroborate their claims. What if there's not? Then it depends whether the venture looks suspicious. If it looks like a duck and waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, the court is entitled to suspect that it is indeed a duck. Having come to that suspicion, the court is then properly entitled to call upon the people who claim it isn't and never was a duck to come up with corroboration.

Enter Koop v. Smith, a 1915 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. The case involved a fraudulent conveyance but is useful for its wider discussion of badges of fraud and shifting onus of proof:

"Suspicious circumstances coupled with the close relationship between the transferee and the debtor make a sufficient prima facie case of fraud. From that point, the burden of producing credible evidence substantiating the transaction is upon those who set it up. If substantial valuable consideration is truly given for a transfer of lands, there must be better evidence of it than the recitals in the deed and the land transfer tax affidavit."

I think that this principle should apply to the Mulroney-Schreiber dealings. There was a close relationship going back to Mulroney's leadership bid. There are plenty of suspicious circumstances to be found in the record of both men. Mulroney's story has changed at least twice and his current position directly contradicts his sworn testimony many years ago. Schreiber too has changed his story when that has suited him.

I think there is an abundance of suspicious circumstances in this scandal to place a clear onus on Brian Mulroney to come up with "credible evidence substantiating the transaction" as he now alleges it. At the very least, Brian Mulroney has to come up with $300,000 worth of corroboration and that's a lot of paper and a lot of witnesses. And if he somehow manages to do just that? Well then he needs to explain why he said something entirely different at the outset.

Schreiber Talks - Sort Of

After telling the Commons ethics committee he wouldn't talk, Karlheinz Schreiber talked - sort of. News accounts show he hasn't exactly been a responsive witness but he did make a couple of interesting points.

Mulroney has said he earned the cash from Schreiber by representing his business ventures, in particular a pasta business. Schreiber told the committee today there never was a pasta business. "It had nothing to do with any pasta business. It simply didn't exist.”

Schreiber also says he had $500,000 for Mulroney but he stopped paying after the first $300,000 because Mulroney wasn't producing.

He told the committee that he wants to go through his documents before testifying, adding those papers are in Switzerland, Toronto and Ottawa.

Schreiber is apparently due back before the committee next Tuesday.

Karlheinz Dummies Up

Karlheinz Schreiber knows the only thing anyone wants from him now is what he knows about the Airbus affair and his pal, Brian Mulroney.

The artful dodger intends to keep what he knows to himself, hoping against hope to cut some deal. In other words, Schreiber, under subpoena to tell all, is defying parliament to extract a deal. In my books that's extortion.

Schreiber, or probably his lawyers, have crafted his objections rather neatly. He won't testify - not quite yet. First he has to go through his papers, refresh his memory. Now, that one's reasonable. It's the second one that's cute. He doesn't want to talk until his extradition case is resolved. What he's saying is that (a) he's currently before the courts in a dispute with the federal government, (b) what he has to say may be damaging to this same government, so (c) he doesn't want to prejudice his extradition case by speaking prematurely.

Of course, the other way to look at this is that Schreiber is saying he won't talk if he's going to a German cell anyway.

Here's something I'd love to know. Schreiber says he has a raft of documents and correspondence in his Ottawa home dealing with this business. Why has no one sought a search warrant for those papers? Why would anyone allow Schreiber to cull them and possibly cherrypick what suits his purposes?

If Karlheinz is going to dummy up, let's get that on the record and get rid of him, just as soon as the court has heard his final cry for help. But let's also get those papers and see just what story they tell.

And then, let's subpoena Schreiber's former lawyer, Robert Hladun. We should get Hladun's evidence about the overtures supposedly made to him by Mulroney and Mulroney's lawyer seeking a written statement from Schreiber claiming that no money changed hands between them.

Solicitor-client privilege is broad but it's far from absolute and I think this particular exchange would probably not be protected. Hladun's discussions about it with Schreiber may be privileged but I fail to see how the actual discussions he had with Mulroney or his counsel would be covered. He owes them no privilege. As I've said before, I thin Hladun could be the smoking gun in this one. If I was counsel to the committee, I'd be serving that subpoena on him this afternoon.

God Made Him Do It. No, Really.

Richard Roberts, son of Oral, has announced his resignation from his post as president of Oral Roberts University.

Roberts told an assembly of students that God told him on Thanksgiving that he should retire the very next day.

Oral Roberts U has sunk into a pile of scandal lately. Ricky is being sued for lavish, personal spending habits while the U sunk $50-mill into debt. Then there are claims that his wife, Lindsay, has had a thing for some of the very young, male students.

Roberts said God told him he would ``do something supernatural for the university'' if he stepped down from the job he held at the 5,700-student school since 1993. Amen, brother.

How The Other "Earth" Went Astray

The other "earth" is Venus and a European probe, called the Venus Express, is shedding light on how that planet, and ours, took differing paths. It all comes down to the "greenhouse gas effect". From The Guardian:

Scientists had puzzled over Venus's hellish characteristics. It is roughly the same size as Earth, with a roughly similar orbit. Both planets began life with similar atmospheres, but Venus underwent a ferocious greenhouse effect that left it with an atmosphere made up almost entirely of CO2 and almost no water.

"Earth and Venus were pretty much identical to start with ... It really made you think the physics was different, which obviously it couldn't be," said Prof Fredric Taylor at Oxford University. Some scientists had thought that Venus's proximity to the sun was key to its transformation, but the new data suggests a different explanation: "It's not evil, just unfortunate." Venus Express's data appear in a set of paper's in today's edition of Nature.

One finding is that the solar wind - a stream of charged particles from the sun - is stripping away water molecules from the atmosphere by breaking them into atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and blasting them into space. That cannot happen on Earth because its rotation creates a magnetic field that diverts the solar wind. Without water, CO2 in the atmosphere could not be laid down in oceans as carbonate rocks. "[On Earth] it's all in the white cliffs of Dover and places like that," said Taylor. The CO2-rich atmosphere led to a runaway greenhouse effect.

Venus Express has also found some intriguing features of the atmosphere. One instrument detecting electromagnetic frequencies has observed the tell-tale signature of lightning, something some scientists did not think was possible. "It is like some sort of echo," said Dr Magda Delva at the space research unit at the Austrian academy of sciences in Graz. "If you have lightning then chemical reactions are possible that would not under normal conditions take place ... At least on Earth this was important for the beginning of life."

Big Business (British) Goes Green

Some of Britain's biggest companies - car makers, airlines, banks and retailers - have joined together, pledging to offer greener products and pursue research into ways to reduce carbon emissions.

The group, which includes British Petroleum, Tesco and British Telephone, intend to set the standard for regular monitoring and reporting of carbon emissions, investing in technology and emission reducing products and promoting greener behaviour by their employees.

The 18-companies involved employ more than two million people worldwide and generate revenues of two trillion dollars annually. The group is to release a report on Monday setting out its plans. It notes that the real responsibility for cutting emissions lies with consumers who, through their purchases, directly influence some 60% of Britain's carbon emissions.

Deja Vu

Decisions, decisions. What's a president to do? According to CNN, these are some of the decisions beguiling the president:

"...how to get the Saudis more involved in solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, how to get them more engaged against terrorism, how to address the Arab view that the United States always sides with Israel and how to build up moderate Palestinians to counter extremists."

The president, however, wasn't George w. Bush, but Richard m. Nixon.

Declassified documents just released by the Nixon library show Tricky Dick was dealing with almost the same issues that confront Bush three decades later. And, yes, Nixon was just as successful in dealing with them as Bush has been.

Success In Iraq - Maybe Not

A survey released today at http://www.journalism.org/, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, doesn't tally with many reports about great progress being made in Iraq.

"...the journalists—most of them veteran war correspondents—describe conditions in Iraq as the most perilous they have ever encountered, and this above everything else is influencing the reporting. A majority of journalists surveyed (57%) report that at least one of their Iraqi staff had been killed or kidnapped in the last year alone—and many more are continually threatened. “Seven staffers killed since 2003, including three last July,” one bureau chief wrote with chilling brevity. “At least three have been kidnapped. All were freed.”

A majority of journalists surveyed say most of the country is too dangerous to visit. Nine out of ten say that about at least half of Baghdad itself. Wherever they go, traveling with armed guards and chase vehicles is the norm for more than seven out of ten surveyed. "

The survey included responses from 111 journalists who have worked or are currently working in Iraq. The vast majority, 90 of them, were in Iraq when they took the survey or have worked there in 2007, and most have spent at least seven months in the country cumulatively since the war began.

The journalists are from 29 different news organizations (all of them U.S. based except for one) that have had staff in Iraq—including newspapers, wire services, magazines, radio, and network and cable TV. This represents, by best estimates, every news organization in the U.S. save one that has had a correspondent in Iraq for at least one month since January 2006.

He'll Be Back Before You Know It

It sounds as though Conrad Black has some hope of getting off lightly when he comes up before a Chicago judge for sentencing next month.


Right now the consensus is that Black can expect to get something in the range of 5 to 7-years if the judge accepts the findings of a court-ordered report. The pre-sentencing report disputes some of the claims the prosecution is making in seeing a 20-year term for Black.


The report concludes the amount actually lost was about $6-million, not the $32-million alleged by prosecutors, notes that the crime was not a "sophisticated" as in meticulously planned fraud, and that most of the misconduct happened outside the U.S.

The National Post reveals how overzealous Black's prosecutors can be. They're asking that "the relevant-conduct analysis should consider not only convicted conduct, but also acquitted and uncharged criminal conduct that is proved by a preponderance of evidence." Say what? They want the judge to assess Black's sentence by incorporating conduct for which he's either not been charged or has been acquitted? I don't much care for Connie but this is really piling on

Wonder what Babs is going to do. Will she dump Connie and go for a new suitor or will she hang around and wait for her Lordship to come back to her open arms?

Success in Iraq - Too Little, Too Late

By most accounts, conditions on the ground in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad, have improved noticeably over the past two months. There's disagreement on why but the improvement is pretty well accepted.

The outlook on the war among the American people has certainly picked up. A Pew Research poll found that 48% now believe the war is going fairly well compared to just 30% last February. Yet this growing confidence hasn't translated into improved support for either the war or for George w. Bush.

The percentage of Americans who want their troops out soon has held at 54% compared to 53% last February. It was telling that the percentage of Americans who still believe the Iraq war will wind up poorly hasn't changed at all. The latest figures from Pew shows Bush's approval rating has actually fallen a few points to 30%. Probably the economy and subprime mortgage meltdown have offset any extra support Bush might have hoped for from Iraq.

The numbers seem to suggest that a lot of Americans made their minds up about this war some time ago and improvements now are too little, too late to change their minds.

Mulroney's Achilles Heel

It's reported that the Commons Ethics Committee will have government lawyers open the questioning of Karlheinz Schreiber when and if he appears before them tomorrow.

If it was up to me, my first question would be to ask Schreiber if he would release his former lawyer, Robert Hladun, from his privilege restrictions concerning any communications between Hladun, Brian Mulroney and Mulroney's lawyer, Gerard Tremblay, during October, 1999, pertaining to funds that passed from Schreiber to Mulroney or Frank Moores.

Why focus on this? The answer is contained in this account from the Fifth Estate of events said to have transpired on October 17, 1999:

October 17, 1999

"Mulroney contacts Schreiber's lawyer Robert Hladun and asks him to ask Schreiber for a written statement indicating that at no time did Mulroney solicit or receive compensation from Karlheinz Schreiber.

Gerard Tremblay phones Robert Hladun and asks for a letter to keep on file from Schreiber, which is not to be disseminated, so that he can send a letter to the CBC which "would in his opinion shut down the airing of the fifth estate story on the "Airbus"—October 20th.

Mulroney contacts Hladun and tells him he has instructed Tremblay to send a letter to the fifth estate "indicating that if there was the slightest implication that Mr. Schreiber, Mr. Moores and Brian Mulroney were involved in any way then there would be terrible consequences.

He would issue the letter but first wanted an assurance or comfort in writing from Mr. Schreiber saying that he would confirm what he had publicly on many occasions, that at no time did Brian Mulroney solicit or receive of any kind from Schreiber. Mulroney called Hladun again that day, at which time Mulroney was told "I was no sure whether or not a letter would be forthcoming."


These events, to my mind, could be the most troublesome for Mulroney because of what they say if they're true and because they can be confirmed or denied by a person whose integrity is not questioned, Robert Hladun.

If Hladun corroborates this account it would put Mulroney in the spot of having to explain why he personally contacted Schreiber's lawyer asking for a letter from Schreiber denying payments that even Mulroney himself now acknowledges he received. It would also make it vastly more difficult for Mulroney to lay on the blarney about what he said under oath in his lawsuit and why he forgot to declare this income for tax purposes until it was disclosed in the media. In other words, any guy who would try to pull this stunt has just kissed goodbye the benefit of the doubt.

If these events didn't happen I think Hladun would be eager to set the record straight, if only to extricate himself from the controversy.

Global Warming Tourism

This little fellow is the Asian Tiger mosquito. With much of the world getting warmer, he's been arriving at all sorts of new places.

The Asian Tiger is being blamed for spreading chikungunya fever to Italy. The Italians have been dealing with an outbreak of 300-cases of the fever. Before this outbreak there had only been one case of the fever recorded in that country.

The spread of this mosquito is of particular concern because of two other gifts it often carries - dengue fever and yellow fever. Dengue fever has a 7% fatality rate.

The spread of the Asian Tiger has been remarkable. It is now firmly established in much of Latin America, in a minimum of 26 states of the US, in parts of Africa and much of southern and parts of central Europe. In North America it's credited with spreading West Nile, eastern equine encephalomyelitis and Cache Valley virus.

But Will He Talk?

Karlheinz Schreiber is on his way to Ottawa. Opposition MPs want the Speaker to let Schreiber spend tonight in his house, hoping that might make him more co-operative when he appears tomorrow before the ethics committee.

Will Schreiber talk? That's the great unknown. What more can he say about Brian Mulroney and Frank Moores than he's already said, on camera, to CBC? Maybe there's not a lot more to tell, although it would be helpful, to everyone involved including Mulroney, to get Schreiber's account under oath and be able to test his statements through cross-examination.

Even if Schreiber dummies up that won't put an end to Mulroney's troubles. He's already got too many facts and claims on the record, either personally or through his spokesmen, to avoid having to answer a lot of tough questions.

My instincts tell me not to expect too much tomorrow. I'm guessing that Schreiber's performance will be a real letdown.

Pakistan's Taliban

“When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire.”

So wrote British general, Andrew Skeen, in the early 1900s in his guide to military operations in the Pashtun tribal belt.

While NATO and the US are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, so is the Pakistani army in the tribal lands of North and South Waziristan along the Afghan border. Taking the fight to the Pakistani Taliban is of critical importance to NATO. It's about the only means of denying the Afghan Talibs safe sanctuary to muster their forces and support operations in Afghanistan. So, how is the Pakistani army making out? According to the New York Times, about as well as one might expect:

The only consistent reports of offensive action by the Pakistani Army involve the use of helicopter gunships and artillery to attack militant compounds. Aerial assaults, when carried out without support from “boots on the ground,” serve but one purpose: they help sustain the illusion that the Pakistani government is taking effective action.

The truth is that the soldiers have lost the will to fight. Reports in the Indian press, based on information from the very competent Indian intelligence agencies, describe a Pakistani Army in disarray in the tribal areas. Troops are deserting and often refusing to fight their “Muslim brothers.”

Nothing illustrated this apathy more clearly than the capture of hundreds of troops in August by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud with nary a shot fired in resistance."

So, what are the options? Throw more money at Islamabad? If money would do the trick it would have worked by now. Stop throwing money at Islamabad? No one's sure how that would turn out. Invade Pakistan? Please, we can't handle the job in Afghanistan. We're already grossly understrength. Where would we find the tens of thousands of soldiers that would be needed to repeat the Victorian British blunders in the Khyber?

That's what we're up against, seemingly insoluble challenges. It's not that the Taliban are better fighters than our troops, they're not. Our soldiers are better, they've got vastly better weapons and support technologies, they have better communications and total air superiority, better mobility. So why can't we just mop the floor with these backward warriors?

The Taliban have a number of advantages we've not been able to neutralize. One of them is in recruiting. Afghanistan is dirt poor but the insurgents have access to narco-bucks from the country's booming opium trade. This allows them to "hire" recruits. However there's another way they get support and that draws on their fiercely-held tribal code of Pashtunwali, particularly Mla Tarr. This requires all members of a man's family capable of carrying a gun to rise up when he's attacked. It's sort of a "kill one, get three free" plan.

The insurgents also have the "home turf" advantage. They have nowhere else to go, nothing else to fight for and, in fact, they're fighting for everything they have, their homeland. For the Pashtun, whether it's the half in Pakistan or the half in Afghanistan, the Taliban are the home team. Even Karzai, the country's president and himself a Pashtun, knows it.

We have the tactical advantage in firepower and technology - useful for fighting a tactical battle. The insurgents have the strategic advantage of time, as much time as it takes to keep wearing us down until we get tired and frustrated enough to leave. Put simply, their strategic advantage trumps our tactical advantage in the long run.

So General Skeen knew a century ago what our leaders have yet to understand. We can kill these people until we can't find any more bullets and then we leave. If the powerful Pakistani army can't control the Pashtun of Waziristan, all we're doing in Afghanistan is blowing smoke.

Another NATO Oopsie!

NATO warplanes in the Afghan province of Nuristan bagged 14-reconstruction workers.

The victims were labourers for an Afghan company contracted by the Americans to do roadwork. They were asleep in their tents when the bombs arrived.

“We just collected pieces of flesh from our tired workers and put them in 14 coffins.” - Nurullah Jalali, the executive director of the construction company.

NATO says - and this will surprise you - they thought the workers were Taliban. Ya think?

Talk about killing two birds with one bomb - wiping out a reconstruction team and sending the victims' relatives directly to their nearest Taliban recruiting office.

UN Slams Harper

Stephen Harper may hope Canadians are dumb enough to believe he's sincere in working for global warming solutions but he's not fooling the folks at the United Nations.

Stevie's been outed. From CanWest:

"Canada has a long history of global leadership on global atmospheric environmental issues, from acid rain to ozone depletion and climate change," said the UN's Human Development Report. "Maintaining this tradition will require tough decisions."

The UN report said Canada could achieve greater reductions in carbon dioxide emissions than the goals set by the government, "but not with current policies."

Merry Christmas Debbie Shank

52-year old Deborah Shank won't be having much of a Christmas this year. She's just been Scrooged by her former employer, Wal-Mart.

Shank used to work for the retail giant at its store in Cape Girardieu, Mo., until seven years ago when the car she was driving was broadsided by a tractor-trailer. The accident left Shank with permanent brain damage, unable to walk or even communicate with her family.

Wal-Mart's employee health insurance plan picked up the woman's medical expenses - until - until, that is, her family settled with the trucking company involved for a not-so-whopping $417,000. Wal-Mart, which had paid about $470,000 for Shank's medical care demanded the money, all of it, and a federal court judge agreed. Update - On March 18th, 2008, the United States Supreme Court crushed the Shanks' last hope, dismissing, without reasons, their final appeal. A local paper in their state called the situation "Dickensian."

No question about it. Wal-Mart was legally entitled to scoop Shank's entire settlement, every last dime of it. And so it did.

Of course the Shanks didn't have this problem front and centre on their minds for very long. Shortly after Wal-Mart won its case their son Jeremy was killed in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times summed up Wal-Mart's greed quite succinctly:

Doing what the law allows isn't the same as doing the right thing, however. The company made itself whole at the expense of a helpless former employee who will never be whole again. Instead of having some resources to improve her care, Shank will receive only the basic services afforded her by Medicaid and Social Security. Nor will the trust fund be in a position to reimburse Medicaid (i.e., taxpayers), which stood to collect any unspent money upon Shank's death.

Wal-Mart has spent the last few years working hard to rebut health care reformers, labor unions, anti-globalization groups and other critics who've argued that it puts profits ahead of humanity. While its advertising campaigns try to put a friendlier spin on the company, its behavior toward Shank tells a different story. If Wal-Mart can't restrain itself, perhaps Congress should prevent health plans from draining settlements won by injured workers with more bills to pay.

Do yourself and the rest of us a favour this Christmas. Stop shopping yourself or your neighbour out of a job - just say no to Scrooge, shun Wal-Mart.

WMDs in Iraq - Finally There's Proof

A growing number of credible scientists are reporting on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They exist and they've been used, widely it seems. The WMDs they refer to weren't built by Saddam. They were American and British.

The WMDs are in the form of radiation contamination caused by the widespread use of depleted uranium shells.

So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, "The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed."

"More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991," Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.

Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California.

Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, "The long- term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of control."

Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, "For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed."

She adds, "the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive."

I hope these experts are wrong, flat out wrong. I hope they're just making this stuff up to advance some scurrilous hidden agenda. I hope this is all some vast, loonie left conspiracy. But, if it is, it's a conspiracy involving a lot of prominent scientists:

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: "Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned- out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground."

"Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults," Caldicott wrote. "My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities."

Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, "the food, the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated," Caldicott explained.

Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes in his "The Sorrows of Empire"(Henry Holt and Co.) that, given the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as well as Kosovo, the evidence points "toward a significant role for DU."

By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, "the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction."
Moret calls DU "the Trojan Horse of nuclear war." She describes it as "the weapon that keeps killing." Indeed, the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive by-products.

Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.

The End of the American Empire

Chris Hedges is one of the most clear-headed writers in America today. A minister's son with a doctorate in divinity from Harvard, Hedges has worked as a war correspondent covering just about every American conflict since Grenada. In a column first published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hedges laments the end of America's greatness:

"The most damning indicators of national decline are upon us. We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political power. The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.

Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news.

An increasing number of voices, especially within the military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.

"There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders," retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in Iraq, recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials have been "derelict in their duties" and guilty of a "lust for power."

The American working class, once the most prosperous on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers' rights, control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country's managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests.

Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly clear than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday, President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.

The decision to measure the strength of the state in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later."

The Catch-22 of Energy Conservation

One way often cited to improve energy conservation is by increasing energy efficiency. It sounds perfectly logical, in theory.

In practice, however, improved energy efficiency can actually backfire. From the Toronto Star:

A paper by CIBC World Market economist Jeff Rubin argues that, historically, improvements in efficiency that were meant to reduce the consumption of a commodity have increased usage as it became cheaper.
The result is that energy intensity strategies may not work in the battle to cut down the use of oil and gas, as well as carbon emissions believed to cause global climate change.

Rubin says the only sure-fire way of reducing energy consumption and, by extension, cut down greenhouse emissions is to shrink the economy, an unpalatable proposition to governments and industry.

While this is not an argument against attempting to increase energy efficiency in the economy, Rubin says that for greater efficiency to reduce usage, it will be necessary to ensure that consumers don’t see lower prices.

Whew, I'm glad this bit of wisdom came from a bank economist, not Greenpeace. Rubin's findings and conclusions may come as a shock to many but they're anything but new.

It's going to take a lot of adjustment and an awful lot of convincing skeptics, but the growth model on which we've based our national and global economies is over. It's not just climate change. It's resource depletion, species extinction, desertification, freshwater exhaustion, water and soil contamination, air pollution, chemical toxicities, overpopulation - you name it.

It may take a decade, maybe two, but we will gradually come to understand the need to shrink our economies. We'll do it not because we don't want wealth but because we want to survive even more. We're finding it extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, to get the necessary consensus to implement meaningful action on global warming. That's just one problem of many that we need to address, simultaneously.

The notion of shrinking economies has already been examined at length. The scientist, James Lovelock, has coined a term for it, "sustainable retreat." He uses that term to describe getting smaller but doing it as affordably and comfortably as possible. In other words, this process doesn't have to resemble a scene from some post-apocalyptic movie, the image the global warming deniers like to use to scare the public. In some ways it's as easy as doing a lot more of a bit less.

UN Calls for Realistic Emission Targets

Stephen Harper, the great snake oil salesman of global warming, says he's all in favour of binding emission targets just so long as they're applied equally across the board. Steve isn't being realistic. He knows that. He's posturing, knowing full well that will let him sound engaged on the greenhouse gas problem while ensuring that no effective action will be taken. He's not just selling snake oil, he's making it.

Back in the reality-based world, the United Nations warns we've got less than ten years to abruptly change course if we're to avoid "irreversible ecological catastrophe". Two words there that should sort of grab your attention: "irreversible" and "catastrophe". Think of yourself in a canoe in rough water. If you're not careful, your boat can tip so far over that you won't be able to stop it from capsizing. It reaches its tipping point, its point of no return, even before water begins pouring over the gunwales. That's what irreversible ecological catastrophe means.

Ten years as in ten years max. It could be less than ten years. It could be a lot less than ten years. Look at the IPCC's predictions. Almost all of them have been understated. Things they told us were coming in thirty years appear in five or ten. With that record, it's only prudent to consider this warning as ten years at the outside.

This from The Guardian:

" ...the 400-page [UN Human Development programme] report said that simply ignoring climate change would lead to unprecedented reversal in human development in our lifetime, and acute risks for our children and their grandchildren.

"The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem," the report says.

"Looking to the future, no country - however wealthy or powerful - will be immune to the impact of global warming."

The panel says the greatest financial responsibility lies with the US and the other well-developed countries most responsible for the rising levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mainly from the use of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

As the world's richest countries bear the greatest responsibility, the UN Development Programme called on them to bear the largest burden in cutting emissions and in providing financial aid to the poor.

Developed countries, the UN said, should cut emissions by at least 30% by 2020 and by 80% by 2050. Developing nations should cut emissions by 20% by the year 2050."

This is the bullet that Harpo and Bush are struggling so hard to dodge - taking responsibility for having brought the planet to the perilous state that today confronts mankind. They have bottomless purses when it comes to (sort of) fighting Islamist fundamentalism but would prefer to do bugger all when it comes to a problem that poses a much greater threat to their nations and their people.

Summon the villagers, light the torches, get the pitchforks.

Is Mushie Really Quitting the Army?

It's a firm he's worked for since 1964, the Pakistani Army. Like Zia before him, Musharraf rose to the top in his military and then took over the government to boot. Now, under intense pressure at home and from the US, the Pakistani President is about to resign his command - or so we're told.

What I can't figure out is just how a head of state, a nation's very commander in chief, can ever actually resign as commander of his military. After all, President Musharraf was supposed to be General Musharraf's boss, wasn't he?

Then there's the question of succession. The man Musharraf has appointed as his successor, General Ashfaq Kayani, a former chief of the country's powerful intelligence service, is expected to take charge tomorrow. Kayani headed the ISI, Pakistan's powerful Inter-Service Intelligence agency, a hotbed of Islamist radical power within the Pakistani military. It was this same outfit that literally created the Taliban. Couldn't Mushie have found some stooge from the artillery or maybe the catering service?

It might be unwise to read too much into Musharraf's change of wardrobe. Even if this is a step ahead for democracy in Pakistan, it's not a very big step.

The Mask Drops, It Was About Oil!

American troops will be staying in Iraq indefinitely and American companies are going to get a leg up on the country's vast wealth, er oil. Hold on, this'll get your head spinning so fast it might just explode.

From The New York Times:

General Lute predicted that the agreement to negotiate formal bilateral relations would contribute to regional stability by proving America’s long-term commitment not just to Iraq, but also to the broader Persian Gulf area. A recurring message of senior Bush administration officials, intended in large part to deter what they see as Iranian mischief in the region, is to reassure Persian Gulf allies of a continued American presence there.

The United States also pledged to support Iraq’s economic development and to provide financial and technical assistance. Significantly, the document committed the United States to support Iraq in receiving “preferential trading conditions,” including joining the World Trade Organization and receiving most-favored-nation trading status with Washington.

Stripped of the Bushit, it means that upwards of 50,000 American troops will be permanently based in Iraq, a respectable Legion even by Caesar's standards. Better yet, American companies will get first dibs on Iraq's oil wealth - all in the name of supporting Iraqi's economic development, of course.

What remains to be seen is whether Maliki can sell this scam to his legislators and the Iraqi people and whether Bush's successor will be able to keep the American people onside for another adventure in imperialism.

Cutting Carbon Consumption

One way to cut our carbon emissions is by harvesting free energy. That, of course, is the idea behind solar and geothermal energy and the dream of tidal power. But there's another source of free energy we've overlooked, even though it's staring us right in the face, day in/day out.

Here's a clue. It goes up in smoke. It's the enormous, untapped heat plumes that come out of industrial smokestacks. Look at a picture of any coal-fired electricity plant. We focus on the smoke pouring out of the chimneys but fail to see the energy that's being lost along with it.

One company in the US has developed an energy scavenging system for smokestacks. It's really little more than a conventional boiler. The emerging gases heat water pipes that produce steam that propel generators that produce electricity. Put another way, it's a no-brainer.

It's estimated that by using power scavenging devices on the largest smokestacks it would be possible to generate about 14% of America's electricity requirements. The best part is that, by putting them on coal-fired generator plants, you recover energy that won't have to be produced by burning more coal. Neat, eh?

Look at Big Oil. There are a lot of smokestacks at refineries. There are also plenty of gas flares, in the refineries and in the oil fields, that burn off unwanted gas. Gas + fire = heat energy, ja? Maybe there's some good reason why they don't use those flares to generate electricity but I've been pondering this for a long time and haven't found any explanation yet.

Desalination Is A Damn Poor Answer

People who live in drought afflicted areas always point to desalination as the answer to all their problems.

Desalination may solve their problems but only by creating additional problems elsewhere. We don't have a lot of experience with desalination plants in Canada because we usually have enough rain and groundwater. Parts of the US, however, aren't so blessed. Now, with large tracts of the American south facing drought and water depletion, the clamour for desalination is getting louder and more strident.

Desalination - the production of freshwater by removing salts and other ingredients in sea water - sounds like the perfect solution. It's not. Desalination plants create enormous environmental problems. They're expensive to build and expensive to run. They use an awful lot of energy, typically fossil fuel, and generate a lot of greenhouse gases. The pipes tend to leak and saltwater causes immense problems once it gets into groundwater supplies (remember how the Romans took revenge on Carthage?)). The worst part, however, is the brine effluent that's left over.

The standard approach is to simply pump the brine, along with all the other chemical residue from the desalination process, right back into the coastal sea. There it plays utter havoc with the marine environment ranging from turbidity, salinity imbalances, destruction of fish habitats and stocks and algae blooms.

In North America, our coastal waters already face enough challenges. We don't need to add the consequences of desalination to the mix.

Water Wars - Right Next Door

George w. Bush might not get global warming, just yet, but he will when his beloved ranch in Crawford, Texas, turns into a sand dune.

I've been following the southeastern US drought for a while but didn't pay an awful lot of attention to the greater picture, at least not beyond the California wild fires. It didn't take much looking, however, to learn of a climate change that's already happened, the permanent drought in the US southwest.

Down that way it's become accepted that megadrought has arrived. It's been going on for 11-years already in Arizona and most other parts of the region aren't any better off.

"Being in the desert is unnatural," said senior researcher and geophysicist Richard Seager of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute at Columbia University. "The whole Southwest is dependent on massive works of engineering, all of which were built assuming there would be more water available than there really is. How is that whole system going to stand up to this kind of stress? Who gets the water?"

Five of America's ten fastest growing states are in the drought area: Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada and Texas.

The region is just beginning to see the start of water wars, in this case mainly non-violent disputes over who gets how much water for what. How much for the urban dwellers, how much for cattle, how much for cotton? The debate can get pretty furious.

Traditional reservoirs, such as Lake Powell (above) and Lake Mead (below) are already down by half and expected to empty before long.

Some of the region's cotton farmers are planning to give up on their crops and get rich selling their water quotas to city dwellers. Developers in some states are trying to access aquifers in neighbouring states. Naturally, folks are getting tempermental.

So, what's the answer? There's talk about desalination plants on the California coast but that's expected to take upwards of three decades to come online. In the meantime? That's unknown right now but, if you're looking for that retirement condo in Phoenix, you might want to wait a few years before diving into the pool.

Forget Global Warming, Global Drying Will Get Here First

The thing about global warming is that we're told the real consequences won't arrive for several decades at least, possibly even centuries. Whew! I'll be long gone by then. Don't worry, be happy - unless you live in one of the many spots around the world that have fallen strangely dry, and arid.

You see, long before the polar ice caps melt into the seas, maybe even before you get you start decorating next year's Easter Eggs, you'll be hearing a lot about what I like to call Global Drying. It's a craze that's positively sweeping the American south and it's the hottest thing in the eastern Mediterranean, southern Europe, Australia, big hunks of Africa, parts of Mexico and all sorts of other places.

Drought is here, and it's there, and over there too. But, until this year, it was often out of sight/out of mind. That, friends, is coming to an end.

Atlanta, Georgia is a booming metropolis of more than four million people and it's currently beset by drought. Take a look at the map above. See if you can locate Atlanta. What colour is that anyway?

Now that map shows you how the droughts affecting the US are expected to develop into February of next year. February is going to be a key month for the good folks of Atlanta - it's the month in which that city is expected to run out of water.

Interesting question - what do you do with more than four million people who find themselves without water? If you're Governor Sonny Perdue, the answer is obvious - you get down on bended knee and pray to Jesus for help. And that, sad as it may be, is about the best idea Sonny has come up with.

Now I'm sure there are answers to Atlanta's problems but, like most of these things, implementing them takes time and Atlanta appears to be as short on time as it is on water. For FEMA, Atlanta may make Katrina look like child's play. Atlanta isn't an isolated case. The drought spreads (as the map shows) across an entire, densely populated region and there's another one much like it now besetting the southwest and a developing drought along the states in between.

Scientists are now beginning to whisper the word "megadrought." Until very recently, most drought studies barely went back more than a century or two. However that's changing and we're now looking back, 1200-years and more. Can you say "oopsie"?

We've all heard of the Dirty Thirties and the seven-year drought that afflicted the prairie grasslands. What you probably haven't heard about are the 60-year droughts or the one that ran in North America from AD 900-1300, a full 400-years.

It's been less than 200-years since we really began filling up the US and Canada and less than a century since we created the "hydraulic society" that allowed the southwest to be populated thanks to massive government water projects. What we didn't understand at the time was that those regions, the Great Plains included, were enjoying an unusually wet period. We assumed there would be a reliable source of adequate amounts of precipitation that we could harness to let people live in deserts, complete with manicured lawns, artificial lakes and golf courses.

Even at our most optimistic moment, the illusion was never sustainable. We managed to empty the High Plains aquifer by more than a hundred feet. The once mighty Colorado River no longer flows into Mexico. We've sucked these things almost dry - just in time for the arrival of what might be a severe, multi-year drought.

So, keep an eye on the ice packs and the polar bears and the vanishing glaciers. These things are important. But, if your relatives from Atlanta call to tell you they're coming for a visit, they might just be staying for a while.

Back To the Basics - We're Filthy

Here are a few timely facts that should help you evaluate our furious leader's position(s) on global warming.

Let's begin with the OECD, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD represents the wealthiest nations on the planet, no need to sully yourself with those impoverished sub-Saharans. This the the club of the "Haves."

So, compared to the Have Nations, how does Canada stack up on greenhouse gas emissions? Not so good.

On a per capita basis, Joe Canuck comes in 27th out of 29. But, hey, we're a huge country with a small population. Most of those other OECD countries have a lot more people, so, in the overall scheme of things, we're small potatoes, right?

Wrong. In total CO2 emissions, Canada came 25th out of 29. Only the US, Germany, Japan and the UK put out more. Not so neat, eh?

Canada puts out in excess of half a trillion tonnes of GHGs every year and we're still trending upward, fast.

Harper's Deliciously Perverse Logic

When it comes to global warming, trust Stephen Harper to say whatever suits him at the moment. Even with Canada's worst polluters, his beloved Tar Sands, he won't tolerate any talk about hard caps on emissions. There, the formula is "intensity based" targets. That's a scam. What he means is cleaning up bitumen extraction and processing - a little bit - while increasing overall extraction and processing - quadrupling or even quintupling operations. The net result - an enormous jump in GHG emissions from Big Oil at the Tar Sands.

When it comes to global warming and Stephen Harper - that's what you're dealing with. Fighting climate change will not come at the expense of Tar Sands expansion and that's the bottom line.

In order to make any sense out of what Harper says elsewhere, you need to keep his Tar Sands perspective in mind.

On the weekend, Harpo made Canada the pariah of the Commonwealth (alright, alright - we're still not up there with Zimbabwe or Pakistan, but... ) by scuttling a resolution calling for binding caps on greenhouse gas emissions.

Harper, being the sleazeball he is, wasn't candid enough to admit that he would not tolerate emissions caps because that would screw up his Tar Sands. Steve knows that sort of honesty could cost him big at home. Instead he resorted to the tried and true tactic of all swindlers - distraction.

Steve looked for another way out and found it - in India. He said the rest of the Commonwealth is flat out wrong in wanting developed nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions first. Harpo smugly described his knuckledragging as "the only right position."

"If we are all to believe that climate change is a major problem caused by greenhouse gas emissions then we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the only way we can do that is if all major emitters reduce their emissions. It's that simple, so we are not going to settle for anything less." - Harper

It is indeed "that simple" to a real con man. What's simple about it is that it tells it tells the emerging economies that, henceforth, we intend to preserve our per capita emissions differential. That means that every citizen of Canada is going to be entitled, indefinitely, to generate greenhouse gas emissions five or six times that of every citizen of India. Why? Because we're Canadians, civilized, still mainly white folks - and they're not. Why? Because we're already accustomed to monster SUVs and 4,000 square foot houses with three car garages - and they're not.

Then again, remember, this is a con - a distraction. Stephen Harper is not prepared to tolerate hard caps in any case. It's all about "intensity based" targets for him, so all this business about China signing on to this or India signing on to that is just smoke and mirrors.

That, my friends, is what Stephen Harper is all about - and he's laid it right out at your feet. He wants a return to the British Raj. That's what this is all about - White Man's Burden.

Putting the Lie to Harper's Nonsense About India

Mike at Rational Reasons is currently in India on business. We hear a lot about India from our imperial leader, Stephano Harpo. He says we can't consider tough action on global warming until we get emerging economic powers, like India, onside. Absolutely pointless for Canada to waste its breath on curbing greenhouse gas emissions until offenders such as India get on board.

Mike left the following comment to one of my earlier posts. It's a comment that deserves a proper post of its own, so here it is:

"OK, lets put to rest this nonsense about needing China and India and the US, because a lot of simpletons like to repeat that meme but no one seems to actually know the facts.

I am in India right now and I have seen first hand what they are doing:

1. Most vehicles in India are motor bikes and scooters. Very good on gas. They have an all electric model on the market now too, meaning no gas and no emissions.

2. Every car in India -EVERY car - must have a sticker on its driver's side (right) headlight indicating it is a low emission vehicle, or the vehicle can't be sold or driven.

3. Most of the cars are less than 5 years old. It is rare to see an older one, with the exception of a original Indian model, which was made back in the 60's. It is a diesel, meaning it is already getting better milage than most gasoline cars AND can run on bio-diesel or unmodified vegetable oil if needed.

4. In India almost everything that is thrown away is recycled. In Mumbai, you can actually sell your garbage to people who will take it to recycling depots - there is a market for it. Old electronic components are stripped for there metals and usable parts - hell almost anything is stripped this way.

5. Being Environmentally Friendly is a huge advantage that Indian companies are using to lure more business. It is bad business for this grow, red hot economy to NOT be environmentally friendly.

6. Most gas in India is high grade, low emission fuel or diesel.

7. India is still emitting a small fraction of the GHG that we do. Companies here are actively investing and trying to create low emission alternatives because it is good for business.

In other words, India is doing stuff to lower emissions and meet Kyoto without even signing it. They are doing FAR more than Canada, and we signed it.So conservative whiners can sure stop using India as an excuse for in action. They are already working at the problem.

And a big thanks to you, Mike.

Mission Accomplished, Steve

Mr. Smug, obviously pleased with himself, after scuttling the Commonwealth resolution calling for binding targets to fight global warming (toronto star photo).

What Stephen Harper truly "gets" about climate change is how to sabotage any serious effort to tackle it. He must make his bosses - Bush/Cheney and Big Oil - pleased, especially given that their other dinosaur, Australia's Howard, just went down the toilet.

Harper, on the world scene, says he won't commit to any binding targets agreement until the US, China and India also sign on. However that's just empty rhetoric, fodder for the weak-minded among his supporters. He's lying. Harper has already made clear that he cannot accept carbon caps. He won't go past "intensity based" emission controls. That makes discussion of any meaningful plan - regardless of India, China and the US - a farce.

Our prime ministerial grease ball is focused on one thing - undermining the growing campaign to tackle global warming.

Winding Down the Surge, Mission Postponed

When 5,000 US troops leave Iraq this week, it will mark the beginning of the end of the US military's surge. These troops won't be replaced and, over the next six or seven months, the rest of the 30,000 soldiers will be pulled out.

So, what has the surge accomplished? Not what it was instituted to achieve.

On the plus side, the surge has seen a decline in both sectarian violence and attacks on US soldiers. Sunni resistance fighters turned on al-Qaeda terrorists - Sunni versus Sunni. The much larger problem, the Shia militias went to ground or, at the direction of Maliki, were integrated into Iraq's military and police services (that's not good by the way).

The upshot is that there's no way to know whether the surge actually caused the decline in killings, much less whether that will continue.

Then there's the downside. The surge was supposed to give the Baghdad government a bit of stability to allow it to put in place laws and measures designed to further reconciliation amoung the country's three main groups - Arab Sunni, Arab Shia and Kurds. Progress was to be measured by a series of "benchmarks" prescribed by the Bush administration.

In late summer the Democrats in Congress went on the warpath, furious that the al-Maliki government had achieved virtually none of these benchmarks. That's when America's commander in Iraq, David Petraeus, turned up and made the Dems back down. Petraeus noted that the surge had only begun and it would take until October to assess how it succeeded or failed.

By the standards of last summer and the standards of October, the surge has been a dismal failure. The benchmarks, Bush's benchmarks, remain largely ignored by the Maliki government. Reconciliation isn't at hand. The key oil law (the one to hand the oil fields to US companies) gathers dust. And now the troops have begun to leave.

So what's a failed president to do in these circumstances? Why, simple, move the Baghdad goal posts. Throwing the "benchmarks" to the winds, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker said, "It is going to be one thing at a time, maybe two things at a time, we hope with increasing momentum. It is a long-term process.”

From The New York Times:

There have been signs that American influence over Iraqi politics is dwindling after the recent improvements in security — which remain incomplete, as shown by a deadly bombing Friday in Baghdad. While Bush officials once said they aimed to secure “reconciliation” among Iraq’s deeply divided religious, ethnic and sectarian groups, some officials now refer to their goal as “accommodation.”

This is about the point where George w. Bush seems to lose interest in his adventures. When the going gets tough, he seems to be drawn to the next shiny object. Remember the grandiose "Road Map" to solve the Israeli/Palestinian problem. That was all you heard about, until one day you didn't hear it any more. Remember Osama bin Laden? Don't hear much about him any more either. How about GWOT, the Global War on Terror, war without end? That's been shunted aside too.

America's Shakey Assessment of Afghanistan

To listen to Peter MacKay and some Canadian generals, we're making solid progress in Afghanistan. That's the problem with listening to Peter MacKay and his generals. They can't afford to tell you how miserably "the mission" is faltering.

But, when it comes to tall tales you can expect the tallest to come from the Americans. So, what's their take on Afghanistan? According to the Washington Post, it's not nearly as rosey as the line coming out of Ottawa:

...the latest assessment [of the National Security Council] concluded that only "the kinetic piece" -- individual battles against Taliban fighters -- has shown substantial progress, while improvements in the other areas continue to lag, a senior administration official said.

This judgment reflects sharp differences between US military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan war is headed. Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban's unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.

The contrasting views echo repeated internal disagreements over the Iraq war: While the military finds success in a virtually unbroken line of tactical achievements, intelligence officials worry about a looming strategic failure.

But one senior intelligence official, who like others interviewed was not authorized to discuss Afghanistan on the record, said such gains are fleeting. "One can point to a lot of indicators that are positive . . . where we go out there and achieve our objectives and kill bad guys," the official said. But the extremists, he added, seem to have little trouble finding replacements.

Although growing numbers of foreigners -- primarily Pakistanis -- are joining the Taliban ranks, several officials said the primary source of new recruits remains disaffected Afghans fearful of opposing the Taliban and increasingly disillusioned with their own government. Overall, "there doesn't seem to be a lot of progress being made. . . . I would think that from [the Taliban] standpoint, things are looking decent," the intelligence official said.

Senior White House officials privately express pessimism about Afghanistan.

At the moment, several officials said, their concern is focused far more on the domestic situation in Afghanistan, where increasing numbers are losing faith in Karzai's government in Kabul. According to a survey released last month by the Asia Foundation, 79 percent of Afghans felt that the government does not care what they think, while 69 percent felt that it is not acceptable to publicly criticize the government.

Gee, does anyone remember another conflict not all that long ago where America won every battle but finished up losing the war?

Harper Disgusts Leaders, Blocks Commonwealth Resolution

According to Canadian Press, Stephen Harper succeeded in blocking passage of a Commonwealth resolution on global warming that would have called for binding targets on greenhouse gas emissions.

The move so frustrated some foreign diplomats that they sought out Canadian journalists to express their disgust at what was happening behind closed doors.

Harper said Canada's position has been consistent from one international summit to the next and will remain so at the upcoming negotiations in Indonesia.

He says there cannot be an international treaty unless everyone's on board - and that includes big polluters like India, China, and the United States, which were not full members of Kyoto.

...some foreign officials at the Commonwealth have privately poured scorn on the Canadian position, calling it the ultimate recipe for inaction.

They say it relies on developing countries like India and China, which are struggling to eradicate widespread poverty while growing their own economies, to act first.

"It's a bit disingenuous, actually, to present (Canada's) position as a higher ambition," one Commonwealth official said.

"We need to show the Indians we're willing to lead."

Britain's foreign minister this week did not mention Canada or Australia by name but he said climate-change talks were being held up by a 'you-first' attitude from some countries.

Sorry, Steve, but someone has to lead in order to get all the polluters to commit to a meaningful global effort and that someone ought to be the nations whose per capita greenhouse gas emissions dwarf all others. By the way, you total hypocrite, those nations just happen to be Canada and the United States.

Letting the Grownups Deal with Iraq

There is a growing number of voices calling for Washington to take advantage of the drop in violence in Iraq to declare victory and get out - while the getting's good.

Everybody, it seems, from Sadr to the Sunni resistance, wants just that enough to put the guns away and lay low. They're virtually pleading with America to go.

So what's keeping Washington from bolting? There are probably several reasons the Bush regime isn't ready to leave Iraq but, just as they weren't straight with us about why they went in, don't expect them to come right out and admit why they won't leave. That doesn't mean some of these factors aren't obvious.

America has built an embassy compound in Baghdad that's actually bigger than the Vatican. It's hands-down the biggest American embassy anywhere. Does that sound like a country that is planning to leave? Then there are the major military bases that get mentioned ever so rarely. What do you think they tell us?

These developments might indicate that the United States is very interested in staying put in Iraq. Maybe the US wants to maintain a sizeable military presence on Iran's doorstep. Maybe the Pentagon wants a spot for its bases that will remove the instability they caused to the Saudis. Maybe Washington intends to keep the power to cut off potential and existing rivals' access to Middle East oil.

Then there's oil. Sure, the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do about oil. Didn't even cross Dick Cheney's evil little mind. It was sheer coincidence that the only Iraqi ministry US forces secured when they stormed into Baghdad was the oil ministry. What a fluke?

Then there's the most important piece of legislation the Iraqis never drew up - the cornerstone of their country's future - the Iraq oil law. Okay, sure, it was drafted by the Coalition Provisional Authority under proconsul Bremer. And, yes, it will, if passed, transfer effective control and development of Iraq's vast oil reserves from the country and its people to "international" (as in American) oil companies. And it will impose a colonialism on Iraq that other Middle Eastern states shook off decades ago.

So, its grand theft of Iraq's most valuable resource, so what? Even the Democrats made the passage of this devious bit of larceny one of their key "benchmarks" of Iraqi progress.

Writing in today's Globe & Mail, Robert Dreyfus argues that the time has come for the US to hand Iraq over to others who can actually help the country.

A new, nationalist Iraq is emerging underneath the presence of 160,000 U.S. troops. That nationalism extends from the current and former Sunni resistance fighters to Mr. al-Sadr's Mahdi Army to a range of moderate, secular Sunni and Shia politicians, all of whom — albeit under exceedingly difficult circumstances — are now talking to each other about a political framework for a new government.

Two urgent steps are needed, to capitalize on the re-emerging Iraqi nationalism. First, the broad-based majorities among Sunni and Shia Arabs must be reconciled under a new constitution, with new elections creating a new government untainted by American oversight. Second, Iraq's neighbours — all of them, including Iran and Syria — have to underwrite the new Iraqi nationalism.

With its track record, the Bush administration cannot accomplish either of these tasks. It's a job for the United Nations, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other parties. And all of this, in turn, depends on the United States announcing a timetable for withdrawing its forces.

Dreyfus is probably right but, as always, the devil is in the details. Everything, as he puts it, "depends on the United States announcing a timetable for withdrawing its forces." Even a new American administration may not be willing to bite that bullet and actually withdraw US forces from Iraq.

I don't think there will be peace or reconciliation, in the long run at least, if the proposed oil law is enacted. Fully two-thirds of the Iraqi people and their leaders know it is pure carpetbagging, the outright theft of their country's badly needed wealth. If it is passed I'd bet it will fuel a fresh insurgency against the American occupiers, their collaborators in the Iraqi legislature and the oil companies and anyone who dares work for them.

The Commonwealth's Last Dinosaur - Harper

Howard is gone and, with him, so goes Australia's support for Canada's effort to thwart Commonwealth efforts to pass a resolution calling for binding targets for greenhouse gas emission cuts.

Now the world can see Green Stevie for what he truly is, a dissembler who pays lip service to the global warming crisis but is intent on doing everything he can to let Big Oil dodge the consequences of that. Harper likes Bush's way of doing business. Say what people want to hear and then do just the opposite.

A Commonwealth official told the Toronto Star, "There is no sense there is a serious commitment to make the changes in the Canadian economy that we will all need to make in response to the challenge."

You think?

What better way to block essential emission caps than to fall back on Big Polluter Grid Lock. This has Canada and the United States saying no deal until China and India sign on and those two countries saying their pre capita emissions are a mere fraction of our own so no deal until the states primarily responsible for creating the existing crisis (the US in particular) take the lead.

"Useless Manure"

We probably won't know until he's gone how Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe has managed to hold onto power so long while presiding over his country's fiscal collapse.

Inflation has become so bad that the country's central bank it is knocking three zeroes from its currency notes. In other words, a thousand Zimbabwe dollars is now one new Zimbabwe dollar. If that sounds radical, bear in mind this is the second time the country has pulled this stunt this year.

The central bank governor, Gideon Gono, said holders of cash needed to urgently deposit it into the banking system "before it turns to useless manure".

Actually it sounds like he's asking Zimbabweans to turn last month's crap into next month's crap. The official rate of inflation is about 14,800%. Independent assessments come in closer to 40,000%.

In Brazil, Girl Jailed With Men

She was 16-years old. That didn't stop Brazilian officials from throwing the girl into a prison cell with 20-men. What would be the likely outcome from leaving her in that cell for four weeks? How about gang rape and torture?

The girl is said to have emerged from custody covered with bruises and cigarette burns. Brazilian media report her cellmates forced her to have sex in exchange for food.

According to The Guardian, this isn't an isolated case:

The revelations have unearthed other cases in which women were apparently imprisoned alongside men.

On Wednesday there were reports that a 23-year-old woman had shared a cell with about 70 men in the town of Parauapebas, also in the state of Para.

Amnesty International's Brazil researcher, Tim Cahill, said: "We receive extensive reports of women in detention who suffer sexual abuse, torture, substandard healthcare and inhuman conditions, showing that this case is far from isolated but continues to be hidden from the public."

Howard Down in Flames.

Australia's nasty little troll, non-Liberal prime minister John Howard, has been given the boot. The genuinely little man loved coal even more than the Chinese, opposed Kyoto and, of course, subscribed to the entire "War on Terror" series.

In fairness, Howard had brought economic prosperity to Australia, largely based on coal exports to China. Not quite the same thing as pushing crystal meth to 1.3-billion addicts but close enough.

The best part is the report that the whiny little bugger is also expected to lose his own seat.

The Australian newspaper The Age, headlined the election as, "A Triumph of Humility Over Hubris."

"Unfortunately for the Liberals and Nationals, all of the opinion polls, the focus group testing and, yes, the 2007 election result, suggest that when an increasing number of voters looked at the Prime Minister and his senior colleagues during their fourth term, they saw too much arrogance and a little too much self-satisfaction."

Canada Stands Alone On Climate Change in Kampala

Canada sticks out like a sore thumb at the Commonwealth conference in Kampala. 51 of the 53-member states want a climate change resolution that would force developed countries to adopt a binding commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The only two members not supporting the proposal are Canada and Australia. Even then we're pretty much alone as Australia is one day away from getting a new leader who's indicated he would back this sort of resolution.

So, Harpo, what's the deal? Even Britain's Gordon Brown backs the resolution. He's expected to pressure Harp over the weekend.

If Howard goes down to defeat tomorrow, that'll leave Stephen Harper, the face of Canada's New Government, standing alone in the Commonwealth.

Is Dion Going for Broke?

According to the Globe & Mail, Stephane Dion wants to bring down the Harper government in February.

The paper reports that Dion wants to take advantage of what he feels will be the fallout of the Mulroney/Schreiber affair and get to the polls before the Conservatives can bring in another budget.

I guess it's really a no-lose situation for Liberal supporters. It'll give Dion a chance to refute his critics and, if not, it'll clear the way for a new leader. I don't see any particular downside either way.

The Vagaries of International Co-Operation

Everyone knows that the effort to halt global warming will depend on real co-operation among the nations of the world, particularly on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

It seems the logical, even sane thing to do but that's not enough to get the industrialized nations to pull together and do the right thing.

To understand what lies ahead, take a look at efforts to keep the Atlantic, blue fin tuna stocks from collapsing. Canada and the US complain that too many blue fin are being taken from the waters off Europe and Africa.

There's an organization to deal with this very problem, the International Committee on the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna. It represents 45-nations from North America, Europe and Africa. ICCAT has been a dismal failure at getting the Europeans and Africans to stop overfishing the tuna stocks. Scientific evalutations and quotas are simply ignored.

What's coming is a repeat of what has already happened and is happening to other species - collapse. When that happens the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species kicks in and shuts down the fishery entirely.

Canada and the US want a managed, sustainable blue fin fishery but it's just not happening.

Krugman - Enron All Over Again

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman sees real similarities between the Enron collapse and the subprime mortgage crisis now spreading through the US - bad executive management. In Enron's case, top management fudged the books and some went to jail for it. In the mortgage lending business it wasn't so much fraud as garden variety greed.

“What were they smoking?” asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose.

The answer, of course, is that they were high on the usual drug — greed. And they were encouraged to make socially destructive decisions by a system of executive compensation that should have been reformed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but wasn’t.
In a direct sense, the carnage on Wall Street is all about the great housing slump.

This slump was both predictable and predicted. “These days,” I wrote in August 2005, “Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a sustainable lifestyle.” It wasn’t.

Krugman points out that the losses, upwards of $400-billion, aren't astronomic but they may cause such a loss of bank capital to force lending cuts of up to $2-trillion.

Around 25 years ago, American business — and the American political system — bought into the idea that greed is good. Executives are lavishly rewarded if the companies they run seem successful: last year the chief executives of Merrill and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million, respectively.

But if the success turns out to have been an illusion — well, they still get to keep the money. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Not only is this grossly unfair, it encourages bad risk-taking, and sometimes fraud. If an executive can create the appearance of success, even for a couple of years, he will walk away immensely wealthy. Meanwhile, the subsequent revelation that appearances were deceiving is someone else’s problem.

Who Speaks For the Palestinians?

The Bush/Cheney regime fervently hopes to broker a conclusive settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. A coup like that would go a considerable way to salvage Bush's legacy already thoroughly mired in the Iraq fiasco.

It's one thing to bring two people together to strike a deal but the whole exercise is meaningless unless both individuals have the authority to speak for and bind their side to its terms. This is where the Annapolis adventure begins to turn wobbly.

There's no problem with the Israeli side. Prime Minister Olmert clearly represents his nation. It's the Palestinian representation that's the problem.

Bush is trying to strike a deal with Palestinian Authority President Abbas. Abbas and his party, Fatah, are clearly more maleable than their rival, Hamas. If there's a deal to be made, Abbas will accept terms Hamas would reject. The trouble is, the Palestinian people had a democratic election and voted in Hamas, not Fatah. And Hamas isn't going to be invited to Annapolis.

According to the International Crisis Group, conditions for an agreement are anything but ideal:

"Since Camp David, Israel has all but destroyed the Palestinian Authority (PA), Palestinian infighting has dramatically increased, and Abbas’s authority pales compared to Arafat’s. Critics rail that Hamas controls Gaza and Israel the vast majority of the West Bank, leaving the PA only Ramallah and, during the daytime hours that the Israeli military deem it safe, Nablus. Fatah, Abbas’s party and presumptive backbone of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), is divided, chaotic and bereft of ideology. Olmert fares not much better. He has recovered – slightly – from the humiliation of the 2006 Lebanon war but his poll ratings remain low, he faces multiple corruption investigations, and he must contend with rivals itching for his job and deal with a fragile coalition that could splinter or collapse at the first hint of compromise with the Palestinians. The U.S. administration’s staying power and willingness to take risks at a time when it must confront urgent crises in Iraq and Iran remain untested."

All three administrations involved in this exercise are in trouble. The ICG believes that a fundamental precondition to any settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is an end to the Fatah/Hamas conflict:

"Fatah/Hamas reconciliation and reunification of Palestinian territory ultimately are necessary for successful peacemaking. Unfortunately, isolating Hamas appears to be a principal motivation behind the Annapolis process: the U.S., Israel and Fatah are convinced Israeli-Palestinian progress and the Islamists’ marginalisation must go hand in hand. The idea is based on an assumption – that Gazans will rise up against Hamas because of the punishing siege – that reflects wishful thinking, not strategic thought."

The Bush regime's record of diplomacy in the Middle East speaks for itself yet that hasn't kept that administration from trying to fit round pegs into square holes time and again. Not being a "reality based" operation the Bushies simply ignore problems they can't shape to their liking and go on regardless. It's sort of like setting out on a long road trip with a flat tire. Bush et al may be happy to fool themselves but I doubt they'll be fooling many Palestinians.

Blogging Tories - What Is Their Major Malfunction?

Anyone who runs a blog from the Liberal (moderate) side has to expect to be routinely attacked by seemingly fanatical right wingers. Their comments are notable for being full of sexual and scatological references. They tend to be jingoistic, unflatteringly aggressive and hostile, ill-considered and, ultimately, sophomoric, juvenile even.

I'm old enough to remember a time when Liberals and Conservatives could hold a civil dialogue without either side abusing the other or having to sacrifice its values and beliefs. We agreed to differ and we still respected each other.

Those, of course, were the days of Progressive Conservatism. Liberal or NDP or Progressive Conservative, there was always a common denominator of Canadian values that allowed us to make progress together.

Back when I was a member of the working press in Ottawa, I sometimes ran into political extremism. In those days that tended to come from the far left, the radical left. These types would rant and rave and spit fury without end, castigating anyone whose beliefs did not comport with their own.

Today, that very sort of conduct comes from Conservative supporters. The party, following Dick Cheney's roadmap, has shifted to the right, to the far right. In the process it has energized the radical right who, true to course, resemble in their carrying on nothing so much as the radical left of the 60's.

The voice that comes from these people is the voice of extremism, the strident screed, the impulse to try to heap ridicule and abuse on anyone who lies beyond their narrow, angry vision.

Now I know there are many intelligent, informed and thoughtful Conservatives out there and we should be glad to have them. Unfortunately they have not held their own, their part of the centre, but have surrendered their voice to the Cheneys and the Harpers and their followers, the far right.

It won't last, if only for the simple reason that the uber-right is at odds with core Canadian values. Study upon study shows that. Reality, however, is of no moment to these types. Long denied the limelight by sensible conservatives, the ultra-right nutjobs are now released onto their rampage and intent on making sure all of us know it.

Relax, they'll be gone soon enough.

Our Oceans in Peril

One sign of the troubles facing our oceans is the spread of jellyfish infestations. There seem to be two main causes of this - overfishing of species that normally feed on jellyfish and warming seas that extend their habitat.

A purple jellyfish, known as the "mauve stinger", has plagued Spanish beaches and swimmers there for some time. Tourist operators now have to sweep the beaches and close in waters to keep them free of the problem.

Last week, the mauve stinger showed up, en masse, where it's never seen - off the northeast coast of Ireland. An infestation there wiped out Ireland's only salmon farm. From The Age:

The jellyfish, covering an area of around 26 square kilometres, engulfed the Northern Salmon Company's cages off the province's north-eastern coast, suffocating 100,000 fish, the firm's managing director, John Russell, said.

"It was sheer devastation - I've been 30 years in the salmon industry and I've never seen anything like it," Mr Russell said.

Staff on their way to give the fish their morning feed noticed a "reddish-brown tinge" to the sea and then realised the boats were struggling to make headway through an expanse of jellyfish over 10 metres deep, Mr Russell said.

Aussie Labour Widens Lead

John Howard is toast. A Nielsen survey shows that, with the general election just two days away, Kevin Rudd's Labour Party has opened a 57-43% lead over Howard's Liberals. That's expected to translate into a 50-seat majority for Labour. That, in turn, will give Rudd the mandate he needs to move Australia back from the far right where it had been positioned by Howard.

The Cubans Sent to Kill John Kennedy

ABC News has a fascinating account of a plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy - in Chicago - three weeks before he went to Dallas. The story comes from former Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden. Now 73, Bolden was invited by Kennedy to join the presidential detail and thus became the first black man assigned to protect a president.

"Kennedy was due to arrive in Chicago the morning of Nov. 2 to attend the Army-Air Force football game at Soldier Field and ride in a parade. Newspapers had even printed JFK's detailed travel plan from O'Hare airport to the Loop.

Although police were preparing to line the motorcade route, Secret Service officials in Chicago were deeply troubled about the visit because of two secret threats.

Right-wing radical and Kennedy denouncer Thomas Vallee had arranged to be off work for JFK's visit; Vallee, an expert marksman, was arrested with an M1 rifle, a handgun and 3,000 rounds of ammo. But then there was the phone call to federal agents from a motel manager concerning what she'd seen in a room rented by two Cuban nationals.

"Had seen lying on the bed several automatic rifles with telescopic sights, with an outline of the route that President Kennedy was supposed to take in Chicago that would bring him past that building," said former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden.

Bolden recalled how agents bungled surveillance of those two suspected Cuban hit men. They disappeared and were never identified.

News reports stated that Kennedy didn't show because he was ill or because of a diplomatic crisis. Official investigations of JFK never determined why the president canceled Chicago Nov. 2. But in his first interview in 44 years, Bolden said JFK stayed away because of an imminent threat.

Bolden said the president didn't come to Chicago because he was basically waved off by the Secret Service, and it wasn't because he had a cold.

Information about Vallee, his similarity in appearance and background to Oswald and details of the Cuban hit squad in Chicago were never given to federal agents in Dallas.

When the Warren Commission began investigating JFK's assassination, Bolden says, he attempted to inform members about the Chicago plot and misconduct by his fellow agents.

During that time Bolden was arrested and prosecuted for soliciting a bribe from a counterfeiter and served a six-year sentence. He says it was a setup to silence him. The main witness has since recanted, and Bolden hopes now to clear his name. "

Afghanistan Backs Iran - What Else Did You Expect?

The National Disgrace is in a tizzy about Afghanistan refusing to support a Canadian resolution before the UN General Assembly censuring Iran for its human rights record.

The Afghani ambassador voted for an Iranian bid to have the resolution thrown out and against the Canadian motion when it finally came up for a vote. Here's the paper's take on Afghanistan's perfidy:

One interpretation of Afghanistan's view is that the government of President Hamid Karzai cares more about its relations with Iran than with Canada, despite Canada's massive commitment to Afghan reconstruction and the cost in Canadian lives.

I wonder if it could have anything to do with the fact that Iran borders Afghanistan? Maybe the Afghanis have figured out that Canada is there today but very well may not be in a year or two. Maybe the Afghans know when it's not best to be pointing fingers at someone else.

Karzai Cozies Up To Taliban

With the Taliban insurgents said to be spreading throughout the Afghanistan countryside, Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he's in almost daily contact with the insurgents.

"Only this week I've had more than five or six major contacts, approaches, by the leadership of the Taliban trying to find out if they can come back to Afghanistan,” Karzai told reporters.

Of course it's not clear why the Taliban would be reaching out to Karzai for permission to "come back to Afghanistan." According to the Senlis Council the Taliban have already come back to Afghanistan in a big way and are closing in on Kabul.

By the way, here's a picture of another Karzai, Hamid's brother Ahmad, said to be a big wheel in the opium trade. Ahmad is shown meeting with notorious warlord Gul Agha. Nice, very nice.

The Last Days of the Troll Down Under

It looks increasingly like the end of the road for Australian prime minister John Howard. His anything-but Liberal Party is expected to be turfed out to make way for the Labour Party when Aussies go to the polls on Saturday.

True to his little neo-con heart, the Troll has resorted to the far right's favourite tool - fear. He warned voters this week of "enormous risks" of changing government, implying some sort of security and economic cataclysm would surely result if Australians chose a full-size prime minister.

So what's the new guy, Kevin Rudd, promising if he's elected? For starters, he'll pull Australian troops out of Iraq. He might even use those bods to increase his country's forces in Afghanistan. He's also promised to sign on to Kyoto and to take a leading role in the push for carbon-emission cuts at next months' Bali conference.

Rudd is also expected to steer Australia away from the United States and more toward Asia.

Noah and the Great Flood - Blame Canada, Of Course

Several ancient religions tell of the great flood thousands of years ago. The Judeo-Christian account tells of Noah and his ark and all those critters. Even earlier religions have similar accounts - leaving aside Noah and his boat, of course.

Now a British scientist believes that flood way over on the other side of the world was caused by the collapse of a giant, humungous, glacial dam in Canada discharging freshwater from the prehistoric Lake Aggasiz. From CanWest News:

The deluged shorelines caused by the colossal Canadian gusher have even been associated with the "great flood" myths common to many ancient cultures - including the biblical story of Noah's Ark.

Now, University of Exeter geologist Chris Turney believes he has traced the sudden proliferation of farming across neolithic Europe to an exodus of coastal people moving inland to escape the results of the Agassiz flood.

"It still blows my mind to think that a release of water from Canada could set off a cascade of changes all the way across in Europe," Turney told CanWest News Service. "It just goes to show how people and the environment are intimately linked."

University of Manitoba geologist Jim Teller's reconstruction of the lake's dying throes has kick-started a worldwide wave of research into what was undoubtedly one of the most awesome natural events in Canadian prehistory.

Teller has also theorized Agassiz's final, cataclysmic burst caused such a surge of seawater around the world it might have given rise to the Noah's Ark saga and other ancient accounts of massive floods.

Among the effects, scientists believe, was the breaching of an earthen barrier between the Mediterranean and Black seas in southeast Europe and extensive flooding of the Black Sea shoreline.

Mulroney's Colossal Mistakes

According to Mulroney mouthpiece, Luc Lavoie, the former PM made a "colossal mistake" in accepting money from Karlheinz Schreiber. Funny he would look at it that way.

Mulroney's problems aren't with taking the cash-stuffed envelopes in coffee shops and hotel rooms. It's what he did afterwards that amounted to colossal mistakes - plural.

It's why he omitted any mention of getting the Schreiber schmiergelder money in his sworn evidence in his law suit. It's why he seemingly waited until after Schreiber's bank records came out to admit receiving the money and then running off to Revenue Canada to make an "anything but voluntary" disclosure. Those are colossal mistakes and there may be more, who knows?

Mulroney is furiously slicing and dicing what's left of his reputation with utterly far-fetched explanations. Like why he didn't disclose his business relationship in his testimony. Why? Because he wasn't asked. He's right, the government's counsel didn't put that specific question to him but Mulroney answered it anyway. He volunteered that he had no dealings with Schreiber other than to meet the guy for coffee a couple of times. That's Mulroney's statement. It's on the record, given under oath. And it wasn't remotely true.

Mulroney's last-ditch defence is tantamount to saying that, since you didn't ask the specific question, I was entitled to give an utterly false and misleading statement of my own and if you were deceived by that, hey, it's your problem. Sorry, Brian, doesn't work that way. You're bound by your voluntary statements, regardless of the question asked, because you made them under oath. There's no special law for Brian Mulroney. Just the same one the rest of us have to live by. Oh yeah, Brian, you're a lawyer and nobody knows that better than someone from your profession.

Bear in mind that Mulroney hasn't said these things himself. Luc Lavoie has said them, the boss's mouthpiece. Lavoie has said a lot of things that weren't exactly true but they were his statements, not Mulroney's, and Lavoie is free to say pretty much anything he pleases. He's free to test one tall tale after another in a hunt to find the one that will fly best for the boss. So far he's not gotten anywhere but, hey, you have to give him full points for trying.

He had it all. A good life, every advantage, even some of his reputation back. But that wasn't enough for Brian Mulroney. He had to come back into the public eye as Stephen Harper's mentor and he brought all the old arrogance along with him. If he'd just laid low until after Schreiber was cooling his heels in a German jail cell, he might have dodged this bullet but life in the public eye was too enticing. Oh well.

Mulroney's fortunes took another hit yesterday when Jean Chretien told an interviewer that he'd discussed the latest information with Allan Rock, the former justice minister who handled the Mulroney lawsuit settlement. Chretien got out his trusty mallet and wooden stake and said the two agreed that, had they known of the Schreiber payments, there wouldn't have been a settlement, there wouldn't have been an apology. Payback is a bitch, Brian.

Why Can't Holy Rollers Keep It In Their Pants?

America's religious nutjobs from Jimmy Swaggart to Jim Baker and many since have acquired a reputation for indulging in seamy pecadillos but this one may take the cake.

Ever heard of Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church of Decatur, Georgia? No, I didn't think so. Until recently CHSCHHC was just another American megachurch, but now it's become so much more.

It all began when the church's now 80-year old "Archbishop", Earl (naturally) Paulk (I hope that's not pronounced "poke"), and CHSCHHC got sued by former church employee Mona Brewer, who says Earl Paulk manipulated her into an affair from 1989 to 2003 by telling her it was her only path to salvation. Earl Paulk admitted to the affair in front of the church last January.

After confessing to his parishoners about putting it to Mona, Earl swore that she was the only woman he'd ever slept with except for his good wife. Earl also said the same thing, under oath, in the course of a deposition in the lawsuit.

For reasons that are unclear, somehow the Cobb County District Attorney and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation got to investigating Earl's evidence and even got a judge to issue an order for paternity testing.

The subject to be tested? Why, Earl's nephew and the current head pastor of CHSCHHC, 34-year old D.E. Paulk. Even Maury Povich doesn't get anything this good. The results? You guessed it, D.E. isn't Earl's nephew. He's Earl's son. Seems Earl must've plumb forgot about banging his brother's wife way back when but, then again, wouldn't anyone?

By the way, D.E. stands for Donnie Earl. Maybe he'll start going by Earl Junior. He's pictured below in a moment of utter rapture.

Here by the way is the skinny on Donnie Earl from Atlanta's own, Creativeloafing.com:

Most in the congregation don't doubt that Donnie Earl Paulk has the Holy Spirit. He's heir to men who've had the Holy Spirit before him. This -- the plush office, the church academies, the television broadcast and the cathedral -- is his legacy, handed down from 10 generations of preachers and, ultimately, his uncle. Donnie Earl is a megachurch bishop in the making, a creation of the kingdom in which he was reared, and he's got all the right marks: the charismatic stage presence, the devotion of his followers, the eye for Versace suits and the heart for society's outcasts.

But there are other things about Donnie Earl that don't fit. And in the end, those qualities might make him more unimaginably successful than pastors before him. Donnie Earl is progressive where his predecessors were stodgy, young where they were old, hip where they were square. He aspires to host a spot on MTV, produce films, launch a record label and invite Lenny Kravitz to guest preach at his church. Once Donnie Earl takes over the south DeKalb kingdom of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, with its multi-million-dollar operating budget and its 7,000 members, he plans to extend his reach into a secular entertainment empire.

Praise the Lord and pass the collection plate.

Western Union - Face of Global Migration

The internet age drove it bankrupt but migrants have brought it back, bigger than ever.

Western Union has returned to earn nearly a billion dollars a year mainly by helping migrants send money home. From the International Herald Tribune:

"Global migration is the cornerstone of how we've grown," said Christina Gold, Western Union's chief executive.

With five times as many locations as McDonald's, Starbucks, Burger King, and Wal-Mart combined, Western Union is the lone behemoth among hundreds of money transfer businesses in the United States.

Little-noticed by the public, seldom studied by scholars, these businesses form the infrastructure of global migration, a force remaking economics, politics and culture across the world. Last year, migrants from poor countries sent home $300 billion, about three times the world's foreign aid budgets combined.

Harvard, Princeton and Yale - Ivy League Loan Sharks?

I'm talking the top drawer here. Harvard, Princeton and Yale, the gold standard of American universities. They're being sued for alleged loan sharking.

The International Herald Tribune reports that Massachusetts developer Fred Fahey is suing the universities along with three other schools and two foundations that invested in Realty Financial Partners.

Fahey arranged to borrow about $10-million to finance a golf course community development. He borrowed the money from a lender called LR5-A. Realty Financial is a limited partner in LR5-A and the schools and foundations are limited partners in Realty Financial.

Fahey negotiated two loans with LR5-A. The largest, for $6.7-million, apparently came with a 42% interest rate. It's going to be tough to "pierce the corporate veil" once to get at Realty Financial and even harder to do it twice in order to get at the Ivy Leaguers but Fahey is determined to give it a shot.

Massachusetts law generally prohibits interest rates in excess of 20%.

It seems non-profits in the US have become fond of these sorts of investments. The Yale endowment gained 28 percent in the 12 months that ended June 30; Princeton's increased 25 percent; and Harvard's, 23 percent.

By the way, what sort of interest are you getting from your bank?

Less Crime, More Inmates - Mission Accomplished, Steve

Only in Conservative Canada. Crime continues to fall but that won't stop the Harpies from slinging more Canadians behind bars. I guess it's all the result of Stevie's "get tough on crime before it's gone" policies. From the Canadian Press:

One analyst suggested judges are growing leery of releasing people on bail in the face of a federal government that's pushing a law-and-order agenda.

"I think, overall, we've seen in recent years concern that's been expressed through the Conservative government about judges supposedly being soft on sentencing," said David MacAlister of the Institute for Studies in Criminal Justice Policy at Simon Fraser University.
"Not that I think they ever were, but I think that's bound to have an impact on judges. They're going to be sentencing people for longer periods of time and holding people they might otherwise have released just because of the pressure."

He said crime rates don't explain the rise: "Crime rates have steadily been coming down. There isn't more crime."

While more adults were in jail, the average number of young people aged 12 to 17 in custody on any given day went down, continuing a decline that began with adoption of the Youth Criminal Justice Act in 2003.

MacAlister said it's "inevitable" that the prison population will rise again if the Tory legislation on minimum sentences passes.

"Once you start instituting mandatory sentencing, your incarceration rate is bound to increase," he said.

Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard Society, said the government's get-tough agenda is going to require more prisons.

"This is our future," he said of the rising incarceration rate. "I sometimes think this agenda is about building more prisons."

Mushie to Bushie - Get Lost! Bushie to Mushie - You're the Greatest!

You can thank Pervez Musharraf for showing the world what happens when you tell the President of the United States to piss off. He wets his pants and then gives you a great big, Crawford, Texas hug.

In response to Mushie's declaration of martial law in Pakistan three weeks ago, Bush reacted angrily. He said his aides warned the dictator that the state of emergency "would undermine democracy."

Bush even sent his tough guy Negroponte to Islamabad to read the riot act to Musharraf.

In an interview with ABC News, Bush now says Musharraf "truly is somebody who believes in democracy."

From The Washington Post:

Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch said that "it's hard to imagine how the administration will be able to achieve anything in Pakistan if the president is so disconnected from reality."

"Almost everyone in Pakistan who believes in George Bush's vision of democracy is in prison today," Malinowski said. "Calling the man who put them in prison a great democrat will only discredit America among moderate Pakistanis and give Musharraf confidence that he can continue to defy the United States because Bush will forgive anything he does."

Is it any wonder that a lot of Pakistanis now call their dictator "Busharraf"?

The New World Order

Forbes.com, which calls itself the "home page for the world's business leaders" says the battered US dollar isn't coming back to its former glory any time soon.

One of the greenback's travails is OPEC. Confidence in the US dollar took a hit last week when a technician plugged the wrong line into the wrong socket and inadvertently broadcast a full half hour of OPEC deliberations and debate. It was only when the first stories hit the Reuters web page that officials realized what was going on and pulled the plug.

The brief window into OPEC revealed both Iran and Venezuela arguing to dump the American dollar as the currency of oil trading. Saudi Arabia vetoed any further discussion, warning that word of OPEC uncertainty in the dollar could send it crashing. All of this, of course, was being broadcast live to the world.

Kuwait has already moved to switch from a dollar-peg to a basket of currencies and the ongoing malaise in the dollar may force others to follow suit. Then there's the 800-pound gorilla, China, and its trillion-dollar holdings of American currency.

The United States is vulnerable and it appears destined to remain that way for another year at least. Right now the US has its hands full just trying to ride out the storm of the housing market collapse.

Afghanistan - Bigger and Better, Again!

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has just released its 2007 report on the state of Afghanistan's opium industry and - surprise, surprise - it's growing!

According to the UNODC, "..opium is now equivalent to more than half (53%) of the country's licit GDP."

The report notes that the opium price in Afghanistan is about one-tenth of the wholesale or trade price in Europe and a mere one percent of the street price in Europe. It's always those damned middlemen, isn't it?

Of the $4-billion in opium money that actually reaches Afghanistan, barely a quarter of that actually goes to the peasant farmers. "District officials take a percentage through a tax on crops (known as "ushr"). Insurgents and warlords control the business of producing and distributing the drugs. The rest is made by drug traffickers."

Let's face it - opium is the growth industry in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on the planet. We've hummed and hawed and debated what to do about it. We've tried this and that and still haven't got the faintest idea of how to tackle the problem.

Maybe if we set aside a billion dollars to compensate the peasant farmers and then began slinging everyone else who gorges at the opium trough into prisons, we'd be able to slowly get it under control. Wait, that won't work. Why not? Because we'd have to start by incarcerating the Afghan government and then the warlords and their militias. Then we'd be fighting everyone in that miserable country.

We're propping up a government that, as it stands today six years after the Taliban were run out, is not worth saving, one that is financially, culturally and tribally integrated with the warlords and the insurgents. We think we're fighting the Taliban but, in reality, we're just nibbling away at the edges of a much-larger organization, none of it any damned good.

Sorry, Lavoie - It Is Our Business, Your Boss Mulroney Made It Our Business

"Luc Lavoie told CanWest News Service that when Mr. Mulroney left politics in 1993, he had money pressures since he was "not a rich man" at the head of a young family with certain lifestyle expectations."

I read James' post suggesting that having Luc Lavoie as a spokesman is a real blunder for Brian Mulroney. I'm not so sure that this isn't a pretty shrewd tactic.

Brian Mulroney likes to get his message out through underlings and fixers, like Luc Lavoie and Fred Doucet. I expect it's the deniability game. If Lavoie says something - and it backfires (as it has so often) - Mulroney can skirt the result by saying his underling was wrong. Much better than getting stuck with it personally.

Now if Mulroney is going to get a sympathetic ear anywhere, it's with Canada's uber-right media. Yes, I mean the National Disgrace. Sort of like how Cheney always gravitates to Fox News whenever he's looking for a compliant interviewer who will keep a straight face while he spins bullshit.

Not suprising Mulroney's latest "po-boy" refrain wound up being carried by Lavoie to the National Disgrace. Here's the latest. Yes, Karlheinz Schreiber met with Mulroney three times to pass cash-stuffed envelopes, each to the tune of $100,000, across a table to the boss. Why three envelopes? Why $100,000 each time? Easy. Each $100,000 was for one year's consulting fees for Mulroney helping Schreiber with a project to build military vehicles in Montreal and to establish a pasta business.

Yes, says Lavoie, Mulroney did accept the first cash retainer while he was still an MP for Baie Comeau but after Kim Campbell had succeeded him as prime minister.

Now the next line is that, because the delightful little bundles of cash were retainers, Mulroney wasn't obliged to report them as income right away. In other words, they only became income in the years in which they were earned. Okay.

And, on the thorny issue of when his boss did actually decide to run to RevCan and pay taxes on the "income," Lavoie punts and says that isn't anyone's "God damn business." Ooh, ouch! Sorry, Luc, but it is our goddamned business, Mulroney made it our business.

It was Mulroney who told counsel, under oath, that his involvement with Schreiber after leaving office had amounted to simply having coffee with the guy once or twice. Mulroney offered an account of their relationship and he can hardly now say it's the government's fault because they didn't ask if he'd pocketed any cash-stuffed envelopes from Schreiber.

Mulroney proferred an account demonstrably at odds with the current story now that incontrovertible facts have come out that certainly seem to contradict his testimony. So it's cut here and snip there and sand off these rough spots trying to make his account conform to the known facts and the more he does that, the more obvious everything becomes.

One thing I don't get. LaVioe goes to the National Disgrace with a sob story about how Mulroney was all but broke when he left office. Poor fella! What I don't get is how does a guy in such embarrassed circumstances manage to get in his car, drive down to Montreal and buy a really big house for, oh, $1.6-million (March, 1993) and then throw another $1-million to renovate the old dump? Wouldn't you like to be that kind of poor? When you look at those numbers, Schreiber's $300,000 was chump change.

The Oily Truth

Hey all you SUV jockeys out there! We may have just reached Peak Oil, the point at which global oil production begins its decline.

The Economist reports that Big Oil profits dropped in the third quarter of 2007 despite the world oil price steadily nearing $100 a barrel. Exxon Mobil was down 10% but they were lucky. Overall, earnings fell an average of 15%.

So how do revenues take such a hit while prices soar? Easy, a shortage of labour and equipment drove production costs up almost twice as fast as price increases but the real key - declines in production.

"According to Citigroup, the average decline in overall output was 3.3%. If the relatively steady supply of natural gas is stripped out, the numbers look even worse: oil production fell by 9% on average. No matter how high the price goes, the oil majors cannot make a profit from oil they do not produce."

The International Energy Agency forecasts that we'll see production shortfalls of 12.5-million barrels a day by 2015.

And here's an ominous development. Samsung Heavy Industries has just launched the world's first ice-breaking oil tanker. The ship was ordered in 2005 by Sovcomflot, a shipping company owned by the Russian government. I wonder why on earth they would want an icebreaker/oil tanker? Oh, wait a minute, I get it.

Taliban On the Run? Hardly.

We've become accustomed to the Afghanistan rituals. There are the grim ramp ceremonies and the coverage of the flag-draped coffins of the dead being "repatriated" to Canada.

Then there's the ritual of the embedded reporter telling us of the bravery and commitment of our soldiers in the combat zone.

We also get the ritual briefings from mid-level and senior officers about the latest mission and how we're capturing this and driving the insurgents out of there and there and there. They always make sure to get out the message that it's a tough struggle but we're slowly winning. We just need a couple years more. Hmm.

It's these boastful and often groundless claims by the colonels and generals that sully the sacrifice of their soldiers. Remember how they gleefully pronounced Panjwai clear of the Taliban? They told us they were going to keep it that way. Yeah, sure. Didn't happen. The Taliban left, more or less intact, and returned when it suited them. They didn't have to wage a fierce battle to reclaim Panjwai, they just walked back in.

A report just released by the Senlis Council paints a grim picture completely at odds with our military leaders' glowing optimism. From The Guardian:

The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into the group's hands, according to a report by an independent thinktank with long experience in the area.

Despite the presence of tens of thousands of Nato-led troops and billions of dollars in aid, the insurgents, driven out by the US invasion in 2001, now control "vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries," the Senlis Council says in a report released today.

On the basis of what it calls exclusive research, it warns that the insurgency is also exercising a "significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people, who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change".

The council goes as far as to state: "It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when this will happen and in what form. The oft-stated aim of reaching the city in 2008 appears more viable than ever and it is incumbent upon the international community to implement a new strategic paradigm for Afghanistan before time runs out".

The Senlis assessment is confirmed by Oxfam and, according to The Guardian, is also affirmed by "senior British and US military commanders."

We need to realize that our military's bag of tricks is just about empty. It's a matter of too little, too late. The question now is how many more ramp ceremonies we're going to permit before people like Rick Hillier come clean with us?

We're not fighting the Taliban's war and they're not fighting ours. The trouble is, it's the outcome of their war, the political war of insurgency, that will decide the future of Afghanistan. Centuries of fighting off foreigners has shown them how to defeat massively superior armed force. A couple of decades ago it was the Soviets. They had all the toys - special forces, armoured vehicles, tanks, artillery, strike fighters and attack helicopters - and they were willing to be awfully brutal in using them. But they didn't win.

Here's something else to ponder. Once the Taliban achieve a critical mass of legitimacy, how long will it be before the others - the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, throw in with them and drive out Karzai? If that happens, what are we going to do then? It's time to start watching the other players, the warlords such as Dostum, Hekmatyar, and Gul Agha.

Another Hollow Argument

The anti-Kyoto crowd like to mock Canadian action to cut GHG emissions as meaningless. They point out that we're so small that a significant cut here would make no noticeable difference globally. It's not that they don't get it, these clowns choose not to get it.

There are times when the community of nations must act collectively. We sent squadrons upon squadrons of fighters and bombers to England in the Second World War and yet we were never threatened by German bombs. For decades Canada led the international peacekeeping effort in places like the Gaza Strip and Cyprus and yet they weren't particularly significant to Canada.

What was significant to Canada was the peace and health of the world. That's why we've sent our soldiers in harm's way so often and why we've contributed to global foreign aid. We recognize that everyone wins, Canada very much included, from a healthy, stable world.

There are other ways to look at this situation. If we can lower our per capita GHG emissions by 20 per cent it will be equal to ten times as many Africans eliminating their GHG emissions completely.

When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, Canadians are pigs at the trough. We're second only to Americans. You cannot imagine what global warming would be like if the Indians and the Chinese reached per capita GHG emission levels a quarter of our own.

Let's see, we want to lecture them about what they must do. The problem is, when we have our snouts buried deep in the slops, it's hard to make out what we're saying.

Talk Is No Longer Cheap

Harper EnviroMin John Baird says he gets global warming, "Canada, like the rest of the world, needs to take immediate action." Without meaningful action, Baird's words are nothing but talk.

Ever since Stephen Harper read the polls and realized he was sailing a course to his doom, leading to his miraculous epiphany, the Cons have talked and talked and talked about global warming and the urgent need for action and have done - virtually nothing.

Harper is like the one sap who doesn't let go of the mooring rope as the balloon lifts off and hangs on and on until it's too late. That guy sees what's coming but clings to the false comfort of the rope until he can hold no longer.

Letting go, for Stephen Harper, would mean aknowledging the sine qua non of tackling global warming, carbon caps. Absolute ceilings on total production of greenhouse gases followed by strictly mandated, steady reductions in those ceilings.

The guy who hangs on to the rope as the balloon sails away cannot accept the reality that his very undoing is his hold on the rope. He can't accept that his only means to save himself is to let that rope go and accept the injury of falling over the certainty of death if he delays.

Harper's insistence on "intensity based" targets and multi-fold expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands is the rope he cannot let go. He can't accept that Athabasca operators already exceed any tolerable level of greenhouse gas emissions. If he accepted that reality, he would release that rope while there's still time. Instead he's willing to let that balloon keep rising, urging us to be content so long as its rate of climb slows.

It's not as though he doesn't have options. For years the Big Oil operators in Athabasca have promised that, before we know it, they'll be carbon neutral. They've supposedly got all these carbon-capture technologies, already proven and on the shelf, that they can employ. Okay, fine, where are they? Surely now is put up or shut up time for Big Oil.

You see, Big Oil and Stephen Harper have a lot in common. They're all talk. For them, talk is cheap. For you and me and our kids and those who follow them, talk is no longer cheap.

Kill' Em - You'll Be Glad You Did

The United States is a real, law and order country. Although maybe it would be more accurate to describe it as a real, "crime and punishment" country.

There's a lot of support in America for the death penalty but there's also a growing opposition to it. Opponents often cite studies, usually from other nations, that show that capital punishment is not a deterrent to homicide, especially murder.

Now a number of American studies have been released that claim to show that the death penalty is indeed a powerful deterrent to murder. From the New York Times:

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.

The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise.

“You have two parallel universes — economists and others,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment.” Responding to the new studies, he said, “is like learning to waltz with a cloud.”

The studies try to explain changes in the murder rate over time, asking whether the use of the death penalty made a difference. They look at the experiences of states or counties, gauging whether executions at a given time seemed to affect the murder rate that year, the year after or at some other later time. And they try to remove the influence of broader social trends like the crime rate generally, the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, economic conditions and demographic changes.

“It seems unlikely,” Professor Donohue and Professor Wolfers concluded in their Stanford article, “that any study based only on recent U.S. data can find a reliable link between homicide and execution rates.”

The two professors offered one particularly compelling comparison. Canada has executed no one since 1962. Yet the murder rates in the United States and Canada have moved in close parallel since then, including before, during and after the four-year death penalty moratorium in the United States in the 1970s.

The inconvenient fact that the American studies and the American experience stand alone to those everywhere else in the West is anything but problematical to these economists because, when you get to set the rules of the study, you work in an artificial world free of considerations such as overall crime rates, the criminal justice system, economic conditions and demographic changes. There, see it's all so simple, so very, very simple.

The Trouble With Stephen Harper

Adbusters has published an interview with Dr. Michael Byers who holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia:

His most recent book is Intent for a Nation: What is Canada for?, a title inspired by conservative philosopher George Grant’s influential 1965 work, Lament for a Nation, in which Grant grimly predicted the inevitable absorption of Canada by the United States.

On Stephen Harper:

"The first thing to understand is that Mr. Harper is an economist, so he thinks that economics are of paramount importance. And I’m pretty sure that he buys Grant’s thesis, and that there’s not really much we can do to avoid it because we are so dependent on the US economically. So the question for Mr. Harper would be how to manage dependency. I really don’t think that he’s capable of believing that Canada can chart an independent course. Add to that the fact that ideologically he is essentially an American Republican, he wouldn’t see a whole lot of downside to going along with the policy decisions of the Bush administration. For him, it’s a convenient default position.

"I’ll give you the three most obvious examples. One, Harper’s long-standing position on climate change, which he has recently altered – ostensibly – because he’s finally realized the political reality that lots of Canadians are beginning to care a great deal about climate change, and that it has become hard to deny at a scientific level, especially for an Arctic country like Canada. But Stephen Harper as a policy wonk has always doubted the reality of human-caused climate change, and has resisted any effort to deal with it, especially in a multilateral manner involving any international organizations. In that respect, he shares an awful lot with key members of the Bush administration.

"The second example concerns the use of the military abroad, and what Mr. Harper has sought to do with the Canadian forces – his absolutely gung-ho support for the counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan, his public criticism of Jean Chrétien’s government for not sending troops to Iraq in 2003. This is a man who believes that foreign policy at a primary level involves shooting people overseas. He’s not a peacekeeper. He’s not a diplomat. He shares the tough-guy position of the Bush admin, in the belief that the way you exert influence is by exerting military power.

"I guess the final issue that stands out is Mr. Harper’s aggressive policies on the Middle East, such as his comment that Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s abduction of an Israeli soldier last summer was “measured.” And his refusal to back down from that, even after eight Canadian citizens were killed in the bombings. That was staggering for me, because the Middle East was one of the important areas in which Canada had traditionally and successfully steered a different course, all the way back to 1956 and the Suez Crisis. That was Lester Pearson and Canadian diplomacy’s greatest moment, using middle-road, pro-active diplomacy and the imaginative construction of solutions – in that instance, the pioneering of un peacekeeping. That’s what we did. That’s why we have the reputation we have. There was no need for Mr. Harper to make that comment, and to side unequivocally with the Israeli Defense Forces last summer. Even within Israel there was a lot of public discomfort with what the IDF was doing, but you would never have suspected the slightest doubt in the Canadian government. We’ve seen similar things happen with the issue of funding the Palestinian Authority or the listing of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. And as a result of this, the Harper government is essentially writing Canada out of the script in the search for Mid-East peace. We don’t matter anymore.

"The Bush administration’s greatest failing, I think, is missing the importance of soft power. Mr. Harper makes the exact same mistake, but it’s magnified ten-fold by the fact that Canada relies much more on soft power than the US. It’s the one thing that has really made us matter in the past. The combination of our size, our location, our resources, with a very sophisticated use of soft power – that’s what enabled us historically to “punch above our weight.” The Harper government doesn’t get that. It’s our most treasured asset, and it takes decades to build it up and only months to waste it away."

This Guy Needs Help

I stumbled across Werner Patel's blog, "The Spade", where I found his take on the taser death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport.

"I know it sounds harsh and heartless, but given what I know about people like that (and the problems they are causing in Western Europe on a daily basis), I am actually glad that he won't be our problem anymore."

Later, Patel followed that up with an apology, saying it was all a "confluence of tragic events that resulted in a man's death."

Just what does Werner know "about people like that" that would make him glad if some of them got the same treatment as Dziekanski?

I wondered if I just read Patel unfairly until I found these follow up remarks from him in his comments section:

"When someone acts like an animal, he has to expect that others will stop him, one way or another. Besides, the officers had to act because he could have hurt other people there (throwing heavy equipment around, including a computer). In the good old days, they would have shot him; with Tasers, you at least get a chance it's not lethal.

Dan, I am not saying that all of them must be shot. But if it does happen, I, knowing what I do first-hand, certainly won't shed a tear, but side with our decent officers.

Oh, and Dan, it's not racism, because they're the same race as we are. And, finally, it has nothing to do with race, etc. I believe that anyone who acts like this should be taken down -- if he dies in the process, it's his own fault. If he had acted like a human being, instead of an animal, he wouldn't have been put down."

"Exactly. The Taser is the best approach available. The public needs to be protected from such animals. In the (good) old days, he would have been shot; with a Taser, death is not the most common outcome at all. But as I also said, if you act like an animal, you have to be prepared to face the consequences, including death."

"What does this have to do with anything? He was not a regular traveller or tourist: he had come here as an immigrant. As such, it was his duty to learn English before coming to Canada.
Act like a fool, die like a fool."

I don't know where this clown prince came from but he's sure welcome to take his Dark Age attitudes right back where he learned them.

We're Getting All Mushie About Pakistan Again

It has to be tough to be Pervez Musharraf. He seems to live in a world where people are either his avowed enemies or just tolerate him, sort of.

One thing about the guy is that he gets everybody nervous, really nervous at the first sign of instability in his administration. The fact is, he's always made us nervous. Six years ago, on November 5, 2001, Gwynne Dyer explained why:

"...General Richard Meyers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday that he is 'concerned' about Pakistan's stability and the safety of its nuclear arsenal. The Indian government said nothing at all, but you can guess what it is thinking.

It is thinking that if Pakistan should fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists as the result of a revolt against Musharraf, most probably from within his own armed forces, then India will have to 'preempt' - destroy Pakistan's nuclear weapons on the ground before it can launch them - within the first hours after a new regime comes to power in Islamabad. And Washington, of course, is thinking exactly the same thing.

Seymore Hersh has just published a report in the New Yorker magazine, strenuously denied by the Pentagon (but then it would deny it, wouldn't it?) that the United States already has a secret plan to destroy Pakistan's nuclear weapons immediately if they seem likely to fall into fundamentalist hands.

This is insanely dangerous stuff even if it is true, as every one assumes, that the preemptive attack would be carried out using only conventional, not nuclear weapons. Pakistanis in all walks of life... ...see their nuclear weapons as their last and maybe their only safeguard against far more powerful India.

A bungled or partial preemption would probably end with the new regime in Pakistan launching its [remaining] nuclear weapons ...while it still could. The targets could be Indian nuclear bases and cities, or even US troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

How real is the danger? It's not so much the civilian fundamentalists demonstrating against the West in the streets who pose the danger, but the generation of fundamentalist officers, brought into the armed forces by the late General (and President) Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, who have now risen to command key army formations. Together with many senior officers of Inter-Service Intelligence - [the agency] that basically created the Taliban, ...they comprise a large fundamentalist presence inside the only Pakistani institution that really works."

And that's why we're getting all Mushie about Paksitan again because, in the six years since Dyer penned this particular column, things there haven't gotten a bit better.

NATO Can't, er, Won't Protect Detainees

Sure, some of them are Taliban, the odd one might even be al-Qaeda, and some are just Afghani peasants. It doesn't really matter what they are once NATO forces decide to detain them. At that point they're simply Detainees and headed for an Afghan prison and, well, just about anything you can imagine.

There's a lot of evidence coming out that the people we're handing over are going to something that more closely resembles an abbatoir than a prison. An Afghan prison and an abbatoir really do resemble each other - both have shit and blood all over the floor.

It's good to know that, when the villagers watch as we drive away with uncle Ahmad or cousin Mohammad or grandfather Karim bound and trussed and slung in the back of an armoured vehicle, they'll completely understand that whatever fate befalls their loved one, their fellow tribesman, is entirely the doing of their own government and not at all the fault of the Canadian soldiers who made off with him. Thank goodness these are not people who hold grudges or seek revenge.

You see, at the level where it matters most - at the village level, where we capture and detain people - our soldiers become totally responsible to those villagers for anything untoward that happens to those detainees. We deliver their people into the hands of the butchers.

In Viet Nam, the Americans handed their captives over to the South Vietnamese. How well did that work? Just how much did that advance the Americans' campaign to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese villagers? How many of those villagers did it drive into the arms of the insurgency?

Now, sure, I know the Taliban are as bloody and vicious as any Afghan government torturer but that's not the point. A key tenet of the insurgents' style of warfare is to drive a wedge between the people and their central government. One of the ways that's accomplished is to make the people fearful and distrusting of their government. When both sides are brutal, you don't have much to lose by choosing the side that actually controls your territory, not the one that drives through twice a week buttoned up in armoured vehicles. What we're doing and allowing Karzai to do is precisely what the other side seeks to have us do.

Failing to ensure that the Karzai government treats detainees humanely is simply bad for business. God knows that duplicitous clown and the thugs in his government and the warlords and drug lords he collaborates with are already making our soldiers' job over there enormously more difficult than it should be, adding torture of detainees, our detainees, only makes everything worse.

The Canadian chairing NATO's military committee, General Ray Henault, rules out establishing our own internment camps over there. Henault says 1) we can't afford it and 2) it would undermine the Afghani government. I suppose the good general doesn't understand that there's nothing we could do that would further undermine the Kabul government on this one and, when it comes right down to it, what we can't afford is to let these atrocities continue.

This just in - the Gulf-Times, from Doha, Qatar, reports that, "Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week ordered authorities to stop torturing suspects in a tacit admission that the practice had been carried out."

They Can't Be Trusted

Saturday's Globe & Mail editorial says it all:

"Canadians cannot believe a word the RCMP have to say over the taser death of Robert Dziekanski."

Not a word. They killed this man and then waged a disinformation campaign to cover their backsides. Gee, haven't we heard this before? Remember a kid named Ian Bush who wound up with a bullet fired into the back of his head, supposedly in self defence by an RCMP officer who said he was pinned, face down, on the floor of a cell with Bush at his back? Guess what? That's an impossibility, just maybe not to the RCMP.

They always get their man. Do they ever. Wish it weren't so.

This time, though, they weren't so lucky. A guy named Paul Pritchard was there with a video camera. He captured the truth we weren't going to get from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Have the Mounties Hit Rock Bottom?

They've burned barns in Quebec, screwed up the biggest terrorist attack in Canadian history, shot a young man in the back of his head in "self defence" and now brought international ridicule on their force by the apparently unnecessary execution of an innocent, confused man pleading only for their help. Surely it's time to say "enough" to these people and get someone in charge who will rein them in and curb their excesses.

What's needed at the top of the RCMP is one very tough, very straight cop - not a bureaucratic insider with lifelong ties to the Conservatives.

This garbage has got to stop.

I have always respected the RCMP even though my admiration for the force got dented every now and then over the years. The homicide at Vancouver airport was the straw that broke this camel's back. I'm not saying it was murder or even manslaughter but it certainly was a homicide. That man was killed and for no good reason and there are people, including those who were nowhere near that airport that day, who should answer for it.

Something went horribly wrong. Were these officers not trained properly or did they ignore their training? Were they not fit to be trusted with the weapons we gave them and, if so, who chose to give them the weapons?

For my money, the cops involved ought to be treated as though they had drawn their service revolvers and shot that man to death. They ought to be in the prisoners dock. We also need to ensure that whatever infected them and made four fit, highly trained police officers believe they had some right to use that level of force on this man hasn't spread to the rest of the RCMP. It's time to call the cowboys into the corral for a long, blunt talk.

This is Canada and we act to a higher standard than others, including our closest neighbour. We're reluctant but not unwilling to have our police use force but, when they do use force, we expect it to be cautious and measured. We're entitled to expect nothing less than that standard from our national police force and they disgrace us when they abuse the trust we repose in them.

The same goes for our military which has been drawn into the American mentality of "kicking ass and taking names." The last I checked there was an abundance of ass-kickers and name-takers on this planet. They don't need our soldiers to swell their ranks. We expect our soldiers to at times use force but we also expect them to be cautious and measured in that. We should be entitled to expect that our soldiers won't call artillery and air strikes down on the innocent civilians in villages. We're entitled to expect that they will not surrender the suspects they apprehend into the hands of torturers. We're entitled to all of that and they too disgrace us when they abuse the trust we repose in them and do those things.

So let's hear from Hillier and let's hear from Elliott. Let them tell us why the services they oversee have brought disgrace onto this country. Let's hear them tell us what they will do to restore our trust in their services. Better yet, let's hear them do what honourable people in their situation are expected to do - take personal responsibility, apologize and resign.

Let's stop playing America's favourite game, "shoot'em up". Only in America could 9/11 happen and a needless, groundless invasion and occupation of a nation happen and an entire region be set on fire and no one take full responsibility for their abject failures. Tens, probably hundreds of thousands have died and many more will because of the hubris and incompetence of a few and yet that few refuses to accept any consequences for their acts. I don't want my country to descend into that mentality. The only way to avoid it is for heads to roll and offenders to answer for their actions.

It's going to be a lot easier to clean up these stains now than it will be down the road if we do nothing for by then they will surely spread.

We have to salvage some good from these miserable disasters. Otherwise those who've already fallen victim have endured their suffering for absolutely nothing. We can't bring Robert Dziekanski back but we don't have to let his name get tossed away in the garbage either. Let's not strip this guy of his dignity in death as we did in life. This is way past some lame review of how we use tasers. It's about standing up and being Canadian again.

The Alchemist's Prize

Global warming skeptics always claim to have a gaggle of credible scientists ready, willing and able to refute the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's conclusions about man-made global warming and the climate change dangers that lie ahead.

Here's the truth - they're full of crap.

First you have to leave out the "usual suspects", the scientists who gravitated to the service of Big Oil after years of lining their pockets fighting the good fight for Big Tobacco by spreading doubt about the link between cigarettes and cancer. Sorry, those people are paid liars and about as reliable as jailhouse informants.

Then, take whatever dregs are left over and come up with any credible studies they have produced that disprove the IPCC findings. The catchword here is "credible" as in "peer-reviewed". All that means is that they have published the hard research behind their conclusions so that it can be tested by other scientists and shown to be valid or bogus. That's not too much to ask, is it? We ask that of the scientists whose research, thousands of pages of it, is used by the IPCC in its work.

Now, don't be giving us the old saw about how these skeptic scientists can't come up with the funding that the pampered global warming people enjoy. Think about how stupid that sounds.

Can even you hardened skeptics believe, even for a minute, that Big Oil and Big Coal wouldn't heap immeasurable money onto any scientist able to refute the IPCC and show that global warming isn't a man-made problem arising out of greenhouse gas emissions? No one has a more immediate and direct financial interest in this than the fossil fuel industry and, if you've read any of the reports about their latest quarterly earnings, these companies are literally awash in profits lately.

Big Oil and Big Coal would pay anything to the alchemist who could allow them to get the global warming and climate change and greenhouse gas emissions problems off their backs. The only thing is that coming up with any credible rebuttal is as hard as turning lead into gold.

The Art of Abu Ghraib

Showing now at the American University Museum:

Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib series features uncompromising, graphic images by this Colombian painter expressing his outrage at the American-led torture of Iraqi insurgents.

The Paris-based Botero, known for his exaggeratedly rotund figures in benign social satires, unveiled these controversial works in Europe in 2005. This will be the first showing of the Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings in a museum in the U.S.

The works in this exhibition are quite the departure from Botero's usual style, but do relate to his previous works portraying drug cartel violence in Colombia. Botero constructed each work after reading official reports of the atrocities and concentrated on the suffering and dignity of the victims rather than their tormentors.

The Mysterious Death of Buster Crabb

It was one of the great mysteries of the Cold War. Just what happened to the Royal Navy's highly-decorated Commander Lionel "Buster" Crabb, the frogman spy?

In 1956 Crabb was given a little job in Portsmouth harbour. Soviet leaders Nikita Kruschev and Marshall Nikolai Bulganan had arrived aboard the cruiser Ordzhonikadze on a state visit to Britain. The Royal Navy wanted a look at the underside of the cruiser and its escorts. On 17 April, 1956 Crabb and his colleague booked into a hotel in Old Portsmouth. The following day the Russian ships arrived. The day after that, Crabb failed to show up for breakfast and was never seen, alive, again.

The following June, a fishing boat found the badly decomposed body of a man in a diver's suit. The head and hands were missing. There was heated controversy over whether the corpse was indeed that of Commander Crabb.

50-years later, a former Soviet frogman has come forward to say that he killed Crabb that day, cutting the diver's throat when he spotted him planting a mine on the hull of the cruiser. From The Guardian:

Eduard Koltsov, a retired sailor, said he needed to tell the truth about the cold war mystery before he died. Koltsov, who was 23 at the time, was investigating suspicious activity around the ship when, he said, he saw Crabb fixing a mine to the hull.

In the documentary, he showed off the dagger he claims to have used to kill Crabb and the red star medal he was awarded.

"I saw a silhouette of a diver in a light frogman's suit, who was fiddling with something at the starboard next to the ship's ammunition's stores," he said. "I swam closer and saw that he was fixing a mine."

British officials vehemently deny Koltsov's claim that Crabb was attaching a mine to the cruiser.

Yet records released in the UK last year show the government of the day went to extraordinary lengths to suppress the story.

Crabb is said to have been Ian Fleming's model for James Bond.

The Kinky Side of the Far Right

The Far Right isn't just about death and destruction and Christian, family values, it's also got a real appetite for the pervy business.

And, when you speak of the Far Right, you speak of FoxNews - home of Hannity, O'Reilly and Geraldo. Naturally these upstanding Right Wingnutters also have their kinky side and - if you want a peek - check out http://www.foxnewsporn.com/. If it's trashy sex exploitation you want, you will not be disappointed.

Give Schreiber the Boot

I agree with The Grumpy Voter. If Schreiber has tied his willingness to give evidence in the Airbus affair to whether he gets extradited to Germany, we ought to just give him the boot.

My preference would be to delay his extradition until we can get him before a duly convened, judicial proceeding, swear him in and let him have his say. If he doesn't want to talk, we can treat it as though he has nothing further to add.

Quite frankly I'm not sure there's a lot more that Schreiber can say now that we really need. It would be useful to get him under oath to put on record the business about BM and his lawyer calling Schreiber's lawyer to ask for a statement denying that funds changed hands but that's about it.

No more nonsense from Karlheinz.

Globe Exposes Harper on Prisoner Abuse

The Harper government knew, and was utterly indifferent about captive abuse in Afghan prisons long before the story broke to the public in April of last year.

Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association had to drag the Harper government before a Federal Court judge to get them to turn over documents they were determined to keep secret. Documents including a Canadian correctional services inspector asking Ottawa for better boots because she was "walking through blood and fecal matter" when she inspected the prisons.

Blood? Fecal matter? What kind of prisons show off that sort of thing to international inspectors? Even a neo-con Tory can figure that out.

From The Globe & Mail:

Another report noted that the warden of the main prison in Kandahar, where many prisoners handed over by Canadians soldiers were held, had been fired after charges that he raped juvenile detainees. Cosmetics and hashish were found in his office. He was exonerated because an Afghan military judge said it was "impossible for a drunken man in his 50s to commit an act of rape," reported a Canadian official in a cable to Ottawa.

At one Kandahar secret police prison, all inmates are shackled in leg irons around the clock. Some have been kept that way for more than a year.

...since May, after the government hastily arranged follow-up inspections in the wake of news reports, a different, but equally disturbing picture, emerges.

It is of scores of disappeared detainees, of strong evidence of torture and abuse continuing despite the inspections and of a frantic effort, in the first few days after the stories appeared last April, to paint a far rosier picture than documented in secret diplomatic cables.

Harper and his gang knew about it, they tried to conceal it and, when it came out they tried to mislead the Canadian public about it. In stubbornly continuing to consign detainees to this treatment, they were knowingly making Canada a party to it.

Even if the Conservative pols were willing to bury the truth, surely we could have expected our top military leaders to preserve the honour of the armed forces by bringing this out. They seem to have gone American too.

Arctic Ice Free Sooner Than Expected

Forget about 2050 or even 2030. In less than three years the Arctic Ocean could become ice free.

Louis Fortier, scientific director of ArcticNet, a Canadian research network, said the sea ice is melting faster than predicted by models created by international teams of scientists, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They had forecast the Arctic Ocean could be free of summer ice as early as 2050. But Fortier told an international conference on defence and security in Quebec City yesterday that the worst-case scenarios are becoming reality.

"The frightening models we didn't even dare to talk about before are now proving to be true," Fortier told CanWest News Service, referring to computer models that take into account the thinning of the sea ice and the warming from the albedo effect -- the Earth is absorbing more energy as the sea ice melts.

The Arctic, considered to be the barometer of global climate change, is warming faster than expected and this could cause global average temperatures to rise still more.

"The most unbelievable thing is the total absence of ice in straits where you never thought you would ever be able to navigate. The changes are not progressive anymore, they are dramatic," he said.

When it comes to our political leadership and global warming, the Harper Tories are positively neanderthal in responding. If we're going to deal with this we have to act nationally, independently. No more, "we'll act when China does." That's a dodge, a way to justify a global climate change gridlock.

We can fault the Chinese for having just edged out the US in total GHG emissions. They can fault the West for already having contributed the overwhelming share of GHGs that have brought us to where we are today and still being unwilling to take meaningful remedial action. Great, we all get to blame each other and - do nothing. That's a suicide pact and it's got to end.

We're criminally irresponsible if we let this charade continue. People, who just happen to be the poorest people living in distant lands, are going to pay an awful price for our selfishness. For a guy who claims to be a devout Christian, Harper seems pretty indifferent to the suffering that will follow from his "intensity-based" chicanery. Love Thy Neighbour, Steve.

To all the deniers out there, read this and I mean really read it before posting any more of your nonsensical comments: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7092614.stm

You Decide - Did Mulroney Lie Under Oath?

The following is a verbatim transcript of the sworn statement made by Brian Mulroney in the course of his lawsuit against the government of Canada.

Counsel: Did you maintain contact with Mr., er, Schreiber after you ceased to be prime minister?

Brian Mulroney: Well, from time to time, not very often, when he was going through Montreal, he would give me a call, we would have a cup of coffee, I think once or twice, and he told me that he continued to work on his projects, ah, that he was pushing the new government, and he told me that the idea of the project at that point was ______ , but the desirability at the time was to work with the provincial government of Quebec and the federal government, ah, the new federal government, to establish this new project in the east end of Montreal where the jobs were badly required and he told me that, um, he had hired Marc Lalonde to represent his interests before the new Liberal government.

Did Brian Mulroney lie? The account of his dealings with Schreiber after leaving office doesn't conform with his current position that he met with Schreiber at least three times at which Schreiber gave him cash-stuffed envelopes totalling $300,000 and that the money was a retainer that Mulroney subsequently earned by representing Schreiber's business interests.

I've represented many clients but I've never heard of anyone earning $300,000 for meeting with a guy once or twice for a cup of coffee.

Then there's Schreiber's as yet uncorroborated allegation that, in October, 1999, Mulroney and one of his lawyers placed a call to one of Schreiber's lawyers, Robert Hladun, asking that Schreiber for a statement asserting that at no time did Mulroney solicit or receive any money from Schreiber. If Hladun corroborates Schreiber's account, Mulroney has a serious problem in light of his latest acknowledgements of the payments.

Eye on Iraq

The ministries of defense, oil and trade are among the most corrupted institutions in the Iraq according to Mousa al-Shuwaili, Iraq's director of the accountability and transparency commission. What a relief, it could've been the ministry of sand and refuse!

According to al-Shuwaili, the corruption in these worst ministries is "rampant" and was mainly due to the pressure and meddling from unspecified political factions. Really? Oh my!

Meanwhile President Nouri al-Maliki has found his own way to beef up the ranks of the Iraqi Army and police service. He's ordered 18,000 members of his own Dawaa militia and the Badr corps to merge into the army and police.

The Rules of Modern Journalism, by Gwynne Dyer

"If you like being treated like an idiot child by your

leaders and your media,

you're living at the right time."

I've been re-reading some books covering the events since 9/11 and lately I've been going through Gwynne Dyer's, With Every Mistake. In it he writes of the new media rules on how to cover terrorism:

Rule One: When covering terrorist attacks, do not discuss the political context of the attacks or the terrorists' motives and strategy. Two generations of comic books and cartoons have accustomed the general audience to villains who are evil just for the sake of being evil, so calling the terrorists "evil-doers" will suffice as an explanation for most people.

Rule Two: All terrorist actions are part of the same problem. Therefore you can treat this month's bomb in a Bali night club, the sniper attacks in Washington and the hostage-taking in a Moscow theatre as all related to each other in some (unspecified) way, and write scare-mongering think pieces about the "October Crisis."

Rule Three: All terrorists are Islamist fanatics. On some occasions - as when Basque terrorists blow somebody up - it will be necessary to relax this rule slightly, but at the very least any terrorists with Muslim names should be treated as Islamist fanatics.

...most of the Western media know them by heart. Consider, for example, the terrorist seizure of the theatre in Moscow last week that ended with the death of about fifty Chechen hostake-takers and a hundred hostages. Two years ago, the mdia coverage of these events, even in Russia itself, would have given us a lot of background on why some Chechens have turned to such savage methods. Didn't see much of that last week, did we?

Nothing about the long guerilla struggle Chechens waged against Russian imperial conquest one hundred and fifty years ago. Nothing about the fact that Stalin deported the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia (where about half of them died) during the Second World War. Nothing about the fact that Chechnya declared Independence peacefully in 1991 and that both the Chechen-Russian wars, in 1994 and 1999, began with a Russian attack.

Never mind all that now. The Chechen men and women who seized the theatre have Muslim names, so they must be part of the worldwide network of Islamist fanatics who are driven by blind hatred to commit senseless massacres (or so it says in the script here).

UN Approves Death Penalty Moratorium Call

83-28, 47 abstentions. With that the United Nations Human Rights Committee approved a controversial resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty.

Attempts were made to split the moratorium supporters by amending the resolution to include ending abortions but those amendements were voted down, letting the main resolution sail through.

The United States allied itself with Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe in opposing the resolution. Birds of a feather, eh?

Derivatives Quagmire

A federal judge in Ohio has thrown a spanner into the gears of America's subprime mortgage industry, one that could give a big advantage to troubled and cash-strapped homeowners.

Judge Christopher Boyko stopped Deutsche Bank National Trust Company in its tracks when it sought to foreclose on 14-properties. Boyko dismissed the cases ruling that Deutsche Bank had failed to prove it owned the properties it sought to seize.

The problem comes about from the practise of pooling mortgages and then flogging them as investment bundles called "derivatives." It's believed there could be as much as $6.5-trillion in outstanding securitized mortgages, about a third of that subprime.

Last month Boyko ordered the bank to produce the loan assignments showing that Deutsche Bank was indeed the owner of the note and mortgage on each property. All the bank's lawyers could come up with were letters of intent to convey the essential mortgage rights. Not nearly good enough, ruled Judge Boyko: “The institutions seem to adopt the attitude that since they have been doing this for so long, unchallenged, this practice equates with legal compliance. Finally put to the test, their weak legal arguments compel the court to stop them at the gate.”

It's beginning to emerge that the state of title to these bundled mortgages is a confused mess. Nobody was much concerned about it while the housing market was strong and prices continued to soar.

“This is the miracle of not having securities mapped to the underlying loans,” said Josh Rosner, a specialist in mortgage securities at Graham-Fisher, an independent research firm in New York. “There is no industry repository for mortgage loans. I have heard of instances where the same loan is in two or three pools.”

Baseball Superstar Barry Bonds Indicted

Barry Bonds, Major League Baseball's career home run leader, has been indicted on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice.

Bonds was charged for allegedly lying in his testimony about whether he used performance-enhancing drugs. If convicted he could face a maximum of 5-years for the perjury counts and 10-years on the obstruction charge.

The pictures above show Bonds, before and after.

You Can't Make This Up

A McDonald's restaurant in the Netherlands has had two remove its bright red, mouth-shaped urinals known as "Kisses" after an American customer complained to the head office in the U.S.

The Dutch owner considered them works of art. They are the work of Dutch woman Meike van Schijndel, designer at the Utrecht-based firm Bathroom Mania! Speaking to Expatica in 2004, she said the urinals were designed as a fun cartoon mouth.

Climate Change for British Columbia

The National Disgrace might not buy it but its little sister, the Vancouver Province seems to understand that climate change is coming to our beautiful province and in a big way.

"B.C.'s long-range weather forecast calls for winter storms and heavy rain followed by summer droughts, says the province's top climate expert.

Global warming is changing B.C.'s weather patterns for the worse, says Dr. Andrew Weaver of the Earth and Ocean Sciences Centre at the University of Victoria.

"Global warming is changing the way heat is being added to our planet," Weaver said yesterday. "The northern latitudes are warming up more than the tropical latitudes.

Heavy rainfall in winter is going to be standard on the West Coast, he said. "When it rains, it rains more, in bigger amounts. You get the summer drought, and the winter precipitation."
Weaver said the melting of Arctic ice in Greenland has the potential to add up to 70 centimetres to planetary sea levels this century.

It could cause particular problems for low-lying B.C. cities such as Richmond. "You've got the global sea-level rise, but you also get silt coming out of the Fraser," he said."

The Schreiber Tease

Karlheinz Schreiber seems intent on doing everything he can to avoid, or at least delay, his extradition to Germany. His best remaining means of accomplishing that is to tease us with promises that he knows much more about the Mulroney, Moores and Airbus cash business and that he'll tell all before the public inquiry called into the affair.

I think the very best thing that could happen to Brian Mulroney is to get Schreiber's evidence out, under oath. Let's hear everything he's got to say and see whatever documentation he has to back up his claims. That will then allow Mulroney's capable counsel a full opportunity to rebut anything Schreiber can say. After that all Mulroney would have to do is explain a few problems that arise out of acknowledged facts or that appear on the existing record. Then he's out of this mess - for good.

Brian Mulroney can't fault Canadians for being a tad suspicious. His government, after all, was beset by a number of scandals. He knew Karlheinz was a dodgy character and yet he allegedly chose to do business with him, even to represent him in dealings with the federal government. Then there's the question of who in his right mind would accept cash-stuffed envelopes from a guy like Schreiber without protecting himself with a clear paper trail? I mean, c'mon, it's Karlheinz Schreiber not Warren Buffet. You deal with people like that at your peril and it did turn out to be perilous for Brian Mulroney. Who, in his right mind, would go through this controversy and then still have cordial meetings with Schreiber? Does anyone believe Brian Mulroney was so hopelessly naive?

Sorry but I don't have a lot of sympathy for Brian Mulroney. Schreiber has been his nemesis but the main damage he's caused Mulroney comes from revelations from his Swiss bank records.
Mulroney brought this down upon himself.

So, let's hear what Schreiber has to say, give him one last chance to get everything out.

The Price of Globalization?

One of the issues that dogs proponents of global free trade is the question of security. When many nations have a hand in the production of something, especially something critical, then many nations may also have the opportunity to sabotage the product if that suits their needs.

It's all been the stuff of a Tom Clancey novel but that might be changing. According to the Taipei Times, a Chinese subcontractor loaded a Trojan Horse virus on Maxtor portable hard disc drives destined for Taiwan. The corrupted drives are said to upload data stored on the user's computer directly to web sites in Beijing:

Following findings by the Investigation Bureau that portable hard discs produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology that were sold in Taiwan contained Trojan horse viruses, further investigations suggested that "contamination" took place when the products were in the hands of Chinese subcontractors during the manufacturing process.

On Saturday, Seagate Technology LLC, the manufacturer of the Maxtor portable hard drive, said on its Web site (www.seagate.com) that Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives sold after August could be infected with the virus.

The Investigation Bureau said the tainted portable hard drives automatically upload any information saved on the computer to Beijing Web sites without the user's knowledge .

Ouch! Apparently the problem has been limited to hard drives built for the Taiwan market.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that America is now feeling the sting of Chinese espionage:

China's extensive spying inside the United States is the greatest threat to the security of American technology secrets.

And the Defense Department may be inadvertently outsourcing the manufacturing of key weapons and military equipment to factories in China.

These are among the key findings released today by a bipartisan panel commissioned by Congress to study the economic and security relationship between the United States and China. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, created by Congress in 2001, has been criticized in the past for taking a hawkish stance on China in its annual reports.
The book-length report, the fifth produced by the panel, said China appears to be reversing its move toward free markets by setting up state-owned enterprises to maintain control over 12 key industries, including oil, telecommunications, shipping, automobiles, steel and information technology.

"As weaponry gets more and more sophisticated . . . I think we'll find ourselves more vulnerable for parts that are being manufactured by an adversary. It's really something the Pentagon needs to look at seriously," said commission member Bill Reinsch, who is also president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which promotes free trade on behalf of businesses.

Death Penalty Vote Today

The 192-nation members of the United Nations Human Rights Committee are scheduled to vote today on a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty.

The draft resolution is sponsored by 85-countries, includng all 27 states of the European Union.

There are worries that the resolution's opponents will contrive "killer amendments" to scuttle the vote. From The Independent:

At the UN, Singapore has led the charge against the draft resolution, which calls on all states still maintaining the death sentence to respect a moratorium "with a view to abolishing the death penalty". The text urges them to "progressively restrict the use of the death penalty" and calls upon the 130 states which have abolished the ultimate penalty not to reintroduce it.

Opponents of the measure object that the resolution would be an interference in domestic affairs, in contravention of the UN charter. At least 10 amendments to this effect were introduced last night by such states as Singapore, Egypt and Botswana. The sovereignty argument prevented a draft resolution from being voted on by the UN in the past. But to allow that argument to pass would "ignore the years of progress on human rights at the UN", said a European diplomat.

Tasers Are Lethal Force

I just watched the video of a man put to death by RCMP tasers. We'll have to wait to learn more about the victim, Robert Dziekanski, and why he was so plainly disturbed. I'm not sure that even really matters.

Certain facts are apparent from the video. Dziekanski was on a bit of a rampage. He tossed things around and destroyed at least one computer. He was yelling and acting like a lunatic. There was a need to subdue and restrain the man.

Also apparent was that Dziekanski didn't actually attack anyone. He could have thrown furniture and equipment at bystanders or at the security and police officers who eventually arrived, but he didn't. Nor did he swing at them or kick them. He had no knife, no gun.

Early on in the tape one bystander, a middle-aged, soccer-mom type went up to him and tried to calm him down. She didn't see Dziekanski as a mortal threat to herself and kept trying to calm him for several minutes before she slowly walked away as security arrived.

Twice on the tape you can hear someone saying that a Cathay Pacific flight was due to arrive at that gate with 300-passengers in five minutes.

Then the RCMP moved in, four officers in all. Dziekanski was up against a counter and the four were able to surround him. He seemed to let them do that without attacking them.

Then the tasers were used. On the tape you can clearly hear three, and possibly four, taser shots. What makes no sense to me is that Dziekanski appeared to go down with the first shot. Why did he have to be hit again and again?

Eventually the officers are atop him and then he stops moving. And that's it.

I think this incident should give us cause to revisit the use of lethal force by our police officers. The taser, as has been shown all too often, is not as non-lethal as sometimes claimed. It should be used as a substitute for a gun, not as an alternative to pepper spray. In other words, tasers should only be used in circumstances where an officer would be justified in shooting his firearm.

There was nothing in Dziekanski's behaviour that would have justified shooting him. I also don't see why four fit RCMP officers couldn't have taken him down. At the time they tased him, the guy didn't have a weapon. Why then did they need to use their weapons on him and why three or four times?

I wonder if tasers were used because they didn't want to fill the arrival gate with pepper spray with passengers due to arrive in a few minutes?

This incident is definitely going to bring the RCMP in British Columbia under close scrutiny and maybe that's about time. Months ago we were dealing with the death of a young man, Ian Bush, who died from a bullet fired into the back of his head while in RCMP custody. That one, too, doesn't sit well with a lot of us out here.

Can Musharraf Survive - Washington?

The U.S. has a rich history of unseating foreign leaders it no longer considers desirable, if their countries have particular strategic value.

Perhaps Pervez Musharraf should crack open a few history books for there are signs that Washington may be looking for his successor.

In some ways Mushie resembles the late South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem who ruled that country from 1955 until 1963. Diem was originally Washington's guy because he at least claimed to be tough on communists. Over time, his lustre wore off. Diem swept aside his opposition and suppressed religious dissent. His ability or will to combat the communists came to be questioned and it was feared he might actually strike a deal with Ho Chi Minh. His seemed peoccupied with just holding onto power. See any similarities yet? He had to go and so the CIA contacted Diem's generals and gave Washington's blessings to a coup.

In an eerie echo of that past, the New York Times reports that a host of sources have said that Washington is going to the generals again, this time Musharraf's generals.

Several senior administration officials said that with each day that passed, more administration officials were coming around to the belief that General Musharraf’s days in power were numbered and that the United States should begin considering contingency plans, including reaching out to Pakistan’s generals.

More than a dozen officials in Washington and Islamabad from a number of countries spoke on condition of anonymity because of the fragility of Pakistan’s current political situation. The doubts that American officials voiced about whether General Musharraf could survive were more pointed than any public statements by the administration, and signaled declining American patience in advance of Mr. Negroponte’s trip.

Officials involved in the discussions in Washington said the Bush administration remained wary of the perception that the United States was cutting back-room deals to install the next leader of Pakistan. “They don’t want to encourage another military coup, but they are also beginning to understand that Musharraf has become part of the problem,” said one former official with knowledge of the debates inside the Bush administration.

That shift in perception is significant because for six years General Musharraf has sought to portray himself, for his own purposes, as the West’s best alternative to a possible takeover in Pakistan by radical Islamists.

"Don't want to encourage another military coup," really? If you don't want to encourage it, you don't reach out to a top general's subordinates. This sounds very much like a deliberately leaked message to Mushie to get out or be deposed. It sounds very much like an ultimatum.

Then there's the opposition, Bhutto in particular. She may not be Washington's favourite but any sign that Musharraf's support is waning can only energize her efforts to remove him. Yet, in reaching out to Mushie's generals, Washington appears to be indicating a preference for continued, military rule in the turbulent wake of Musharraf's departure.

Don't write Musharraf off just yet. He's shrewed and can be very tough when it suits him and he's shown himself perfectly willing to stand up to the likes of Condoleeza Rice. But still, things are not going his way.

Any Takers?

It's my farewell to fossil fuel abuse. My last hurrah. I've kept my modest house cold enough to hang meat. I drive my fuel-miser car only when I absolutely must. I'm going to keep trying to do my bit.

That said, before I hit 60, I mean to take one last grand motorcycle adventure - from Panama to Vancouver Island.

I currently have a Harley and a BMW R1200GS. I got the "Gelande/Strasse" (the yellow bike above) specifically to get into the back woods here on the island. It's a wonderful machine and substitutes for a car/pickup just as often as possible. It got me to eastern Ontario two years ago and I rode it down Baja to Cabo San Lucas in April.

Here's the deal. I prefer to ride alone but this sort of venture makes that unfeasible. Reality dictates that a group of not less than three and not more than nine do the trip. What I'm hoping for are four starters.

The starters would crate their bikes and fly to Panama where the trip would begin. At Panama the group would be joined by a local rider, the "host." The idea would be to use a series of host riders along the way. Good riders, familiar with their region, would be able to share the very best of their countries with the group - arrange good, affordable accomodation, chart out routes, navigate the local authorities, etc.

Along the way, at least to the US border, one host would hand over to the next host, each guiding the group in turn. Five or six Central Americans would bring the ride to Mexico. There we would head through the Yucatan and over into Baja and, finally, through Tecate into California.

After that it would be a terrific run up the Pacific Coast Highway through California and Oregon and into Washington.

I'd take over in Washington and lead the group from there through Vancouver Island.

Why post this here?

Simple. I usually prefer to travel solo but this sort of trip rules that out. That means finding others of sufficiently similar outlook and temperment that they can at least get along for the six to eight weeks the trip would entail. Since I'm the guy who'll organize the run, that means liberal-minded people and I guess this site is a good place to begin.

BTW, there's no way to do this trip in 2008. The target date would have to be in February/March 2009.

If you're at all interested (and can ride a bike) let me know.

Georgia's Drought - God's Doing

The slapstick governor of drought-stricken Georgia has unveiled his new, state water strategy - prayer. From the Atlantic Journal Constitution:

Gov. Sonny Perdue wasn't the least bit discouraged Tuesday after his hourlong state Capitol prayer vigil for rain ended with the sun shining through what had been a somewhat cloudy morning.

"God can make it rain tomorrow, he can make it rain next week or next month," Perdue told reporters who asked him if a miracle was on the way.

More than 250 faithful Georgians joined Perdue outside the Capitol to ask for divine intervention to end the historic drought.

"We come here very reverently and respectfully to pray up a storm," Perdue told those in attendance.

Perdue said after the event that Georgians have not done "all we could do in conservation" and that the drought was an attempt by God to "get our attention."

"Hopefully we will be better conservators of the blessings God's given us as he gives us more [rain]," the governor said.

While he's waiting for divine intervention, Sonny might put his time to good use having a chat with folks like Chris Carlos. This guy has a 14,000 sq. ft. house - grand even by my standards - and found himself squirming in the public eye over his October water bill that showed he used 440,000 gallons for the month. That, apparently, is enough to fill the average swimming pool 58-times. Lest his fellow Atlantans show up at his gates with torches and pitchforks, Carlos hired a top PR firm to let folks know he'll try to do better next time.

When Planetary Arms Races Just Aren't Enough

Britain's Telegraph newspaper reports on a massive American initiative to develop new forms of space warfare.

The most ambitious project in a new $459 billion (£221.5 billion) defence spending Bill is the Falcon, a reusable "hypersonic vehicle" that could fly at six times the speed of sound and deliver 12,000lb of bombs anywhere in the world within minutes.
The bombs' destructive power would be multiplied by the Earth's gravitational pull as they travelled at up to 25 times the speed of sound towards their target.

The cost of the vehicle has not been revealed, but a spokesman for the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) said a first test flight was scheduled for next year.

Congress awarded $150 million for the Falcon project and its associated "prompt global strike" programme. A defence industry source said it was likely that hundreds of millions more were being spent on space warfare "away from the public view".

The "global strike" platform would give America the "forward presence" it requires around the world without the need for bases outside the US.

So, the quest is on for the new "ultimate" weapon. Funny how we keep believing we can actually do that, decade after decade. It never works, not for long at least. By the way, how is that hunt for Osama bin Laden going?

Moores Returns To the Airbus Scandal

For years, Frank Moores and those around him have been adamant that the former Newfoundland premier turned lobbyist had nothing whatsoever to do with Airbus Industries and its sale of jetliners to Air Canada.

What a difference a page makes.

The Globe & Mail has reported on a February 3, 1988 letter that may be the smoking gun to undo the Moores' camp claims:

On Feb. 3, 1988, only two months before the board of directors at Air Canada agreed to make the largest civilian aircraft purchase in the country's history, Mr. Moores wrote to the chairman of Airbus Industrie, the late Franz Josef Strauss, about the financing agreement for the sale.

“I would like to bring to your attention a situation that has developed regarding the sale of aircraft to Air Canada,” Mr. Moores wrote, explaining that Air Canada required a “deficiency guarantee” before proceeding with the sale.

In March of 1985, he was named to Air Canada's board of directors by Mr. Mulroney's Conservative government – the same month that Airbus entered into a secret commission deal that saw millions of dollars flow into a shell company controlled by Mr. Schreiber. (Mr. Moores later stepped down from the board because of accusations of conflict of interest.)

As for Mr. Moores's letter to Airbus, which seems to contradict everything he ever said about his involvement with the company, many of his old partners at GCI did not return phone calls from The Globe. His wife, Beth Moores, said earlier this year that she did not want to speak on the record.

Pierre Jeanniot, who was CEO of Air Canada when the Airbus deal was made, said he had no explanation for why Mr. Moores would be writing Airbus about its sale to the former Crown corporation.

Maybe the ghost of Frank Moores still has a role to play in the Airbus saga. Thanks to the Globe and CBC, a lot of old beliefs are beginning to fall apart.

Cheney's Love of Killing

Dick Cheney's been at it again, slaughtering tame birds by the score.

AlterNet has the story of Cheney's most recent safari to a tame bird farm in upstate New York where he and his pals bagged upwards of 400-tame pheasants:

Last month in a caravan of 15 sport utility vehicles and an ambulance -- no jokes, please -- Cheney made his way to Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club, about 70 miles north of New York City, near Poughkeepsie, for a day of controlled bloodletting.

Cheney landed at Stewart Air Force Base and took off the following day for the upscale gun club at a cost of $32,000 for local law enforcement officials who guarded his hotel, protected his motorcade and diverted school buses.

Like Cheney's last visit to Clove Valley in 2001, the 4,000-acre club, which costs $150,000 a year to join, was a fortress with Blackwater-style snipers "protecting" the vice president's right to shoot tame birds.

Birds raised for canned hunts at gun clubs and in state "recreational" areas are grown in packed pens -- think factory farmed chickens -- and fitted with goggles so they won't peck each other to death from the crowding.

When released for put and take hunters like Cheney, pen raised birds can barely walk or fly -- or see, thanks to the goggles. They don't know how to forage or hide in the wild and sometimes have to be kicked to "fly" enough to be shot.

Some hunters say shooting the pellet-ready tame animals, which offer no resistance, is like having sex with a blow-up doll.

Mulroney's Real Fight is With Himself

Brian Mulroney is talking tough again.

Speaking at a fundraiser in Toronto he proclaimed, "Twelve years ago I was falsely accused. I fought and I won. Now it seems I'm going to have to fight again. I'm not pleased by this, but so be it. I am going to fight and win again."

Just who is he planning to fight? He doesn't need to fight, merely to give believable explanations to a number of facts that he admits or that are in the public record.

Karlheinz Schreiber has tossed out a number of allegations, some of them barely more than innuendo. If Mulroney will simply clarify a few of the troubling inconsistencies, Schreiber's claims will become irrelevant to all but the real conspiracy theorists.

He needs to explain why he took cash-stuffed envelopes at three meetings with Schreiber. Why cash and what was it for?

He needs to explain how he handled the money. Just what did he do with it?

He needs to explain how he treated the money for tax purposes. Was it Schreiber's money that led to his (and Frank Moores') voluntary disclosures to Revenue Canada after the story was broken in the Canadian media?

He needs to explain the evidence he gave, under oath, in the course of his lawsuit suggesting t