But For a Couple of Minutes of Bystander Video

If it wasn't for a couple of minutes of bystander video, Robert Dziekanksi's killing would have been reduced to a few lines in the local papers and quickly forgotten.

I wonder if the cops involved even imagined such video existed when they gave their statements after their victim's lifeless body had been hauled away to the morgue.

The "RCMP story" (curious how those two words have become a term of art here in B.C.) was that the four mounties were acting in self-defence when they Tasered Dziekanski five times, wrestled him into cuffs and left him on the floor, unattended, to die.

In the immediate wake of the killing one of the officers, constable Bentley, gave a statement in which he claimed, "right away [Mr. Dziekanski] started backing up, looking for something to grab. He uses an object and putting that in front of him he kind of swung it at us."

Unfortunately for the officers, the government of Poland is represented at the hearings by a highly-skilled criminal lawyer, Don Rosenbloom. In cross-examination, Rosenbloom confronted Bentley with the video, frame by frame, and dismantled his statement:

Mr. Rosenbloom reviewed for the inquiry the video footage recorded at the scene by passerby Paul Pritchard. Run at slow speed, the video shows one of the four RCMP officers directing Mr. Dziekanski away from the spot where they were all gathered, and in the direction of a counter inside the secured area.

Identified ...as Corporal Benjamin Monty Robinson, the officer had his arm extended. He pointed a gloved index finger.

Mr. Dziekanski is seen throwing his hands up in air, as if in resignation, and walking in the direction as commanded. The four officers then surrounded him.

Const. Bentley's reading of the events: "I interpret [Robinson] as giving him an order. For using body language or pointing to direct him somewhere."

"Precisely," said Mr. Rosenbloom. "He's giving him an order. And the order is for him to move to the counter. Do you not agree?"

Not quite: "I perceive it as him ordering him over to the counter, after he's thrown up his arms and walked away from us... [But] I'm uncertain whether he's complied with that order because his behaviour to me changed before Cpl. Robinson directed his arm to the counter," Const. Bentley said. "So, from what I'm seeing, Cpl. Robinson is reacting to Dziekanski's behaviour."

On it went: Mr. Rosenbloom proposed what seemed obvious; Const. Bentley demurred or deflected. He would not admit that Mr. Dziekanski had correctly complied with the order to move to the counter.

On which sat the stapler. No one had directed Mr. Dziekanski to pick that up, of course. His bad decision was fatal.

But why had Const. Bentley claimed in his initial police statement that, at the moment of first contact with the RCMP, "right away [Mr. Dziekanski] started backing up, looking for something to grab. He uses an object and putting that in front of him he kind of swung it at us."

He conceded that he had not "articulated it the best." He hadn't meant to mislead police homicide investigators in explaining the RCMP's role in the Dziekanski incident.

This simply doesn't wash. They're cops. They've been trained to carefully observe in order to be able to give evidence at trial. We send people to prison every day on the strength of what cops say in court. Yet this cop isn't intending to mislead when he claims it was Dziekanski who chose to move to the counter, who grabbed the stapler and who then swung it at the officers when, as shown on video, he was told to move to the counter and didn't "swing" the stapler at all?

This thing smells like week-old fish guts sitting on the dock. It's no wonder Poland wants to bring proceedings against these cops. They're called "Mounted Police." That doesn't mean they're supposed to be cowboys.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1333522

Like NATO, for Vikings

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland are considering a military defence alliance to defend each other against (Russian) agression in the Arctic region.

The foreign ministers will meet in May to weigh the Nordic Declaration of Solidarity.

University of Calgary political scientist Rob Huebert defended the hoopla the Tories have made of the recent, run of the mill interception of a patrolling Russian bomber by Canadian interceptors.

"Regardless of your view of the Tories, they’re not in charge of the Russian military,” he said. “They’re not the ones down at the Kremlin deploying these aircraft.”

See just what you can learn by going to the University of Calgary? The Harper Tories aren't in charge of the Russian military. Quelle surprise!

Mexico's "Surge"

The Mexican army is having its very own surge. The government has ordered an additional 5,000 soldiers to deploy to the border town of Ciudad Juarez.

Juarez lies just down the road from Las Cruces, New Mexico, just a couple of miles from the American border. The drug gangs have been busy lately killing police officers and forced the local police chief to resign this week.

Mexico's war with the drug cartels is huge, involving 45,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police across the country. The war was responsible for more than 6,000 deaths last year and has already claimed 900 so far this year.

I am so not riding my motorcycle down there again anytime soon.

Memo to Iggy - Get Back to the Environment

An Ipsos Reid poll finds 57% of Canadians want serious action on climate change now, even if it means higher deficits. From the G&M:

“With the economic recession, it's expected that concern for the environment versus the economy would drop off. Canadians are saying, ‘No, it's still important, the government should still be focusing on the environment even though it has to stabilize the economy,'” said Sean Simpson, research manager at Ipsos Reid.

Across the country, support for environmental policies tends to increase the further one gets from Alberta. The oil-rich province, which has been hurt by the recent fall in commodity prices, is about 10 per cent out of step with the rest of the country on every environmental question, Mr. Simpson said.

Overall, 64 per cent of Canadians say development of Alberta's oil sands should be halted until a clean method can be found, as do 47 per cent of Albertans.

“They're saying maybe we can have the best of both worlds,” Mr. Simpson said. “Maybe instead of creating jobs in the tar sands we can create them in the environmental sector.”

Iggy would do well to remember his own words, "You've got to work with the grain of Canadians and not against them." That applies even when they don't agree with you, Mikey.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090227.wclimate28/BNStory/National/home?cid=al_gam_mostview

CanWest Still Clinging to Life

The governor called. CanWest has been unstrapped from the table and returned to its cell.

Bloomberg reports that CanWest has been given an extension to March 11 to renegotiate some of its debts.

Crocodile Tears, Please - Lawyers Fall Victim to Recession!

I know there are a lot of eager law students among the ranks of Liberal and Conservative bloggers. I also know the legal profession isn't immune to the effects of severe recession. I'm sure bankruptcy lawyers are doing great and matrimonial and criminal lawyers are probably doing just fine but this is a pretty grim time for a lot of corporate lawyers, especially the solicitors.

One of America's largest law firms, Latham & Watkins, has announced it's shedding 190-lawyers and 250-paralegals and support staff. Now, to keep that in perspective, remember that L&W has 270-lawyers in Washington alone and 2,000 world wide. Still, a 10% cut this early in the recession, leaves one to imagine what lies ahead?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022702751.html

Galloway Slams Afghanisnam

He was one of the most esteemed reporters of the Vietnam war. He was one of the main characters in the book and movie, "We Were Soldiers Once." Joe Galloway is still a war correspondent, for McClatchey Newspapers.

Galloway finds that the ongoing war in Afghanistan is beginning to resemble the war he knew three decades ago, the Vietnam war:

Even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Pentagon have scaled back the Bush administration’s lip service to lofty goals such as victory and a democratically elected national government in Afghanistan as the war grows more deadly and dangerous, even that may not be enough of a row back for the Obama people.

The focus is, and ought to be, on neighboring Pakistan, and on how Washington can help steady a shaky new government there that's besieged by homegrown and imported terrorists and by an economic meltdown in a place that already had had plenty of both before the global recession made itself felt.

The new administration wants to know what the end game and the exit strategy will be in Afghanistan before it doubles down on additional forces and commits billions of dollars more in aid for nation building and rebuilding.

The previous administration was seemingly happy to declare Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan after toppling the Taliban government and then starving the necessary conflict there of manpower, machinery and money to focus on its elective war in Iraq. During the long period of neglect, both the Taliban and al Qaida went to work rebuilding in their hideaways across the border in Pakistan’s wild frontier provinces.

The Taliban insurgents now have a chokehold on as much as 70 percent of Afghanistan, and they're proving to be flexible and adaptive in their attacks on American, NATO and Afghan forces.

If the new American team has some new ideas about how to succeed in Afghanistan, now would be the time to lay them out. Nothing that Alexander the Great, Queen Victoria or Leonid Brezhnev tried in their attempts to subdue the quarrelsome Afghan tribes worked, and nothing we’ve tried in the last eight years has, either.

Galloway ends his piece by reciting the first two lines of this old Kipling classic:

When you're left wounded on Afghanistan's plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

And go to your God like a soldier.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/100/story/62921.html

As Harper Gets Tough on Pot, Obama Chills

Stephen Harper wants tougher sentences and mandatory imprisonment for growing even a single marijuana plant in a bid to ensure full employment for Canadian prison guards.

Harper's announcement came just a day after Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, announced federal drug agents would no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries in places where they're legal under state law.

Quite a few states have either decriminalized simple possession of marijuana or reduced it to a traffic-ticket style misdemeanour. But Stevie's pretty sure that Reefer Madness is a documentary.

So, while Stevie advances his social conservative agenda, Obama is beginning to dismantle George w. Bush's.

http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/129383/

Let's See If Iggy Has the Guts to Say "No"

Stephen Harper is exploiting the recent rash of gang violence in the Lower Mainland to revive his rabid, anti-drug legislation. Like most of this ideologically-driven garbage, there are a few parts of it that make sense but a lot that don't.

Growing one up to 200 plants would net a mandatory, six month sentence. One plant? Oh get real. What does he want to do, give a criminal record to an entire generation?

There's nothing in this legislation that's likely to put a dent in gang activity. If anything it would seem to help the gangs out by eliminating competition among pot growers.

If Harper wanted to deal a blow to the gangs, the best way would be to decriminalize small scale growing and possession of marijuana. But he'd rather take the route that's been proven ineffective time and time again.

Don't worry about a rash of new prisoners. Public Obedience Minister Peter van Loan says there's plenty of spare room going to waste in existing Canadian prisons. "We have capacity in our prisons right now. They are not in the overcrowded situations you might see south of the border,” Van Loan told Canwest News Service.

Close Your Eyes and Think of England

Mike Ignatieff has enshrined the Athabasca Tar Sands as the glue that holds our cherished country together. Iggy told an Edmonton Chamber of Commerce lunch crowd that the TAR Sands are a national unity issue.

From the Conservative Television Network:

"The oilsands are an integral part of the future of Canada," he said. "No other country in the word would toss away this advantage."

Iggy said he supports hard caps on greenhouse gas emissions so long as they're not hard enough to bother Big Oil churning up the Athabasca basin.

...he said that the federal government must negotiate any cap-and-trade system with the oil industry.

"We will be watching in Opposition to make sure (a cap-and-trade system) won't hurt Alberta," he said. "We need to work with the industry, and not against the industry."

Good one, Iggy. All those folks in the Oil Patch are terrified the Conservatives are going to hurt Alberta. C'mon, who writes this guy's jokes?

So, there we have it. Michael Ignatieff is all in favour of hard caps on greenhouse gas emissions so long as they don't really inconvenience anyone such as major emitters.

At least Jean Chretien talked out of just one side of his mouth.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090227/iggy_oilsands_090227/20090227?hub=TopStories

Quick, the Economy's Tanking - Send In the Russians!

Golly. Steve Harper really is standing on guard for we. Just when Obama showed up in Ottawa, a couple of Ruskkie bombers strayed into international airspace and Steve sent'em packing.

"We will defend our airspace," a resolute Harper told someone who could be bothered to listen.

Harp's little soldier, DefMin Peter MacKay chimed in, "It's not a game."

Sorry Pete, but that's exactly what it is - a game. The very same game that's been played out between NORAD and the Russians for decades. And, yes, just like every other government before you guys, we sent up interceptors to - well, to intercept the bombers and then they headed home.

So what's the big deal about this incident? How about nothing, nada, zip, squat. Harp just saw a chance to pretend like he had muscles and an all too willing media and so he took it.

Now will somebody let MacKay in on it. It's a game Pete, a game.

Iggy Wants Harper's Job - Both of Them

Michael Ignatieff wants to be the next prime minister of Canada. Yeah! He also wants to be the next conservative prime minister of Canada. Boo!

As Chantal Hebert put it in the Toronto Star:

Since he has become leader, he has talked a good game about building bridges to a host of natural conservative constituencies but said very little about maintaining those that link the Liberal party to more progressive ones.

Ignatieff talks about the need to make up for years of Liberal neglect, but it is really his party's stance on some of the very issues that have distinguished the Liberals from Conservatives over the past decade – like Iraq, climate change and same-sex marriage – that have kept away many of the voters he is so determined to court.

This guy has to make a choice - start acting like a Liberal or come out of the neo-conservative closet.

h/t 1 Anxious Liberal

http://www.thestar.com/Canada/Columnist/article/593859

Michael in NeverLand - Athabasca and Other Tarry Tall Tales

There's a reason I don't trust Michael Ignatieff or Stephen Harper or Ed Stelmach or the Oil Patch when they talk about cleaning up the Athabasca Tar Sands - it's because I was a parent so I know better.

Most of us are familiar with this scenario. The young teenager has left her bedroom in an awful mess. You find her watching a favourite TV show. You ask her to clean her room and she says she'll get right on to it. An hour later you find her still before the TV watching some other show. That's when what started as a request turns into a command and, like all commands, it comes with a time limit and an "or else."

Get your room clean in 15-minutes or else you won't be going out with your friends on Friday. Now that usually results in a clean bedroom because you've stipulated a time for performance and a meaningful consequence for non-performance.

How many years have we been fed empty promises by the Oil Patch that they'll be cleaning up their room in Athabasca any day now? Many, many years. And how many Tar Sands projects have actually been cleaned up?

Without a meaningful time stipulation and an effective "or else" consequence, the Ignatieff/Harper/Stelmach/Oil Patch promise of a clean Athabasca is about as convincing as that robot call I get around dinner time telling me I've just won a fabulous holiday cruise.

So why is the Ignatieff-Harper-Stelmach clan so unwilling to take these modest measures? They haven't got the guts to even speak the "or else" part but it's the time stipulation that really bothers them. With international pressure building for a new carbon reduction scheme and the supporting climate change science pouring in almost daily, nobody wants to admit that the technology has never been shown to be workable much less economically viable and, even if it was, there would be the standard 20-30 year lag time before a functioning sequestration system could be implemented. Global warming is happening. We don't have 20-30 years to solve Athabasca.

These clowns may be happy living in NeverLand, I'm not.

Will Pakistan Collapse?

There's not much right happening in Pakistan but no end of wrong.

In December the Pentagon reported that Pakistan and Mexico were in danger of sudden and total collapse.

The last thing Pakistan needed was the Supreme Court decision Wednesday that the leader of the opposition and his brother could not stand for election. That triggered riots and violence in Punjab, Pakistan's most populous and prosperous province, causing the governor to impose a form of martial law for two months.

The ousted Sharif brothers wasted no time blaming President Asif Ali Zardari for conspiring against them. The court decision could easily undo Zardari's ruling coalition.

Pakistan's political instability is compounded by the government's truce with Taliban forces. The West has heard all about the peace agreement in the Swat valley. What's gone largely unnoticed is what Asia Times describes as "ceasefires all across the tribal areas and the formation of a united Pakistani tribal front of mujahideen to reinforce the Taliban's battle in Afghanistan."

If this is true it would seem that Pakistan has given the Taliban free rein throughout the border region with Afghanistan. The longer Pakistan remains beset with political chaos the better it serves the interests of the Taliban.

The wild card in this mess is the Pakistan military. How much longer will the generals tolerate this before they move in to take over? Unfortunate as that would be, it might be the best thing for Afghanistan, NATO, the US - and Pakistan.

CIA Now Briefing Obama on Global Meltdown

It's not just about terrorism or nuclear proliferation any more. Now the Central Intelligence Agency is also briefing president Obama on potentially dangerous fallout from the global financial meltdown. From McClatchey News:

The CIA this week began sending the White House a new classified daily briefing on the worldwide economic crisis, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday, underscoring growing concern that the global financial meltdown could topple governments or lead to sharp swerves in the foreign policies of hard-hit nations.

The report for President Barack Obama and other top officials, called the Economic Intelligence Brief, is an effort "to make sure that we aren't surprised by the implications of the worldwide economic crisis," Panetta said in his first meeting with reporters since being sworn in Feb. 13.
"It's beginning to have impacts not only in China and . . . countries throughout Europe," but also increasingly in Latin America, where there are fresh signs of economic instability, Panetta said. He specifically cited Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Great, with everything else destabilizing the world - climate change, overpopulation, fundamentalism, nuclear proliferation - now we get to add Wall Street to the mix.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/62853.html

The Taliban Make Nice? Really?

There is no such thing as a "stalemate" in guerrilla warfare.

That overly generous term is being used by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan to describe the state of affairs between Afghan, US and NATO forces and the Taliban.

Why can there be no stalemate? Because of the time factor. As the insurgents say, we have all the watches but they have all the time. They have nowhere else to go, they can simply wait us out.

There's a stalemate only in the sense that neither side is capable of a military victory over the other but that reflects a totally false view that this is a military war rather than a political war. It ignores the fact that the insurgents are on the offensive, not us. Every now and then they get a breakaway and go on to demolish a prison or blow up an embassy or storm a government ministry.

Now, negotiating from strength, the Taliban have announced they want peace with the Afghan people. From the National Toast:

The Taliban are willing to work with all Afghan groups to achieve peace, but the problems of Afghanistan can only be solved if foreign troops withdraw from the country, a senior insurgent leader said.

The Taliban have made a strong come-back in the last three years, extending the scale and scope of their insurgency across the south and east and up to the fringes of the Afghan capital.

"We would like to take an Afghan strategy that is shared and large-scale, in consultation with all the Afghan groups, to reach positive and fruitful results," Mullah Mutassim, a former Taliban finance minister and member of the group's political council, told al-Samoud magazine in an interview conducted on Feb. 25.
But, he said, the United States "has to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan as soon as possible, because the real starter of crises and complication of matters is the presence of foreign forces in the country.

"If these forces leave, the problem will be over, the question will be finished, and peace will prevail," he was quoted as saying in the interview translated by the U.S.-based Site Intelligence Group which monitors jihadi web sites.

Mutassim is regarded as close to fugitive Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar.

The Taliban are clearly using their newfound power to outmanoeuvre us. They know the Afghan people are turning against the Western forces and their hopelessly corrupt central government. They know the Afghans want the insurgency/civil war ended at almost all costs. The Taliban know that, with an election looming in August, they have an ideal opportunity to influence the vote - and the Karzai government.

Where we failed to take the opportunity as far back as 2002 to drive a wedge between the Taliban and the al-Qaeda terrorists, the Taliban are now in a position to drive a wedge between the Afhgan people and the Western backed-Karzai government. That's the ultimate strategy of any insurgency.

This could pay huge dividends for the Taliban and there's nothing we can do about it, nothing.

Mulroney Takes a Hit

Brian Mulroney has failed in a bid to defang the inquiry into his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber in the Airbus affair. The inquiry is scheduled to commence at the end of next month.

Mulroney's lawyers brought a motion before the inquiry chair, Associate Chief Justice Jeffrey Oliphant of Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench seeking a ruling that the inquiry could not use the Criminal Code of Canada in assessing the former prime minister's conduct. The motion was rejected.

“I intend to determine, on an objective basis, whether Mr. Mulroney ... conformed with the highest standards of conduct,” the judge wrote.
“I believe that this standard is one that reflects the importance to Canadian democracy of the office of the prime minister, as well as the public trust reposed in the integrity, objectivity and impartiality of public office holders.”

The judge also pointed out that in 1988 Mr. Mulroney distributed a document to his cabinet titled Guidance For Ministers that warned them they had an obligation to go further than “simply to observe the law.”

Yesterday, Judge Oliphant ruled: “If the Prime Minister intended to hold ministers personally accountable to that level, then it follows that he himself would be accountable on the same basis.”

This ruling, while adverse to Mulroney, doesn't mean that the Oliphant inquiry will be any freewheeling review of the facts, particularly the link between the Air Canada Airbus purchase and the former prime minister.

The belief that Mulroney had no personal interest in the Airbus affair was based, in part, on exculpatory testimony by former Mulroney aide Fred Doucette. When he appeared before the Commons ethics committee, Doucette proclaimed, under oath, that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the Airbus business. Shortly afterward Schreiber released a raft of documents strongly suggesting that Mr. Doucette was directly involved in the Airbus deal.

The Globe & Mail reports that Schreiber, meanwhile, has dropped his lawsuit against Mulroney in which he claimed the former p.m. did nothing to earn the cash that changed hands between them. Schreiber has said he dropped the lawsuit rather than reveal documents that he'd rather present directly to Judge Oliphant during the inquiry.

The best thing Brian Mulroney may have going for him at this point is observer fatigue. We're on our fourth prime minister since these events happened. A lot of people think everything has been investigated, all the evidence has been examined. Too bad.

The Next Great Liberal Leader?

This is a repost from March of last year. I'd put this issue aside while I waited for Dion to play out his hand and Iggy to prove his mettle. We've seen how those two turned out.

I fear for the future of the Liberal Party as I've known it for more than four decades. That's why I'm going to make this pitch again. This is, in my opinion, the person to restore the Liberal Party of Canada to what we knew it to be.


To me, Stephane Dion has been a total disappointment. Unfortunately, Bob Rae and Michael Ignatieff didn't really inspire me much either.

The Liberal Party needs someone to put some life back into it and that has to be someone truly exceptional, someone not just Liberals but other Canadians can also rally behind, someone like Louise Arbour.

I can think of no finer person than Louise Arbour to be the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and this country's first, elected woman prime minister.

Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, war crimes prosecutor at the International Court of Justice, United Nations High Commissioner for human rights - I don't know anyone else in this country with credentials like that.

LouiseArbour is a known quantity. Her career speaks for itself. Intellect, integrity, experience, reputation - she's got it all and as much or more of it than anyone else. Her kind doesn't come along very often, sometimes it takes decades. We're fools if we don't at least try to bring Louise Arbour into the top ranks of our party.

Anybody for a "Draft Arbour" Movement?

I've never been more convinced that the future of the Liberal Party of Canada is nowhere near as robust as we might like to imagine and hinges directly on getting another "great" leader very, very soon.

I'd hoped that might be Michael Ignatieff but he's shown me wrong.

That brings me back to my previous favourite, the one person I know who has the intellect and character to be one of the once-in-a-generation great leaders, Louise Arbour.

Read the post following this and you'll see a glimpse of what I see in this woman and why she's what this Party needs. I'm not sure she'd go for it even if she was seriously asked but tell me someone who'd be better.

Your Daily Laugh

The world and the Liberal Party of Canada are going to hell in a handbasket. Might as well pause of a giggle:

Why the sun lightens our hair, but darkens our skin?


Why women can't put on mascara with their mouth closed?

Why don't you ever see the headline 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?

Why is 'abbreviated' such a long word?

Why is it that doctors name what they do 'practice' ?

Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons?

Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?

Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?

Why isn't there mouse-flavored cat food?

Why didn't Noah swat those two mosquitoes?

Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?

You know that indestructible black box that is used on airplanes? Why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?!

Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?

Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?

If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?

If flying is so safe, why do they call the airport the terminal?

Tories Move To Protect West Coast Orca?

Word has it that the Harper government is going to order the protection of the "critical habitat" required for the recovery of two endangered killer whale pods in British Columbia.

We'll have to wait for another week or so to learn just what Jim Prentice and Fisheries minister Gail Shea are really prepared to do but it's encouraging to hear they've come to realize the problem. From the Victoria Times Colonist:

Ecojustice lawyer Lara Tessaro said she expects the March 4 publication to include a regulatory impact analysis statement, including costs and benefits of the order, from which the public “can glean DFO’s commitment to enforcing this order.”
Environmentalists note the whales are threatened by declining salmon stocks, increased boat traffic, toxic contamination, and acoustic impacts from activities such as dredging, seismic testing, and military sonar.

“Obviously whales need salmon, whales need clean water, and they also need quiet,” Barlee said. “That’s part of critical habitat. We need a comprehensive approach.”

Ottawa is scheduled to release an action plan within the next four years. That’s where negotiations involving various levels of government and stakeholders, including scientists and commercial fishermen, will face some tough decisions to allow for recovery of the whales.

The situation is complicated by the fact a whale’s habitat is the water column, not a stand of trees necessary, say, for the survival of a bird or mammal.

I hope, in a week or so, I can actually congratulate a Tory for finally doing something right. Until then I'm not going to get my hopes up.

Dziekanski Died Because Mounties Wouldn't Use Mace

Another day another story about how four mounties were messing their drawers when they encountered Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport.

Four fit cops, wearing ballistic vests and the standard kit every officer carries, were scared witless by an unarmed, middle aged, clearly distressed little man.

Constable Gerry Rundel told the inquiry today that he believed Dziekanski had "every intention" of harming the four officers. This must be a very dark and frightening world for poor constable Rundel.

Here's one thing to remember. In addition to their all-too-often lethal Tasers those cops carried utterly non-lethal pepper spray. If those sissies really believed Dziekanski needed to be subdued and couldn't find among their eight arms two strong enough to do the job, they could have maced the guy.

So why did they choose the Taser over the mace? Because an airline rep told them that a load of passengers was due to pass through that arrival lounge in a little while.

That's why the cops rushed the guy, why they gave him five jolts from their Taser. They were in a hurry to take out the trash.

"The Answer To All of This is Technology"

That's Harpo EnviroMin Jim Prentice's way of dismissing the environmental catastrophe we call the Athabasca Tar Sands. Just add a heaping helping of technology, fold in the Tar Sands, whip furiously and - voila, Clean Energy Forever.

Prentice is in good company. Interim Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is totally onside with the technology fix scam. Nothing wrong with the Tar Sands that a bunch of technology won't solve. Clean Energy Forever! We Love U, Alberta, we really love you. Sure, that technology fix, even if it can be developed, is at the least twenty and more likely thirty years off, but that's just a pesky detail. Onward and upward!

Iggy got a bit miffed when confronted with the well-balanced National Geographic article on the Tar Sands. He puffed himself up and set the reporters straight, ""National Geographic is not going to teach me any lessons about the oilsands."

Well that's too f__cking bad Iggy because somebody has to. But, then again, nobody teaches Mr. Ignatieff anything.

h/t LeDaro

Octomom's Million Dollar Gig

Nadya Suleman has been offered a million bucks to star in a porn flick. An Associated Press story appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald, says Vivid Entertainment has also offered to throw in a year's health care insurance to sweeten the deal.

Suleman has just finished taping two shows for Dr. Phil. What a surprise.

Wheels Spinning Within Wheels

One reason we're not going to win in Afghanistan is that, even if we could, it wouldn't matter much to the destiny of this failed state.

Afghanistan's troubles are myriad. They're tribal, ethnic, national, regional, even international. Like it or not, Afghanistan is a football that's being booted about by the United States, NATO, China, Russia, India, Iran and, of course, Pakistan. In this context the Taliban and Islamist extremists are mere chump change.

India is playing Afghanistan to get at Pakistan. China is playing Pakistan and Afghanistan to get at India. Russia is playing Afghanistan to get at the United States.

If you want to get a sense of the confusion and contradiction in the Great Game now being played out in Afghanistan, read this article from Asia Times Online:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KB25Ad03.html

The Associate Prime Minister of Canada

I'm beginning to get the feeling that Barack Obama has become the Associate Prime Minister of Canada.

From what we've seen from Harper and his cabinet, they'll definitely be taking their cues from the president on a host of issues, especially environmental and trade issues. And it looks as though Obama is going to be the one politician who'll tell Special Ed Stelmach to clean up the Tar Sands or else.

Given that Canadians seem to have vastly more confidence in Obama's leadership than anything on offer at home, maybe having an associate prime minister isn't all that bad.

Speaking of associate prime ministers, the other one, Liberal interim leader Michael Ignatieff, was featured in The Guardian today. Here's a sample of Michael Sticking's take on the Liberal challenger:

With an air of haughty detachment, an arrogant sense of entitlement to leadership, limited charisma, Bush-friendly positions on key foreign policy issues, hardly any record on (and relatively little knowledge of) social and economic issues and next to no experience in the political trenches, Ignatieff is hardly the saviour so many Liberals delusionally think he is.

...Today's Canada is very much Trudeau's Canada, the Canada of Trudeau's vision, for better and for worse. Trudeau was, like Ignatieff, an intellectual, but, unlike Ignatieff, he obviously cared deeply about this country and sought to leave his mark on it, which he did. Ignatieff may feel "passionately and proudly Canadian", and there may be a bold vision behind his egotism, somewhere, but he has a lot to prove before he should be considered anything more than an opportunist, if not a self-absorbed charlatan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/13/michael-ignatieff-canada-economy

Remember - Work Kills

The list of maladies related to excessive working is long and comprehensive. Stress, ulcers, heart attacks are just a few. New research is showing that working long hours increases a person's risk of dimentia.

The Finnish-led study was based on analysis of 2,214 middle-aged British civil servants.

It found that those working more than 55 hours a week had poorer mental skills than those who worked a standard working week.

The American Journal of Epidemiology study found hard workers had problems with short-term memory and word recall.

Lead researcher Dr Marianna Virtanen, from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, said: "The disadvantages of overtime work should be taken seriously."

It is not known why working long hours might have an adverse effect on the brain.

However, the researchers say key factors could include increased sleeping problems, depression, an unhealthy lifestyle and a raised risk of cardiovascular disease, possibly linked to stress.

...The effects were cumulative, the longer the working week was the worse the test results were
.
Employees with long working hours also had shorter sleeping hours, reported more symptoms of depression and used more alcohol than those with normal working hours.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7909464.stm

The Abstinence Scam

Texas has one of America's highest rates of teen pregnancy. It also receives more than any other state in federal assistance for abstinence programmes.

Now a damning report blasts Texas high schools for neglecting sex education.

The overwhelming majority of Texas schools use scare tactics and spread myths in place of teaching basic sex and health information that students can use to protect themselves and others, according to a report released Wednesday by watchdog group Texas Freedom Network.

TFN's two-year study of education materials from 990 Texas school districts showed that about 94 percent of public schools use abstinence-only programs that usually pass moral judgments while either downplaying or ignoring contraception and health screenings.

Two percent ignore sex education, according to the report, written by David Wiley, professor of health education at Texas State University, and Kelly Wilson, assistant professor of health education at Texas State.

They put much of the blame on school administrators' fear of controversy and religious groups that teach that sex is shameful.

Texas continues to have one of the nation's highest teen pregnancy rates despite receiving more federal abstinence funding than any other state.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/100/story/62759.html

Atmospheric CO2 Could Last A Millenium

Until recently it was thought that CO2 emitted into the atmosphere lasted maybe a century or two before it was reabsorbed either into the sea or plant life or some other sink. From McClatchey Newspapers:

David Archer, a leading climate researcher who teaches at the University of Chicago, has written a new book that looks at carbon dioxide's "long tail" and what it means for changes on Earth in the future.

If the world continues its heavy use of coal over the next couple of hundred years until it's essentially used up, it would take several centuries more for the oceans to absorb about three-quarters of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. In those centuries, there would be a "climate storm" that Archer says would be significantly worse than the forecast from now to 2100.

The remaining carbon dioxide — the long tail — would stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, leaving a warmer climate. About 10 percent of it would still be in the atmosphere in 100,000 years, Archer wrote in "The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate."

Because of the long life of CO2 from fossil fuels, the climate impacts would last for many thousands of years. Ice sheets would melt, raising seas high enough to swamp 10 percent or more of the world's agricultural land. Other climate impacts could include uncomfortable heat and drier continental interiors, Archer tells his readers. "In the long run, it could be a steep price to pay for a century or so of fossil fuel energy."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/62735.html

Save Bucks - Abolish Capital Punishment

And that's just what's happening in various parts of the United States. The hard economics of death penalty cases is coming home to roost in cash-strapped states. They're coming to realize it's a losing proposition - for the state. From The New York Times:

When Gov. Martin O’Malley appeared before the Maryland Senate last week, he made an unconventional argument that is becoming increasingly popular in cash-strapped states: abolish the death penalty to cut costs.

Lawmakers in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and New Hampshire have made the same argument in recent months as they push bills seeking to repeal the death penalty, and experts say such bills have a good chance of passing in Maryland, Montana and New Mexico.

Capital cases are expensive because the trials tend to take longer, they typically require more lawyers and more costly expert witnesses, and they are far more likely to lead to multiple appeals.
In New Mexico, lawmakers who support the repeal bill have pointed out that despite the added expense, most defendants end up with life sentences anyway.

That has been true in Maryland. A 2008 study by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan public policy group, found that in the 20 years after the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978, prosecutors sought the death penalty in 162 felony-homicide convictions, securing it in 56 cases, most of which were overturned; the rest of the convictions led to prison sentences.

Since 1978, five people have been executed in Maryland, and five inmates are on death row.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/us/25death.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

The paper reports that a lot of states are beginning to lose their appetite for jailing swarms of non-violent offenders too.

Shuffling the Deck - Canadian Foreign Aid

The Harper government is shortening the list of beneficiaries of Canadian foreign aid. Without explaining the rationale on which the Harpies cut the winners from the losers, the new focus will be on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, the Caribbean, Colombia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Mali, Mozambique, Pakistan, Peru, Senegal, Sudan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Vietnam and the West Bank/Gaza.

International Co-operation Minister, "Odious Bev" Oda said the idea is to get the greatest bang for Canada's buck rather than handing out dribs and drabs to many needy states.

This could be an excellent opportunity to restructure Canada's foreign aid along, let's say, environmental lines. After all, we're per capita next only to the US in carbon emissions and anthropogenic global warming is already afflicting a number of nations, particularly in the Sahel. So why don't we take half the money and send it to the global warming victims of our excess and leave the other half to help innocent victims of war in places like Darfur, the Congo, Afghanistan and West Bank/Gaza.

It just seems to me if we're trashing peoples' livelihoods in far off lands, the least we can do is give them first dibs on our foreign aid assistance.

Which One Will Be the Next Prime Minister of Canada?

Steve - or - Mike?

Get Over It - Electing Obama Ended Racism in the US

Really, that's the gist of Raphael Alexander's piece in today's National Toast defending the New York Post cartoon depicting a monkey, lying on the sidewalk dead from gunshot wounds, as President Obama. Raphe says it's time to get over that silly old racism nonsense;

...they can unify in enough numbers to elect a black President [or half-black, or whatever you wish to call him], but they can’t let go of the racial sensitivity that has marked their long history of friction between whites and blacks. The best example of sensitivity turned to insanity has been during this whole “chimp cartoon” flap, and the resultant fallout that is reminiscent of the prophet Muhammad cartoons.

I guess from his perch in comfy Vancouver, Alexander hasn't noticed what's still going on in the American south. Maybe he didn't hear about New Orleans or its black communities. There was an article on the weekend about a resurgence of the KKK.

Alexander betrays his abject ignorance of the condition of many African Americans in not grasping that the term "monkey" is a racial perjorative used to denigrate blacks in today's America. Instead he dismisses this as an historical anecdote. Besides, aren't we all descended from apes?

There’s even an evolutionary correlation that is even more apparent, and important here. Most adults who aren’t devout in their faith will probably admit to the fact that humans evolved from hominids, and our closest genetic ancestors are chimpanzees [96% similar actually] so there is a cultural paradigm to referencing lower primates and human beings. Nobody wants to be seen as a lower primate, which is primarily why George W Bush was referred to as the “smirking chimp”. Calling a black person a chimp is seen as more offensive only because of the historical associations of racism.

Raphael, stick to something you understand, at least even vaguely. There must be something else you can mine out of the Vancouver olympics.

Oh Good, We Got a Book! "How to Fix Afghanistan"

Canada's defence department has just issued its very own, 241-page, counterinsurgency manual. From the National Toast:

A compendium of modern military thinking informed by colonial misadventures and successes, the manual calls for a co-ordinated attack by both political and military forces. "Insurgency is a political problem," reads the introduction. "The mere attrition of insurgents is highly unlikely to result in [their] defeat."

Though the manual urges troops to reject Western absolute values, uses postmodern words such as "meme" and "heuristic," and likens insurgencies to communicable diseases, such approaches are commonly advocated in defence circles, said Prof. Hoffman, a former advisor to U. S. Army Chief of Staff George Casey when he was commanding general in Iraq.

The book also features citations that range from Greek historian Herodotus to Mao Zedong to Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden.
Prof. Hoffman, whom the book references, said that several allies have already produced similar manuals with much of the same philosophies, most recently the United States.

Now there's a breakthrough. Insurgency is a "political problem." So, tanks and artillery barrages and airstrikes really don't do the trick, eh? Quelle surprise!

Like its U. S. counterpart, Counter-insurgency Operations takes issue with the conventional notions of the victors and the vanquished. "Military forces do not defeat insurgencies; instead they create the security conditions necessary for the political resolution of the conflict," it says.

And how do they "create the security conditions necessary for a political resolution of the conflict"? They do it by securing the local population from the insurgents. That means flooding the countryside with enough troops to keep the insurgents from infiltrating the villages and imposing their will on the populace. That means lots and lots of troops. That means not hunkering down in garrisons. That means doing everything that we're not doing because we don't have more than a tiny fraction of the force required in Kandahar province.

Understanding the root of the grievance, Prof. Hoffman says, helps the military separate the enemy combatants who are fighting for ideology, or those who signed up for money. "You identify and isolate the extremists, and bolster the moderates."

A common pitfall, it explains, imposing one's own values on others. "Such an assumption and situation risks creating or exacerbating the perception that foreigners are trying to impose values and beliefs at odds with those of the indigenous population."

Foreigners? Who, us? We're not foreigners in Afghanistan, we're aliens. We're ethnically different, culturally different, socially different, linguistically different, religiously different, economically different, technologically different and politically different. We're pretty much everything that's not them. Yet we went in there expecting them to embrace secular democracy and our notion of human rights. Brilliant!

And then there's this closing bit of wisdom from the article.

It also cautions against demonizing or delegitimizing one's foes as thugs, a time-honoured mistake made by former U. S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and others. "The classification or dismissal of a nascent insurgency as a criminal or some other movement will only fuel the insurgency through inappropriate responses," it warns.

Hmm. Remember the guy who brokered our combat mission to Kandahar, General Rick Hillier? Remember who he described the mission as going into the province to "kill scumbags?" That seems to have set the tone for troops and commanders who went there. I guess Rick hadn't read the memo.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/afghanistan/story.html?id=1321612&p=2

A Setback in the Fight Against Global Warming

Nine years of work to fight global warming is sitting on the bottom of the Antarctic ocean today. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) failed to reach orbit after launch yesterday.

OCO was supposed to map carbon dioxide emissions around the world. It was to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and where it was being absorbed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/24/oco-satellite-nasa

Wanted - Cops With Guts

Four fit, young men equipped with ballistic vests and mace versus an out of shape, middle aged guy who's plainly stressed out. With those odds, it's fair to expect cops to be able to subdue the guy (if even that was truly necessary) without resort to deadly force.

The inquiry into the death of Robert Dziekanski has heard from the first of the four officers that he "was fearful" of the traveller when the cops descended on him at Vancouver airport. What made him so petrified of Dziekanski? Why the guy had the temerity to raise his hands, something that apparently struck fear into the heart of RCMP constable Gerry Rundel.

The witness went on to say that, "it's resistant behaviour where he directly disregarded a command," and he was trained that, when a individual becomes resistant, it's time to whip out the Taser.

RCMP spokesman, Sgt. Tim Shields offered this. "Of course this is a tragedy for everyone involved . Those officers will gladly do things differently if they could bring Mr. Dziekanski back." Guess what, Tim? That's not going to happen, they killed the man, he's not coming back.
Four of your guys, Tim, had to go for the Tasers to subdue a guy who hadn't even taken a swing at them.

Anyone who's watched the video knows these guys had no reason to Taser Dziekanski, not once and certainly not five times. At the end of the day I think it comes down to bad training, bad judgment and four gutless cops. Do we need mounties like this? Does the RCMP?

Americans of All Stripes Rally Behind Obama - Republicans Look Like Losers

The Republicans gambled that blind opposition to Obama's stimulus/recovery plans would pay off - and it backfired. From The New York Times:

A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most Americans faulted Republicans for their response to the president, saying the party had objected to the $787 billion economic stimulus plan for political reasons. Most Americans said Mr. Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on, the poll found, rather than seek middle ground with Republicans.

Americans are under no illusions that the country’s problems will be resolved quickly, but the [New York Times/CBS] poll suggested they would be particularly patient when it comes to the economy, with most saying it would be years before there was significant improvement.

A month into Mr. Obama’s term, with his first big accomplishments, setbacks and political battles behind him, more than three-quarters of Americans said they are optimistic about the next four years with him as president. Similar percentages said they think he is bringing real change to the way things are done in Washington and that they have confidence in his ability to make the right decisions about the economy.

Obama reached his hand out to the Republicans - and they tried to bite it off. Tried, but didn't succeed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/us/politics/24poll.html?_r=1&hp

Another Free Market Fix Fails - Carbon Trading

It was a nice idea. Bring the free market and environmentalism together and let them solve global warming through - carbon trading.

The idea is that major emitters are given a carbon emissions quota. If they don't meet that quota, they're allowed to sell (trade) the surplus. If they exceed their quota, they can avoid fines and penalties by purchasing unused quotas from cleaner companies.

The cap and trade scheme treats carbon as a commodity of trade and it works, sort of, except for one little snag - any commodity price can plummet. From The Guardian:

All this only works as the carbon price lifts. As with 1924 Château Lafite or Damian Hirst's diamond skulls, scarcity and speculation create the value. If permits are cheap, and everyone has lots, the green incentive crashes into reverse. As recession slashes output, companies pile up permits they don't need and sell them on. The price falls, and anyone who wants to pollute can afford to do so. The result is a system that does nothing at all for climate change but a lot for the bottom lines of mega-polluters such as the steelmaker Corus: industrial assistance in camouflage.

"I don't know why industrials would miss this opportunity," said one trader last week. "They are using it to compensate for the tightening of credit and the slowdown, to pay for redundancies."

A lot of the blame lies with governments that signed up to carbon trading as a neat idea, but then indulged polluters with luxurious quantities of permits. The excuse was that growth would soon see them bumping against the ceiling.

Instead, exchanges are in meltdown: a tonne of carbon has dropped to about €8, down from last year's summer peak of €31 and far below the €30-€45 range at which renewables can compete with fossil fuels.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/23/glover-carbon-market-pollution

Like medieval pardoners handing out unlimited indulgences, governments have created a glut. Reformation must follow. Wanted - a modern Martin Luther to nail a shaming truth to industry's door: Europe's whizz-bang carbon market is turning sub-prime.

Lorne Gunter Has His Eye On The Future

Lorne Gunter, loudmouth columnist with the National Toast, flagship of the soon to be defunct CanWest media circus, has written a piece on how to enjoy life on a lot less during this recession. I wonder if Grunter's been pondering his own future:

If we're not eating out as much, perhaps we're eating home more often, maybe even as families.
Sure you can talk together as a family over some spinach and artichoke dip and a thin-crust, brick-oven pizza at a restaurant. But without all the noise and clatter and would-you-like-fresh-ground-pepper-with-that interruptions, you might chat together even more.

You might have to dust off your playing cards and board games rather than hurrying to stand in line at the neighbourhood megaplex to see a movie no one is really happy to see, but which everyone has compromised on. (I make way better popcorn than those high school concession workers at the theatre, anyway.)

Maybe your vacation this summer will involve driving your van further than the airport park-and-ride. Maybe it will involve camping at a nearby provincial park or setting up in your cousins' backyard (provided the cousins don't object, mind you). You may have to be more Clark Griswold than Paris Hilton when planning your summer getaway.

My parents saved up for three or four years for good road-trip vacations --Expo '67, Disneyland--but in between we made do with sites closer to home. The vacation we still talk about the most was the camping trip to Saskatchewan's 1971 Homecoming. We have more funny, shared stories from that summer than any other.

Read a book. Read a newspaper (please, read a newspaper). Invite the next door neighbours over for burgers on the deck. Go for a walk instead of a workout. Rediscover the joy and excitement in conversation.

Relearning to appreciate the simple things -- playing with the box prosperity came in -- can be the silver lining in austere times.

Good advice for anyone facing the pinch in this recession, from a guy who should know.

UnDemonizing Iran

Doug Saunders has an excellent op-ed piece in today's G&M detailing how Bush rejected a comprehensive peace offer from Iran, undermined a moderate leader and left the way open for a rabid radical, Ahmadinejad.

Saunders points out that the path to peace with Iran begins when we stop demonizing it:

The pro-American demonstrations, by all reports genuine (and unpunished), took place over several days in 2003. In that spring, Mr. Khatami sent a Swiss official to Washington to make the peace offer. In exchange for recognizing Israel, cutting off Hamas and proving it had abolished any nuclear-weapons plans, Iran wanted an end to sanctions, normal diplomatic relations with the U.S. and recognition of its role in the region.

So what happened? Well, nothing. George W. Bush was president, the Iraq war was just approaching the "mission accomplished" phase, and nobody in the White House thought it would look good to make peace with Iran, a country that only the year before had been made a rhetorical component in Mr. Bush's "axis of evil."

As one State Department official directly involved with the Iranian offer told me, "It was like we missed the biggest Middle East peace opportunity of the decade, just so we could keep saying 'axis of evil.' "

So the offer was stuck in a drawer. That diplomatic snub was one of several humiliations, diplomatic and economic, that led to the defeat of Mr. Khatami's reformists in subsequent elections and the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's neo-conservative zealots. Mission accomplished, indeed.

A friendly relationship with Iran would solve a number of problems: The Afghanistan war would be much, much easier; Iraq would be more manageable; and prospects for Middle East peace would be energized. As Ms. Albright said, there are useful alliances with far less democratic, far more Islamic countries that are far less capable of changing for the better - notably, Saudi Arabia.

Most of the objection to this scenario, of course, is based on our belief that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. But that, too, is almost ready to vanish into vapour. Our most authoritative source of information about Iran's nuclear program is the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, which stated categorically, based on voluminous sources, that Iran had abandoned its nuclear-weapons program in 2003. Intelligence officials acknowledge openly that the past two years have not added a single new piece of information to that assessment.

It was reported this week, based on a new IAEA report, that Iran has produced "enough low-enriched, reactor-grade uranium to make a bomb." This, as former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Cheryl Rofer has carefully documented, is scientific nonsense: Yes, that uranium contains enough U-235 to make a bomb. To get it out, you would need to kick all the inspectors out of the country, reconfigure thousands of closely watched centrifuges and engage in years of enrichment.

It was physicist Werner Heisenberg who found that the act of observing can affect the nature of the thing being observed. It is likely that simply by looking at Iran as a threat, we've made it one. Look again, and it might change.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090221.DOUG21/TPStory/Focus/
There are still forces in the United States and especially Israel that would bomb Iran in a heartbeat. You can spot them when they distort Iran's actual weapon-making capacity, spinning half truths and infusing fear. Fortunately there seems to be a new American administration that sees Iran as a possible opportunity, not an inevitable adversary.

Food for Thought - From MLK

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time ... We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words:

"Too late."

- Martin Luther King

PTSD Anyone?

PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a well recognized affliction common in soldiers returning from tours of combat abroad. Our militaries look for signs of it and try to treat PTSD victims. The Vietnam aftermath showed what happens when PTSD is left untreated.

Switch now to Guantanamo where the US government faces the difficult challenge of releasing detainees swept up years ago but against whom the American military authorities have no case. You have people who were swept off the streets and flown halfway around the world to undergo years of psychological and physical manipulation, even torture.

America is manufacturing its own, "made in Gitmo" terrorists. The Washington Post has a story of one of these, a Kuwaiti named Abdallah Al-Ajmi, who spent four years at Guantanamo before being sent home.

...U.S. government officials were deeply disappointed -- they had hoped that Kuwait, an American ally, would find a way to detain Ajmi for years -- but they refrained from any public criticism. At the very least, the officials figured, Kuwaiti authorities would keep a close watch on him. And they expected Ajmi to move on, to put his Guantanamo experience behind him, to get a job and settle down after his time in one of the toughest prisons on the planet.

Ajmi chose a different path. Last March, he drove a truck packed with explosives onto an Iraqi army base outside Mosul, killing 13 Iraqi soldiers and himself. It was the denouement of a nihilistic descent that his lawyers and family believe commenced at Guantanamo.

When Ajmi returned to Kuwait, "he was a ticking time bomb," said Mansur Saleh al-Ajmi, one of his younger brothers.

"Before he went to Afghanistan, he was a normal teenager. He spun the car around in circles. He smoked. People liked him," Mansur said. "After he came back from Guantanamo, he seemed like a completely different person. He stared all the time. You could not have a normal conversation with him. . . . It seemed as if his brain had been washed."

...When Thomas Wilner [Ajmi's Gitmo lawyer] learned that his client had become a suicide bomber, he said he felt physically ill. He thought of the victims, and he thought of Ajmi. "Here was this poor, dumb kid -- I really don't think he was a bad kid -- who was thrown into a hellhole of a prison and who went mad," he said. "Should we really be surprised that somebody we treated this way would become radicalized, would become crazy?"

Curiously absent from the American commentary is any suggestion that the US should give inmates psychological screening and, where necessary, treatment before they're returned to their homelands. It's a horrible Catch-22. Hold them to treat them for PSTD or other mental maladies and you're essentially admitting that you've tortured them out of their minds. Ignore reality and release them and you're unleashing several that you've conditioned to retaliate violently. This is a "lose-lose" situation for America, and for the detainees.

Touch Wood - Canadian Consumer Confidence Climbs

CBC News reports that the latest Harris-Decima poll shows Canadian consumer confidence in an upswing.

27 per cent of respondents said they expect to be better off in 2010 compared to just 13 per cent who expect 2010 to be worse. 41% said now is a good time for major purchases.

With Canada among the countries least impacted by the global meltdown, it seems logical that our people would be more optimistic about the future. Our optimism may be misplaced but it's a welcome break from the fiscal gloom and doom anyway.

A Force Someone Might Just Harness

Protest, discontent, rage. Around the world, ordinary people are taking to the streets to protest the global meltdown. They're angry at their governments, they're furious at their financial institutions and they're carrying a rage that breaks out in mass demonstrations.

An angry crowd of 100,000 marched in Dublin over the weekend. Similar scenes have taken place in Greece, France, even China. The Guardian reports that British police are getting ready for their own large-scale riots:

Britain's most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming "footsoldiers" in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police's public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become "viable targets". So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

The police intelligence service warns that the coming crop of protestors don't merely want their anger heard, they'll ensure it's felt. The police claim "known activists" are moving in to agitate the protestors and the police are likewise gearing up to suppress unruly mobs.

All of this should be manna from heaven for the left. It'll be interesting to see if left wing parties find a way to harness the force of protest to revitalize themselves and shift the political centre.

100 Years Later - The Silver Dart Flies Again

If all goes well, a handbuilt replica of Alexander Graham Bell's Silver Dart will mark the centennial of powered flight in Canada with a short hop over Baddeck Bay, Nova Scotia.

The replica Silver Dart was the brainchild of a bunch of aviation buffs from the Welland area. They're a terrific story in their own right. I've known one of them since the 60's, a friend of my father's.

These fellows, who include a retired 747 captain, are recreational flyers who own their own hangar in which they store their small fleet of vintage and homebuilt aircraft. It's been their habit every now and then to fuel up their planes and take off on trips to places like Alaska or Florida.

To build the Silver Dart replica these guys created the Aerial Experiment Association. They've got a web site that explains what they had to do to make the Silver Dart centennial flight a reality.

http://www.silverdartreplica.com/

Final Exams for America's Ailing MegaBanks

America's major banks - including CitiBank and Bank of America - are being scrutinized this week by Washington regulators to determine if they're beyond saving. From the New York Times:

These reviews of the banks’ books, known as “stress tests,” are heightening a dilemma for Obama aides about how candid they should be about the health of banks like Citigroup and Bank of America. The tests are expected to take several weeks.

Bank shares were pummeled last week, partly because of rumors that the government might nationalize some of the banks. Officials consider many of the top 20 banks “too big to fail.”

Still, the big banks say they remain relatively healthy and that, with time and support from the government, they will regain their footing. But many economists, Wall Street analysts and even some bank executives contend that some of the banks are already effectively insolvent.

NYT columnist Paul Krugman says the Obama administration needs to find the courage to nationalize the big banks, what he calls "zombie banks" unable to provide credit to the US economy.

The case for nationalization rests on three observations.

First, some major banks are dangerously close to the edge — in fact, they would have failed already if investors didn’t expect the government to rescue them if necessary.

Second, banks must be rescued. The collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can’t risk letting much bigger institutions like Citigroup or Bank of America implode.

Third, while banks must be rescued, the U.S. government can’t afford, fiscally or politically, to bestow huge gifts on bank shareholders.
Let’s be concrete here. There’s a reasonable chance — not a certainty — that Citi and BofA, together, will lose hundreds of billions over the next few years. And their capital, the excess of their assets over their liabilities, isn’t remotely large enough to cover those potential losses.

...But here’s the thing: the funds needed to bring these banks fully back to life would greatly exceed what they’re currently worth. Citi and BofA have a combined market value of less than $30 billion, and even that value is mainly if not entirely based on the hope that stockholders will get a piece of a government handout. And if it’s basically putting up all the money, the government should get ownership in return.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/23bank.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/opinion/23krugman.html?_r=1

National Geographic Slams Tar Sands

This isn't going to help Tar Sands fans in Calgary or Ottawa. The march edition of National Geographic will have a photo spread of the Athabasca Tar Sands. According to CanWest, the feature will include several pictures of Athabasca's enormous black tailing ponds.

The Alberta government is - on what has become a regular basis - in a pitched struggle with environmentalists and the media over control of the thorny climate change issue.
And the politics surrounding the oilsands - and the world's understanding of Alberta's oil reserves - may define the current Alberta government's time in power.

Earlier this week, Premier Ed Stelmach said comments that Alberta has the dirtiest oil on earth are ``most unfortunate. It's obviously disconcerting, but that's part of the misinformation that continues to roll out quite often from self-interest groups, painting Alberta and the country of Canada with a picture like that.''

But Simon Dyer, oilsands program director for the Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank, said from the Stelmach's government's point of view, ``there still seems to be the perception that this is a public relations battle. ''

Dyer added, ``industry and government need to take responsibility for the environmental performance of the oilsands.''

After years of promising site remediation and environmental clean ups, especially the repeated promise of carbon sequestration, people are beginning to call Alberta's and Ottawa's bluff - and finding they're holding losing hands. It was good while it lasted but it's finally put up or shut up time for the Tar Sands.

What Does "Progressive" Mean to Michael Ignatieff?

I've been pretty forthcoming in my criticisms of interim Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. I've been disappointed in his endorsement of the illegal war on Iraq after 9/11. I've felt really let down that a Liberal leader could take such an unbalanced, one-sided position on the Israeli-Palestinian problem, tantamount absolution for all and any Israeli excesses. I've been troubled by his contradictory support of the Athabasca Tar Sands and his apparent lack of understanding of the environmental dimensions of that catastrophe. I've been worried by this nagging sense that the interim Liberal leader will pander for votes.

Several months ago I read Mr. Ignatieff's self-description as "progressive" yet what I've seen in him so far has been bereft of anything progressive and disturbingly close to neo-conservative.

But could I be wrong? Is there something genuinely liberal about the interim Liberal leader, something unquestionably progressive? I'm looking for more than just a little shiny bauble here or there. Is Michael Ignatieff truly liberal? Is he truly progressive? Is he really in the right party?

What do you think? All supporters and defenders of Michael Ignatieff, here's your chance to come to his aid.

A Nice Pat on the Back for Canada

According to the National Toast, flagship of the doomed CanWest empire, fiscally at least, Canada is being heralded by Western nations, particularly the US, as a paragon of virtue.

Canada has also become a useful proxy for officials in the Obama administration that hold the country up as a model of how "regulation can work."
Paul Volcker, a White House adviser and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, this week sketched out a vision for the future of the banking system that would look "more like the Canadian system than it does the American system."

President Barack Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, also expressed a broad affinity for Canadian ethos -- ranging from the financial to the health-care system--during a recent stopover that he described as a "warming up for the visit of the President."

It's great to watch Harper's clown car cabinet try to bask in Paul Martin's sunshine knowing, had Canada suffered the setback of a Harper majority three years ago, we too would have been beset with all the fallout of American-style financial deregulation. The credit Harper is claiming today exists only because the Libs and NDP succeeded in holding his Conservatives at bay.

The Rebirth of Populism

Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher and 100,000 Dubliners may just be right. We may be about to witness the restoration of populism.

The Dubliners turned out in an angry protest over inadequacies in their government's stimulus initiative. The comments reported in The Guardian and other papers suggested a depth of anger that won't be going away soon, the fuel to drive change.

Give white and blue-collar Americans a chance to let the reality of what's hit them sink in and they too might come to see the economic elite for what they have wrought on working Americans. Big Business, Big Capital has left the United States in tatters and it was all through a toxic brew of greed and incompetence.

The factories of wealth raked in trillions of dollars through cannibalizing America's industrial base and flooding world markets with bad paper. Right wing news organizations ran interference for them, distracting the working classes with xenophobic anger and fears of terrorism. What happens if blue and white-collar Americans discover that they were indeed terrorized - from within? What fate awaits the oligarchs if the American people throw off their blankets of fear?

I'd bet that the populist revolution in the United States will break out when their government moves to "reform" Social Security. Having saddled working America with two, likely three-trillion dollars in debt on stimulus spending and bailing out Wall Street and American banks, it's going to take a lot of brass to stare down those workers and tell them the government can't afford to honour its Social Security promise to them.

That pitch falls apart as soon as someone asks "why?" The only reason why is that the federal government has, for decades, stolen the money working Americans entrusted to it for their retirement. It simply appropriated each year's Social Security surplus, money that was supposed to be safely invested to grow the fund necessary for the wave of Baby Boomer retirees. It siphoned off much of that surplus and wrote IOUs in exchange. Remember Bush talking about a file cabinet full of worthless IOUs?

What if working class America stomped its collective foot and demanded "government of the people, by the people and for the people," the deal enshrined in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address? My, my, my - the possibilities are endless.

Americans have a rich history of populism marked by the rise of the Progressives in the late 1800s through the 1920s. It was a democratic balancing, a movement to set right the excesses of the oligarchs, to reclaim political power for the public.

Keeping Joe Lunchpail in line hasn't been easy but it's been accomplished by feeding him the lie that progressivism = liberalism = socialism = communism = godless political slavery. It's a powerful lie but a lie nonetheless. It's a lie that's going to become harder to sustain. Once working Americans come to see it as a lie and realize how it's been used against them it must just spark a counter-offensive in the class war that's been quietly waged on working America going back to the Reagan years.

The Foot Connects

Need proof that academics can be as craven as industrialists? Check out this link posted at Foot's:

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02202009.html

Obama and Israel, a Strained Friendship?

I don't buy "biblical inerrancy," the strange notion that every word in the bible is the literal Word of God. The Bible, whatever else it may be, is a book written by a bunch of very mortal human beings a long, long time ago reflecting a very early understanding of the world and deities.

In his book American Fascists, Chris Hedges utterly dismantles the notion of biblical inerrancy as patently false given the numerous contradictions in its text and something we only chose to rely on when it suits us:

A literal reading of the Bible means re institution of slavery coupled with the understanding that the slavemaster has the right to beat his slave without mercy since "the slave is his money" (Exodus 21:21). Children who strike or curse a parent are to be executed (Exodus 21:15, 17). Those who pay homage to another god "shall be utterly destroyed" (Exodus 22:20). Menstruating women are to be considered unclean, and all they touch while menstruating becomes unclean (Leviticus 15:19-32). The blind, the lame, those with mutilated faces, those who are hunchbacks or dwarfs and those with itching diseases or scabs or crushed testicles cannot become priests (Leviticus 24:16). And "if the spirit of jealousy" comes upon a man, the high priest can order the jealous man's wife to drink "the water of bitterness." If she dies, it is proof of her guilt; if she survives, of her innocence (Numbers 5:11-31). Women, throughout the Bible, are subservient to men, often without legal rights, and men are free to sell their daughters into sexual bondage (Exodus 21:7-11).

But one little bit of lunacy we cling to in modern geopolitics is the fantastic notion that God bequeathed the "land of Israel" to the Israelites in perpetuity. If you believe that (and so many do) you should rush home, put your wife in her place, sell your daughters, beat your slaves and execute that pesky kid who won't get off the X-Box.

This little fantasy got a free ride during the Bush-era, the Era of Darkness, but it's turning into jello now that Obama has taken the reins. Asia Times Online reports that storm clouds are gathering between the US and Israel:

Iran, with which President Barack Obama has pledged to engage in a "constructive dialogue", and the future of its nuclear program will no doubt be the greatest source of tension between the two allies. The new president's commitment to achieving real progress on a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict may also provoke serious friction. This will particularly be the case should a reunified Arab League launch a major new push for the adoption of its 2002 peace plan, which provides for Arab recognition of Israel in return for the latter's withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands.

Last week's election produced a clear majority for right-wing parties led by the Likud Party of former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly declared his opposition to a settlement freeze, territorial concessions and the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Obama and his Middle East Special Envoy George Mitchell may indeed be willing to exert pressure on Israel - among other things, by tabling their own views about a final peace agreement and how precisely it might be achieved - especially if ongoing Arab efforts to reconcile Hamas and Fatah in a new coalition government succeed.

If all goes well on that front, the Arab League, fortified by a developing rapprochement between Syria and Saudi Arabia, could announce the latest version of its 2002 peace plan at next month's summit in Doha, according to Marc Lynch, a George Washington University specialist on Arab politics.

"If you have a unified Palestinian government and a unified Arab move for peace," added Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, "then it's much more likely that Obama will step up his own efforts - ideally, working with an Israeli government that's ready to go along with a serious peace process, but, if not, being willing to make his disagreement [with that government] known."

The result could be a serious test between the next Israeli government and its influential US advocates. The Obama administration clearly believes that real progress toward resolving the 60-year-old conflict is critical both to restoring Washington's credibility among the Arab states and curbing the further radicalization of the region's population - particularly in the wake of Israel's recent military offensive in Gaza.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/KB21Aa01.html

Arms Race Update - India's Boomers Nearing Reality

India could be just a few years away from deploying its own fleet of made-in-India nuclear missile subs. With the Bush-era American enthusiasm for India on the wane and American, Russian and Chinese interest in Pakistan growing, India seems to be feeling decidedly exposed. From Asia Times Online:

New Delhi has been actively seeking out assistance from France in the implementation of the ATV project, and that Russian engineers are already involved. The sources said that the sea trials of the nuclear-powered submarines should begin this month and that the submarines should be operational within the next three years. The secretive ATV nuclear backed ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) project began in the late 1970's and is being implemented at a secret dry dock in Visakhapatnam, India's Eastern Naval command base. Observers have said that the submarines are a critical addition to India's weapons capabilities.

New Delhi has been concerned about Beijing's strengthening of bilateral ties with Islamabad, particularly given recent tension on sea projects such as at the Gwadar port. China has also been developing ties with Sri Lanka and Myanmar to deepen its control over a complex energy-security conflict being aggressively played out in the region.

Given the ongoing tussle between India and China to control the waters of the Indian Ocean, the New Delhi government has been put under tremendous pressure from the navy to ramp up India's sea power. China has already spoken of creating three ocean-going fleets to patrol the areas of Japan and Korea, the western Pacific, the Malacca Strait and the Indian Ocean.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KB20Df02.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/KB21Aa04.html

Via Con Dios Mexico

Earlier today I did a post about a US State Department travel advisory for Mexico warning American tourists of the risk of being caught in a full-blown firefight.

There's more. AlterNet has released a story about a 2008 year-end report by the Pentagon that warns of two nations at risk of "rapid and sudden collapse" - Pakistan and Mexico:

The report, named "JOE 2008" (for Joint Operating Environment), states:

"In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force, and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state."

U.S. political figures were ...quick to react -- using the Pentagon's lurid findings to argue for increased military aid to Mexico. As President-elect Barack Obama met in Washington with Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Jan. 12, the former U.S. drug czar, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, just back from a meeting in Mexico of the International Forum of Intelligence and Security Specialists, told a Washington press conference: "Mexico is on the edge of the abyss -- it could become a narco state in the coming decade." He praised Calderon, who he said has "launched a serious attempt to reclaim the rule of law from the chaos of the drug cartels." The International Forum of Intelligence and Security Specialists is an advisory body to Mexican federal law enforcement.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/127850/

Water Woes - Turning Off the Taps in California

Water shortages this year in California's San Joaquin valley will cost 75,000 jobs and $2-billion in revenues. From McClatchey Newspapers:

“It is ugly,” said Mark Borba, a longtime west Fresno County farmer. “There are growers out there who have no water or who are drilling wells in hopes of getting them operating in time and still others are bulldozing their almond trees.”

Three consecutive dry winters and reduced water pumping to protect dwindling fish in Northern California rivers helped create the dismal forecast. West siders get water from northern rivers through canals belonging to the federally operated Central Valley Project.

While the news was expected, it hit farmers in the Westlands Water District, the largest affected district, especially hard. Growers in that region expect to fallow more than half of the 600,000 acres in the district, forcing thousands of people out of work and triggering an economic ripple effect that could extend beyond a farmer’s fields.

Tom Birmingham, general manager of the Westlands district, said in a news release that "there is no question that many years worth of investments will be lost."

California's water crisis is dire, and it's bad news for the rest of the US and Canada also. California produces about two-thirds of America's vegetables and half of its supply of fruit and nuts. The San Joaquin valley disaster reflects a critical problem that's being felt in other agricultural zones in California.

Cotler's Smear Job

According to Irwin Cottler's screed in today's National Post, if you're critical of Israel, you're an anti-semite.

Cottler contends that criticism of Zionism's excesses is anti-Semitic. Criticism of Israeli apartheid-style measures is anti-Semitic. He claims that if you criticize these things then, by definition, you're committed to the destruction of the state of Israel.

Ideological antisemitism is a much more sophisticated and arguably a more pernicious expression of the new antisemitism. It finds expression not in any genocidal incitement against Jews and Israel, or overt racist denial of the Jewish people and Israel's right to be; rather, ideological antisemitism disguises itself as part of the struggle against racism.
The first manifestation of this ideological antisemitism was its institutional and juridical anchorage in the 'Zionism is Racism' resolution at the UN. Notwithstanding the fact that the there was a formal repeal of this resolution, 'Zionism as Racism' remains alive and well in the global arena, particularly in the campus cultures of North America and Europe, as confirmed by the recent British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism.

The second manifestation is the indictment of Israel as an apartheid state. This involves more than the simple indictment of Israel as an apartheid state. It also involves the call for the dismantling of Israel as an apartheid state as evidenced by the events at the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism in Durban.

The third manifestation of ideological antisemitism involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state - and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism - but as a Nazi one.

And so it is then that Israel is delegitimized - if not demonized - by the ascription to it of the two most scurrilous indictments of twentieth-century racism - Nazism and apartheid - the embodiment of all evil. These very labels of Zionism and Israel as 'racist, apartheid, and Nazi' supply the criminal indictment. No further debate is required. The conviction that this 'triple racism' warrants the dismantling of Israel as a moral obligation has been secured. For who would deny that a 'racist, apartheid, Nazi' state should not have any right to exist today? What is more, this characterization allows for terrorist 'resistance' to be deemed justifiable - after all, such a situation is portrayed as nothing other than occupation et résistance, where 'resistance' against a racist, apartheid, Nazi occupying state is legitimate, if not mandatory.

Not a word in Cottler's rant suggesting that Israel is, to the slightest degree, the author of even some of its misfortune. Not a hint that the illegal occupation of the West Bank is cause for Israel to be criticized.

No, to Cotler, Israel is totally blameless and beyond reproach and anyone who thinks otherwise is an anti-Semite. This is a rank smear job designed to intimidate critics of Israel. Fuck you Irwin.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/127698/

I stole this comment left by Ezra Winton at ArtThreat.net. He makes a lot of sense about a rapidly growing movement to silence critics:

"At a talk last night at Concordia University, Robert Fisk said that if good, compassionate, honest and just people are continually labelled anti-semitic it's going to give the term a good name. Arguments like skeptik's are barely worth replying to, because they shift the argument away from the illegal occupation of Palestine by Israel to one of anyone-who-criticizes-Israel-hates-Jews. It's disgustingly misguided, mischievous and malicious.

There is no Global Zionist Conspiracy.

I can name all the organizations, the pro-Israel-no-matter-what-they-do organizations and associations, who are leading this anti-academic freedom and fear-mongering campaign across the world's campuses. It's not a conspiracy when B'nai Brith takes out a full page advert in Canada's National Post. I'd say that's pretty front and center. Pretty damn conspicuous. The international community has labelled Israel's occupation of Palestinian land as illegal. Israel has every right to exist and should exist. But it does not have the right to violate international law and human rights in the process. When activists, writers, scholars and politicians make this point they are doing the job of pointing out injustices. To label them anti-semitic or racist is an inane and belligerent tactic of diversion. It's now wasted about ten minutes of my time, so I guess it's working.

If I critique Stephen Harper, his government, his military, and people that voted for him, am I anti-Canadian. If I critique the people who have written policy allowing for whites to occupy First Nations land in Canada, am I being anti-white? Surely not. The double-standard is prolific among unconditional supporters of Israel, and it's time to call it what it is: fear-mongering and diversionary tactics.

Enough already, on to the real task of ending the illegal occupation of Palestine and the suffering of oppressed people everywhere.

I'll Take Haiti

BC Premier Gordon Campbell recently unveiled an Olympic, "adopt a country" programme for BC schoolkids. The idea is that each school will "adopt" a country that might be involved in the 2010 winter games.

Personally, I'd like to adopt Haiti. Now I know I'm not a school or anything like that but I think our standard of living might come to look a lot like Haiti's by the time we pay for our Olympic boondoggle.

Warning - Mexico

Maybe I won't be riding my motorcycle through Mexico this year. Here's the US State Department's latest travel advisory for Mexico. From the Washington Post:

"Recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades. Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico but most recently in northern Mexico, including Tijuana, Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez. During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped and temporarily prevented from leaving the area."

Being "temporarily prevented" from leaving a firefight is never a good thing as far as promoting tourism goes. Tourism is one of Mexico's main sources of income, and the country that sends the most tourists to Mexico is the United States.

China - Using American Wealth to Cement Its Supremacy

It's the way these things go - and it's too late to do a damned thing about it.

The West, particularly the U.S., spent the past two decades pouring wealth from Western economies into China's. That came in the form of moving manufacturing from Western factories to Chinese factories and from engaging in free trade (i.e. enormous balance of trade deficits) that left China awash in foreign currency, including something close to a trillion dollars in US cash.

We spent two decades bleeding our wealth away to grow China's economy, wealth we were too greedy and short-sighted to invest in our own economies. Now while the world is in a recessionary slow-down, China has all that money to go on a distress-sale shopping spree. From the G&M Report on Business:

Flush with cash at a time when most countries and corporations are struggling to gain access capital, the Asian economic superpower has spent nearly $60-billion (U.S.) in less than a week in a series of deals that will secure a long-term supply of iron ore, copper, zinc and oil.

Desperate for financing amid stalled capital markets and investor abandonment of the sector, resource producers are turning to China for a commodity it has in spades: ready money.

China is the world's largest consumer of commodities. While the country's economy has slowed due to the global economic downturn, its gross domestic product is still expected to increase by about 6 per cent this year compared with 9 per cent in 2008 and 13 per cent in 2007. A $586-billion (U.S.) stimulus package will spur infrastructure spending, which is expected to underpin commodities demand.

The country's voracious need for metals helped push prices for iron ore, coal and copper to record highs last year. The global financial crisis has now cut prices for most metals in half; China is throwing its cash around to secure a cheap supply.

It's those last two words, "cheap supply," that will come back to haunt us. By the time our own economies have recovered sufficiently to restore demand for energy and metals, prices for those commodities will have recovered - except for our main competitor, China, which will have locked in both supply and price at recessionary values. It was one thing when we were all competing for resources at the same price. Now, thanks to our investor-classes and their greed, China will have the one remaining strategic advantage it didn't already possess.

Their Head of State Invites Our Head of State for a Visit

President Obama has invited Canada's head of state for a visit to Washington. No, not Stephen Harper and of course not Michael Ignatieff. No, there was just the one invite and it went to Governor-General Michaelle Jean.

Now we all know Canada's head of state is Queen Elizabeth and that GG Jean is simply the Queen's rep to the True North but she's good enough for Obama and, it seems, a damned sight better than that stiff from Calgary.

GM's Back! And It Brought the Begging Bowl Again.

General Motors of Canada (wink, wink) wants more money, more federal and provincial money.

Way, way back, in December, GM told Ottawa and Queen's Park that it needed $3.4-billion. Now, two months later, it's tweaked that figure up to somewhere between six and seven billion.

Federal industry minister, Tony Clement, took it all in stride:

"I would have to say this is a good first step. We are moving as quickly as possible in these negotiations, keeping in mind that any measures must be in the best interests of Canadian taxpayers and the Canadian economy."

What goes unmentioned is the "pay up or the kid gets it" factor in these negotiations. GM is holding a gun to its head and another gun to Ottawa's head. If it doesn't get bailed out it pulls the pin, sending a tsunami of unemployment sweeping through southern Ontario with aftershocks hitting much of the rest of the country.

The problem.

General Motors holds most of the cards. It appears to be essentially insolvent at the moment, unable to continue operating on its own revenues. No one should be surprised at this. The Big Three were on the ropes when the economy was still buoyant. There was no way they could withstand a recession.

Sometimes the debtor has the upper hand. Remember that old line attributed to Lord Rothschild about how when you owe the Bank of England a hundred pounds and cannot pay you have a problem but when you owe the Bank of England a million pounds and cannot pay, the Bank of England has a problem.

By its very size and the manner in which it has integrated its business into the economies of entire states and provinces, everyone gets badly hit if General Motors fails outright, if it goes out of business. Ask the guy who runs the 7-11 kitty corner to the GM factory if you don't understand.

It's very size also affords GM certain bargaining positions that, in lesser circumstances, would be offensive at best. Give us the money or the kid gets it. Give us what we want or we sink your economy. Give us what we want or we'll close our Canadian plants. These are threats you don't even have to utter. They're always on the table, and there's the problem.

If you sense an element of coercion in this negotiation, you're probably right. And it's a card that can be played again and again and again.

Who's to say that seven billion isn't just money spent to buy time? Who's to say that this bailout will actually save General Motors from bankruptcy?

Lending money to a healthy company is one thing. Lending money to a company that by its own admission is at bankruptcy's door is something else altogether.

It strikes me that this is a gamble, a huge gamble at very poor odds. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile taking but only if there's a reasonable chance it will save General Motors. If not, we might as well let GM go now and put those billions toward something with a good prospect of returns.

Has "Son of Izzy" Screwed CanWest?

Izzy Asper built CanWest Global into a media giant, ultimately swallowing up Conrad Black's National Post.

Izzy's empire fell into the hands of son and heir, Lenny, and it now appears to be slipping through his fingers.

CanWest is in hock to the tune of $3.9-billion and the creditors are circling the wounded beast. The smell of fear must have been inescapable as Leonard Asper sought to bail the company out by flogging off assets such as television stations. Apparently Asper's price wasn't right because there've been no takers.

CanWest is now reportedly down to its last $20-million in credit and has until next Friday to find a miracle. The Globe & Mail reports that the creditors have the Aspers in their crosshairs:

"Options on the table include some sort of recapitalization that would see creditors take a haircut, and the Asper family squeezed out," said one banker working on CanWest. "Leonard Asper … is still focused on trying to find some sort of solution that salvages something for the family."

Via con Dios, Lenny!

The Myth of Carbon Sequestration

Carbon capture and carbon sequestration are often heralded as the key to "clean energy." If you can just take the carbon emitted from producing energy - from coal fired plants or from, he he, the Tar Sands, problem solved, right?

Wrong.

It's not as though you point to a hole in the ground and the carbon jumps at the chance to bury itself safely in some deep cavern. No, there's an elaborate process involved. First you have to capture the carbon emissions. Then you have to find a means to compress and transport them. Finally you have to either find or create a place big enough and safe enough to store the stuff, under pressure, and make sure it doesn't leak back to the surface (it's poisonous, really deadly) in perpetuity.

Now we hear a lot of talk about carbon sequestration but we've heard a lot of talk about a manned mission to Mars too. Both are theoretically feasible but neither has been proven to be possible, much less viable.

Viable. Now there's a word that deserves some attention. Viable as in effective. Viable as in affordable. Viable as in politically and socially acceptable.

A while back the Toronto Star used the Freedom of Information Act to get its hands on an Environment Canada report that found sequestration used an awful lot of energy and produced about the same amount of carbon emissions as the carbon emissions it sequestered.

So, we're supposed to pay big bucks and expose folks living nearby to lethal risks on a process that creates as much carbon as it purports to capture? Wait, I know. All we need to do is to set up a second carbon capture operation to capture the carbon emissions of our first carbon capture operation. Then again, maybe that's not such a great idea after all.

http://www.thestar.com/article/574514

So it seems that sequestration is essentially carbon neutral but it produces all manner of other contaminants, uses an awful lot of fossil fuel, wastes a lot of resources and exposes anyone in the vicinity to lethal risks.

Same War, Different Generals, Different Stories

Brigadier Jon Vance officially took command of Canadian forces in Afghanistan today.

Vance says we're winning. From CBC News:

He also said he believes the Taliban and other militants are losing influence in Afghanistan.

"I believe the insurgency is increasingly marginalized, and Afghans will be able to assume greater freedom from the scourge of insurgent activity and follow the destiny they have chosen," he said.

Vance replaces outgoing Brigadier Denis Thompson who, after nine months in charge, gave The Globe & Mail a somewhat different take:

Canadian military surveys have found that average people in Kandahar now feel dramatically less safe than they did 18 months ago, the top commander for the province says.

'People's sense of security has absolutely plummeted,' Brigadier-General Denis Thompson said, offering an unusually thoughtful view of the battlefield as he sat down with reporters at the end his nine-month tour of duty.

Thompson did point out that surveys consistently show that the Afghan people have greater support for the government than the Taliban. I wonder how many, when asked of their allegiance, would say whatever they thought the questioner wanted to hear?

Racism Lives in New York

The Big Apple's right-wing, pro-Zionist rag, the New York Post, has gone over the top with the cartoon shown above published yesterday. This is inexcusable. It has nothing to do with free speech. It's depicting their president as a dead chimp. The Post deserves whatever it gets and it's got a lot coming.

The paper is owned by Rupert Murdoch. No word yet on his reaction.

Afghanistan - NATO Shrugs

The next two years will reveal just how much damage George W. Bush inflicted upon America's war in Afghanistan.

I say "America's war" because that's rapidly becoming a reality as some NATO nations (the Netherlands and Canada) prepare to pack up with no other member states coming forward to take their place.

The NATO nations' increasing resistance to fighting in Afghanistan is evident in America's alternate campaign to get NATO members to contribute civilian support in lieu of combat forces. That, friends, is tantamount to begging.

Oh Britain will soldier on alongside America, even throw a few more troops into the battle, all part of that trans-Atlantic solidarity thing, but it won't be enough to make the sort of difference needed to turn the tide in Afghanistan.

As for Canada, our chief of defence staff warned last week that the Canadian military is exhausted and will need to stand down at least two years after the 2011 cut off to recover. Buried inside that statement are a number of questions. When did NDHQ know the army was getting worn out and when did it tell Harper? Was Harper asked to authorize an expansion of the army to furnish fresh troops for combat in Afghanistan and, if so, did he refuse? Is our military really burnt out as we're told or is that a convenient cover for insisting on leaving in 2011?

One way or the other, NATO's refusal to answer Obama's call is plain enough. The key member states showed up to win but Bush kept his first and second strings in Iraq instead. The NATO forces were left to babysit a deteriorating war. Now they've had enough.

Ironically, it's Rumsfeld's "new Europe" that ought to be stepping up to show their appreciation for being admitted to NATO. Yet, with a couple of small exceptions, they're nowhere to be seen. They must think we're real idiots.

I do sympathize with Obama. It's like taking over as coach in the fourth quarter of a losing game with just a few minutes left on the clock and looking at a demoralized bench. Pretty hard to turn that around.

Don't Blame Me, It's Bush's Fault - Harper

Isn't this the same guy who described the fight against global warming as a "socialist plot?"

That, it seems, was then, this is now. There's a new sheriff in town, a guy named Obama, and Canada's prime minister is busy trying to re-arrange his spots on climate change.

According to Stephen Harper Canada dragged its heels but only because Bush held us back:

“In Canada, we've been wrestling for the last decade or so with our desire to try to have a regime, a regulatory regime, that would diminish our own carbon emissions. But we've been trying to do so in an integrated economy when the United States has not been willing to do so,” Mr. Harper said in an interview to be broadcast in two parts yesterday and today.

“I think quite frankly the fact that we have a President and an administration that wants to see some kind of regulation on this is an encouragement.”

What's the term I'm looking for? Oh yeah, Bald-Faced Liar. Or is "weasel" better?

The Undiplomatic Diplomat

"Why should I have this guy running down the country? Who the fuck

is he? How the hell are they doing?"

That hardly sounds like diplomatic language, does it? But that's what Britain's "business secretary" Peter Mandelson said in front of reporters at a diplomatic reception in New York last night.

Mandelson was plainly infuriated at remarks made by Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz who told CNBC that his company was most worried about its stores in Britain. From The Guardian:

Angered at remarks by the company's chairman, Howard Schultz – who said the UK was in an economic "spiral" with "very, very poor" consumer confidence – Mandelson accused him of spreading unnecessary misery and speaking out of turn.

...Earlier in the day, Schultz singled out Britain as a source of anxiety for Starbucks – which has stores in 49 countries – during an interview with the CNBC television channel.

"The place that concerns us the most is western Europe, and specifically the UK," he said. "The UK is in a spiral."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/18/peter-mandelson-starbucks

What's Warming the Arctic?

Scientists are beginning to get a clearer picture of why temperatures in the Arctic are increasing so much faster than in the rest of the planet.

It's really a combination of three things. The loss of the ice cap reduces the reflection of sunlight and increases light absorption into the darker sea. The associated effect is a warming of the Arctic sea water which warms the surface air. The warming sea water also increases evaporation which generates the powerful greenhouse gas - water vapour.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/j2832332508u0156/

When Optimism Outpaces Realism

The Obama administration has introduced a plan to ease home foreclosures. The feds will put up $75-billion to fund subsidies for mortgage lenders who reduce interest rates for financially troubled homeowners.

That plan is expected to work in conjunction with a measure moving through Congress that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of mortgages.

Both measures are well-intentioned but carry practical pitfalls. The real estate markets in most of the United States are in decline, in some cases free fall. House values next year could wind up a lot lower than values this year and that could go on for some time.

If I'm stuck holding a $500,000 mortgage on a $600,000 house that's now worth $400,000, I might want to foreclose and take my loss now rather than wait until the house value plummets to $300,000 or $250,000.

Measures like these are sensible if you can freeze conditions at one point in time. They're sensible once the market has truly bottomed. But they could have unintended repercussions when the market is in free fall.

(McClatchey puts the cost at $75-billion but The Guardian has it at $275-billion)

Better Grades Through Cutting Classes?

Strange but apparently true.

A recent study found that students who watched a podcast of a lecture scored significantly higher than those who attended the lecture. From New Scientist:

Podcasted lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.

"It isn't so much that you have a podcast, it's what you do with it," she says.

To find out how much students really can learn from podcast lectures alone - mimicking a missed class - McKinney's team presented 64 students with a single lecture on visual perception, from an introductory psychology course.

Half of the students attended the class in person and received a printout of the slides from the lecture. The other 32 downloaded a podcast that included audio from the same lecture synchronised with video of the slides. These students also received a printed handout of the material.

The researchers told the students they would be tested on the material in a week, and they also asked students to hold onto their class notes.

Students who downloaded the podcast averaged a C (71 out of 100) on the test - substantially better than those who attended the lecture, who on average mustered only a D (62).

But that difference vanished among students who watched the podcast but did not take notes.Students who listened to the podcast one or more times and took notes had an average score of 77, McKinney says.

I'm not sure that I buy this - at least not entirely. It rules out participating in in-class discussions, there's no chance to ask a question or seek clarification. And besides, who wants to have their kids home all day playing with I-Pods?

Listen Up Mike

Michael Ignatieff is devoted to the Athabasca Tar Sands. Before he gets himself any deeper, he'd better listen to a few people like David Schindler; Killam Memorial Professor of Ecology at the University of Alberta.

Listen to this short interview with Schindler. It should open your eyes to the devastation facing Alberta.

http://www.water.ca/listenaod.asp?artid=324

It's not about some imaginary Liberal war with Alberta and Saskatchewan. It's about doing what's right - for Canada, for Alberta and for Sasktatchewan. It's about not grasping for simplistic - yet wholly unproven - solutions like carbon sequestration. That's sophistry.

Today I e-mailed Michael Ignatieff, including the link above. I've asked him to at least listen to people like Professor Schindler, read their research and findings, before lashing the Liberal Party of Canada to the Tar Sands.

If I get a response, I'll post it.

And It's One, Two, Three, What Are We Fightin' For?

Hang on boys, Obama's sending another 17,000 soldiers to whup some Pashtun ass.

And that's exactly what they'll do. They'll whup some Pashtun ass - some of it insurgent, some of it civilian. And probably some Pakistani and Uzbek and Chechen ass too.

What they won't do is win the war in Afghanistan.

They will drag it out a bit more. They will ensure that more blood flows. They will draw Islamists from throughout the Muslim world to Afghanistan. It's the difference between a bowl of soup and a pot of soup but it's still soup.

What are we fightin' for? We lost the script on that one at least as early as 2002, not later than 2003.

At first it was all about revenge, getting even for the Twin Towers attacks. That took the form of destroying al-Qaeda and routing the Taliban. The Taliban just sort of got thrown in with al-Qaeda even though they obviously had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Oh well, they blew up those ancient monuments, didn't they? And they weren't going to give us the rights to run a pipeline across their country, weren't they?

We dressed it up for the folks at home, telling them we were going to bring stability and democracy and human rights to all the people of that backward, feudal society and we were going to help our pals, the warlords, do just that. Wait a minute. Warlords? Yup. Peace and stability and democracy and human rights and WARLORDS! Hmmm, which one does not belong with the others?

We didn't figure out that, if you want peace and stability and democracy and human rights, you don't hand a country over to the control of people who have no time for peace and stability and democracy and human rights.

America, as it turns out, didn't have much time for those things either. It had other plans - Iraq. So they asked NATO to come in and babysit their war while they went out to Baghdad for a pack of smokes. And we went - the French and Germans in the north, the Brits and Canadians and Dutch in the southern badlands.

We went there with "the mission" and it was the same nonsense about bringing peace and stability and democracy and human rights to all Afghans. Not only did we take on "the mission" but we extended it, twice, even as we kept falling further and further behind on our stated goals.

As time went on we couldn't keep chanting "the mission, the mission" with a straight face. Even "Support the Troops" wore thin. So, one by one, we began shedding unattainable objectives.

First went "peace." It was becoming clear that a country in name only, riven with tribalism and warlordism just wasn't a great candidate for peace.

Next we ditched "democracy." Oh sure, the Afghans had an election and everything but, it being a feudal warlord society, they tended to elect the warlord class. A clue to that is in the legislature's only real accomplishment - granting legislators amnesty for all the atrocities they committed during their civil war with the Taliban. Neat trick, huh?

You can't bring democracy to a place like Afghanistan without reformers and it didn't take long to realize that reformers had a very short shelf-life in Afghanistan. If the insurgents didn't kill them, the other side would. That's because the Afghan government quickly transformed into a criminal enterprise. Criminal enterprises don't embrace democracy. They're not big on accountability or transparency (then again, neither is our Furious Leader).

Human rights? Well you see the thing there is that human rights are only as good as the society that supports and enforces them. It all goes back to that democracy business.

So, look how we've lightened "the mission" already? We've shorn away peace and democracy and human rights. We've got it pared down to the bone - to "stability." Welcome to Afghanistan version 4.0.

Stability. It's the one thing that everyone in Afghanistan really wants, the one thing that everyone is willing to die for. You see, the Kabul government wants stability, theirs. The warlords want stability, theirs. The Taliban want stability, theirs. Stability = Control.

That's what we want now. Somebody in control, somebody who's pro-us. Acceptable candidates merely need be anti-Islamist. That's pretty much all we ask.

But, wait! We're not going to get stability either. The toxic cocktail of warlordism combined with tribalism rules out stability. This is a country riddled with incredibly vicious, power-hungry thugs and a dandy matching set of power vacuums. The whole place is like a bag of turf wars waiting to break out. Sure, the insurgency is the biggest one. But it's not the only one.

So we're back to the original target of peace - or at least destroying the Taliban or at least holding the Talibs at bay. The idea seems to be to train more Afghan soldiers. We've got about 72,000 more or less in uniform right now and, if we really committed to it, we could train that number again within a year. Easy. Load'em on airplanes. Fly them to places like Wainright, Alberta or Fort Bragg, North Carolina, train them up and fly them home. Hand the president the keys to his new divisions and get the hell out.

Tory and Grit leaders tell us they still "support the mission" but they never tell us what that means. We've had two debates on "the mission" when parliament voted to extend Canada's committment to Afghanistan. Curiously, on both occasions our MPs did their level best to avoid actually discussing the mission.

Michael Ignatieff says "we're lost in Afghanistan." Memo to Mike - we're not lost, you're lost. If you're not lost, Mr. Ignatieff, tell us what the mission is, the one you claim you support.

We know where Jack stands on this. Steve? He's trying to put as much distance between himself and Afghanistan as possible. We won't get any answers out of him. So what's your position Michael Ignatieff?

What's Your "Water Footprint?"

If you're like me and most other Canadians, you probably use - and waste - a lot of water. Coming from the Wet Coast, it's sometimes hard to see water use as a pressing issue. Yet even some parts of Canada experience drought.

The United States may be slow on 'getting' global warming but it's coming to grips with its looming fresh water problem. Even the Wall Street Journal gets it:

Two-thirds of the world's population is projected to face water scarcity by 2025, according to the United Nations. In the U.S., water managers in 36 states anticipate shortages by 2013, a General Accounting Office report shows. Last year, Georgia lawmakers tried, unsuccessfully, to move the state's border north so that Georgia could claim part of the Tennessee River.

Lately, water footprinting has gained currency among corporations seeking to protect their agricultural supply chains and factory operations from future water scarcity. Next week, representatives from about 100 companies, including Nike Inc., PepsiCo Inc., Levi Strauss & Co. and Starbucks Corp., will gather in Miami for a summit on calculating and shrinking corporate water footprints. In December, a coalition of scientists, companies and development agencies launched the Water Footprint Network, an international nonprofit that helps corporations and governments measure and manage their water footprints.
The water-footprint concept was coined in 2002 by Arjen Hoekstra, a professor of water management at University of Twente in the Netherlands. Using data from the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization, Mr. Hoekstra and other researchers gauged the water content that went into the making of various products and applied those statistics to people's consumption patterns to get a rough water footprint for average individuals and nations as a whole.

...A cup of coffee takes roughly 35 gallons. A cotton T-shirt typically takes some 700 gallons of water to produce. A typical hamburger takes 630 gallons of water to produce -- more than three times the amount the average American uses every day for drinking, bathing, washing dishes and flushing toilets. The bulk is used to grow grain for cattle feed.

A large water footprint isn't necessarily bad if the product is made in an area where water is plentiful and well managed. Almost all of the water that goes into crops and food production is returned to the water cycle, either as evaporated water or in the form of polluted runoff. But it is temporarily unavailable for other uses, and may not be restored to the same aquifer, lake or river if it comes back as rainfall in another region. That poses problems for water-scarce areas.

The report notes that industries are beginning to take water supply as a critical consideration in relocation of factories.

For many food and beverage companies, calculating water use isn't just an attempt at an eco-friendly makeover. It's a matter of self-interest. A Coca-Cola bottling plant was shuttered in south India in 2004 after residents claimed the company was depleting and polluting local water supplies. SABMiller PLC -- whose brands include Miller Lite, Peroni and Pilsner Urquell -- invested in water-purification technology for its factory in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where the overuse of groundwater by various industries has caused fresh aquifers to grow increasingly salty. The city's drinking water supply is sufficient for only a third of its three million residents, water aid groups say.

Day by day we're discovering that, for this century at least, water will be the new oil.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123483638138996305.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

The Pundit Predicament

Ever since the invention of moveable type we've had to co-exist with pundits and punditry (sort of like bandits and banditry I suppose). But it was the invention of television that really brought the pundits into our homes, into our faces.

An article in Newsweek explores pundits and why they're so often simply dead wrong:

...Knowing who's likely to be right comes down to something psychologists call cognitive style, and with that in mind Philip Tetlock, a research psychologist at Stanford University, would like to introduce you to foxes and hedgehogs.

At first, Tetlock's ongoing study of 82,361 predictions by 284 pundits (most but not all of them American) came up empty. He initially looked at whether accuracy was related to having a Ph.D., being an economist or political scientist rather than a blowhard journalist, having policy experience or access to classified information, or being a realist or neocon, liberal or conservative. The answers were no on all counts. The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit's accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock's first clue. The media's preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced. They are, in short, hedgehogs, not foxes.

That bestiary comes from the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who in 1953 argued that hedgehogs "know one big thing." They apply that one thing (for instance, that ethnicity and language are primal; ergo, any country that contains many ethnic groups will break up) everywhere, express supreme confidence in their forecasts, dismiss opposing views and are drawn to top-down arguments deduced from that Big Idea. Foxes, in contrast, "know many things," as Berlin put it. They consider competing views, make bottom-up inductive arguments from an array of facts and doubt the power of Big Ideas. "The hedgehog-fox dimension did what none of the other traits did," says Tetlock, who described the study in his 2005 book "Expert Political Judgment": "distinguish more accurate forecasters from less accurate ones" in both politics (will Iraq break up?) and economics (whither unemployment?).entative and balanced. They are, in short, hedgehogs, not foxes.

In short, what experts think matters far less than how they think, or their cognitive style. At one extreme, hedgehogs seek certainty and closure, dismiss information that undercuts their preconceptions and embrace evidence that reinforces them, in what is called "belief defense and bolstering." At the other extreme, foxes are cognitively flexible, modest and open to self-criticism.

Here's how to identify fauna: foxes pepper their speech and writing with "however" and "but," recognizing uncertainty in the face of competing forces. Hedgehogs suffer from no such doubts, which (combined with their adherence to a Big Idea) makes them especially prone to overpredict change: the House of Saud will fall, the European Monetary Union will collapse, Canada will disintegrate like Yugoslavia—in the last case, from the primal force of ethnicity.

The media, of course, eat this up. Bold, decisive assertions make better sound bites; bombast, swagger and certainty make for better TV. As a result, the marketplace of ideas does not punish poor punditry. Few of us even remember who got what wrong.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/184815

Time To Bite The Bullet - Livni

When it comes to what is to be done with the Palestinians, the schism between Israeli politicians is of Biblical proportions.

Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni wants a settlement, on Israel's terms, before a less favourable settlement is imposed by the international community. Likud Party leader Netanyahu favours continuing the occupation indefinitely and expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank.

From the Associated Press:

[Livni] told a convention of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Organisations, "we need to give up half of the Land of Israel," using a term that refers to biblical borders that include today's Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

She explained that such a withdrawal would be for the good of Israel, to maintain it as a Jewish state.

Livni told the US Jewish leaders Israel must take the initiative and come forward with its own peace plan to head off international programs. "Any plan put on the table will not be in our interest," she said.

The Donald Cashes In His Chips

Donald Trump has parted company with his flagship casinos, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort and Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, paving the way for them to be placed into bankruptcy.

Trump Entertainment Resorts is no stranger to US bankruptcy laws. This'll be the company's third dip into the fiscal car wash. In fact, TER just emerged from bankruptcy in 2005.

Trump stepped down as CEO on Friday after failing to dissuade RET's bondholders from demanding the company be placed into bankruptcy.

"Almost every company is in serious financial trouble," he added. "Despite this, I will be watching closely and at some point in the future, I hope to return."

I Actually Agree with Peter MacKay - It's Time for Straight Talk on NATO

Peter MacKay had a stopover in London yesterday en route to a NATO kegger in Krakow, Poland later this week.

MacKay took time out to speak boldly to a gathering of members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, commonly known as "Chatham House." MacKay pulled no punches, "We need to have a frank discussion about the future of NATO."

I'll go that far with Pete. We do need to have that discussion. Except I'd bet the last thing MacKay really wants is to spark a frank discussion about just what in hell NATO's doing in Afghanistan anyway.

"The U.S. re-emphasis on the mission in Afghanistan – with the commitment of more troops, more development, more diplomacy – has brought a predictable sigh of relief from some around the alliance," he said, suggesting some saw it as a chance to sit back and say, "It's okay, the Americans will handle it."

"As the United States says, its contribution is designed to reinforce, not to replace. ... We all need to maintain our collective effort so that we maximize the official contribution from the United States."

"If NATO cannot deter or defeat the real physical threat facing alliance members, and indeed contribute to the building of security for the larger international community, then we have to ask ourselves, what is NATO for?"

Pete's got a point but it's a fairly narrow one that dodges a lot of facts, questions and problems. What is the "real, physical threat facing alliance members" from the Taliban? And, if we are facing a real threat, why have we been playing at 'counterinsurgency on a shoestring' for the past eight years? Why has his Tory government been running around with its collective thumb up its collective ass for the past three? And if this threat is so dire, why are we supposedly leaving Afghanistan in 2011? And why do we think we can defeat Islamist extremism in Afghanistan rather than on the streets of Cairo and Riyadh and Islamabad?

Last year Chatham House came out with a very clear, hard-headed analysis of the fatal flaws that doom our efforts in Afghanistan, particularly the nexus of the corrupt central government, the insurgency and the narcotics industry. Chatham House concluded all three are directly connected, that they form a "nexus." With that outlook, Peter MacKay must've sounded like a sophomoric cheerleader.

Progress in Afghanistan - Civilian Casualties Up 40%

Killing wayward civilians seems to have turned into a growth industry in Afghanistan. UN figures show that civilian deaths from the Afghan war shot up 40% last year although Western forces lagged slightly, increasing their take by a mere 30%.

The militants are responsible for about 55% of the civilian deaths overall.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/17/afghan-civilian-deaths-un

Delusional Wealth

The trouble with wealth is that it's so often tied to debt and yet one thing that history repeatedly shows us is that wealth is notional while debt is as solid as a brick of gold.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman describes America's decade of delusional wealth which some of us know as the Bush Era:

until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. And if the belief of many Americans that they could count on capital gains forever sounds naïve, it’s worth remembering just how many influential voices — notably in right-leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and National Review — promoted that belief, and ridiculed those who worried about low savings and high levels of debt.

Then reality struck, and it turned out that the worriers had been right all along. The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real.

So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize even now. And I’m not just talking about the dwindling band of forecasters who still insist that the economy will snap back any day now.

...as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out in the 1930s, the things people and companies do when they realize they have too much debt tend to be self-defeating when everyone tries to do them at the same time. Attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump.

...If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.

Unfortunately we can't muster a peace time equivalent of the state of emergency we all accept in time of war. Too bad.

Recession? Guess Who's Doing Just Fine? Wal-Mart, Of Course

They drove manufacturing jobs in droves to China in the good times and we shopped there for "everyday low prices," shopped ourselves straight out of our own jobs. And now that the good times seem to have vanished overnight, we're still shopping there because it's all we can afford.

Welcome to the world of Wal-Mart.

While still feeling the pinch just a tad, Wal-Mart exceeded analysts' forecasts for fourth-quarter profits. And, yes, sales were up too - $109 billion up from $107-billion for the same quarter in 2007.

Chrysler and GM may be headed the way of the dodo bird but Wal-Mart seems immune to the downturn.

Just Because

None other, CCR

Israel's Real Arab Problem

It isn't Hezbollah. It isn't Hamas. According to Fareed Zakaria new, right-wing Knesset is more concerned about the Arabs in their midst, the Israeli Arabs:

...while most commentators focus on the future of the peace process and the two-state solution, a deeper and more existential question is growing within the heart of Israel.

It's a question posed by the election's biggest winner: Avigdor Lieberman. His Yisrael Beytenu party won 15 seats, placing third but gaining enormous swing power in the Israeli system. Whether or not the new government includes him, Lieberman and his issues have moved to center stage. As fiercely as he denounces the Palestinian militants of Hamas and Hizbullah, his No. 1 target is Israel's Arab minority, which he has called a worse threat than Hamas. He has proposed the effective expulsion of several hundred thousand Arab citizens by unilaterally redesignating some northern Israeli towns as parts of the Palestinian West Bank. Another group of several hundred thousand could expect to be stripped of citizenship for failing to meet requirements such as loyalty oaths or mandatory military service (from which Israel's Arabs are currently exempt). The New Republic's Martin Peretz, a passionate Zionist and critic of the peace movement, calls Lieberman a "neo-fascist ... a certified gangster ... the Israeli equivalent of [Austria's] Jörg Haider." No liberal democracy I know of since World War II has disenfranchised or expelled its own citizens.

...The antipathy is mutual. "The people who stayed here did not immigrate here, this is our country," declared Azmi Bishara, a former Arab member of the Knesset, after being charged with sedition for his expressions of support for Hizbullah. "That is why you cannot deal with us on issues of loyalty. This state came here and was enforced on the ruins of my nation. I accepted citizenship to be able to live here, and I will not do anything, security-wise, against the state. I am not going to conspire against the state, but you cannot ask me every day if I am loyal to the state. Citizenship demands from me to be loyal to the law, but not to the values or ideologies of the state. It is enough to be loyal to the law."

..As extreme as it may sound, Lieberman's call to disown them seems to have resonated with many of his fellow Israelis. Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that Israel's Arabs constitute a demographic time bomb. He calls it unacceptable. Benny Morris, the once dovish historian who chronicled the forced expulsion of most Palestinians from the Jewish state in 1948, has turned to arguing that Israel needs to protect itself from the Arabs now living within its borders. "They are a potential fifth column," he warned five years ago in an interview with Haaretz. "In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state ... If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified." It's a dangerous spiral: the worse the distrust gets, the less loyalty Israel's Arabs feel toward their country--and vice versa. Last week's election has brought the issue into the open. Its resolution will define the future of Israel as a country, as a Jewish state, and as a democracy.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/fareed_zakaria/2009/02/israels_existential_dilemma.html

The End of the Road in Afghanistan

On the 20th anniversary of the expulsion of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the United States and NATO forces are staring into the same abyss.

Jonathan Landay of McClatchey Newspapers has seen it all before when he was one of those reporters who used to sneak across from Pakistan to cover the Mujahids' war against the Soviet occupation.

Some Afghan experts are worried that the United States and its NATO allies are making some of the same mistakes that helped the Taliban's forerunners defeat the Soviet Union after a decade-long occupation that bled the Kremlin treasury, demoralized Moscow's military and contributed to the Soviet Union's collapse.

Among the mistakes, these experts said, are relying too heavily on military force, inflicting too many civilian casualties, concentrating too much power in Kabul and tolerating pervasive government corruption.

Violence and ethnic tensions will worsen, they warned, absent a rapid correction in U.S.-led strategy that improves coordination between military operations and stepped up reconstruction, job-training and local good governance programs.

"We have not justified democracy. We have not justified human rights. We have not justified liberalism," said Azziz Royesh, a political activist, educator and former anti- Soviet guerrilla. "Afghans don't like the Taliban. But we haven't shown them a better option."

"I see a time when again there could be thousands of unorganized insurgencies around the country," he cautioned. "The foreigners are the ones who will be targeted. If we don't bring change here, these kinds of incidents will add to the Taliban insurgency."

...Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded in a Washington Post opinion article Saturday that the U.S., which is planning to almost double the 32,000-strong U.S. force in Afghanistan over the next 18 months, will lose the war if it can't win Afghans' trust.
"We can send more troops. We can kill or capture all the Taliban and al Qaida leaders we can find — and we should. We can clear out havens and shut down the narcotics trade. But until we prove capable, with the help of our allies and Afghan partners, of safeguarding the population, we will never know a peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan," Mullen wrote. "Lose the people's trust, and we lose the war."

A senior official of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, who requested anonymity in order to speak more candidly, said that many allied governments would find it harder to keep troops in Afghanistan "if we don't see some sort of rise in (Afghans') perception of how things are going . . . within the next 12 months."

I correspond with Landay occasionally and I know he doesn't see much chance of our Afghan war turning out at all well. Then again, we were never fighting to win in any case. Admiral Mullen's comments speak volumes especially when he says that until we're able to "safeguard" the population we'll never get anywhere.

The trouble is, he's saying this in 2009. It needed to be said - and acted upon - in 2002, 2003 latest. This was not only an obligation but an opportunity to secure the Afghan population while the Taliban and al-Qaeda were in disarray, before they could regroup, before they could return, before they could set up their own power structure in most of Afghanistan.

As I've written many times, our side very, very rarely wins this sort of war. But our side never wins this type of war when we ignore the cardinal tenets of counterinsurgency warfare. And in Afghanistan we've ignored them all.

The first and foremost of these tenets is that you "go big or go home." You flood the country with troops, as many as are needed to secure the civilian population and perform your other objectives. This is the most labour-intensive form of warfare bar none. And what did we do? We went there on a shoestring and, eight years later, we're still operating on a shoestring.

I think this war is already lost. Following the playbook to a T, we're now in the phase where we try to avoid seeing that, where we look the other way. Do you think there might be a reason why Harper suddenly became willing to throw in the towel?

Spending for a Better Tomorrow

Just how good is Harper's recovery/stimulus plan? There's one way to measure our Furious Leader's proposals. It's Obama's Recovery and Reinvestment Act that's due to be signed into law tomorrow.

Here's a peek courtesy of the Center for American Progress:

Unprecedented investments in clean energy are a central element of the recovery plan. The bill includes $71 billion for clean energy programs—more than three times the current spending for these same programs (download the breakdown here (.xls)). H.R. 1 also adds $20 billion in clean energy tax incentives. The bill would “spark the creation of a clean-energy economy” that President Barack Obama promised during his inaugural address.

The Recovery Act intends to quickly put Americans to work undertaking the essential task of reducing our use of energy and oil, which would strengthen our economy and security. It would also boost investments in clean renewable energy generation from the wind, sun, and other clean sources.

The World Resources Institute determined that there is a significant job creation differential between traditional infrastructure investments and those focusing on clean energy initiatives. Every investment of $1 billion in clean energy programs creates nearly 5,000 more jobs than traditional infrastructure spending. These are some of the most important initiatives in the recovery package.

Under the recovery plan, the Weatherization Assistance Program would receive an additional $5 billion to install efficiency measures in low-income households. This amount could weatherize 1 million homes, and, directly and indirectly, create 375,000 jobs. Low-income families will save an average of $350 annually in reduced energy costs. .

Another clean energy program, the federal green buildings program, would receive $4.5 billion in funding from the plan. Modernization and energy efficiency upgrades of federal buildings would put people to work and save taxpayers millions of dollars a year in federal energy bills.

President Obama recently noted that efficiency for federal buildings could save taxpayers “$2 billion,” asking, “Why wouldn't we want to make that kind of investment?”

Energy efficiency and conservation grants for energy efficiency in residential and commercial buildings would gain $6.3 billion. This is in addition to a new program with the Department of Housing and Urban Development for energy efficiency retrofits of low-income housing that would receive $250 million. This funding would directly and indirectly generate over 1 million jobs, and many would be construction jobs—a sector hard hit by the recession.

The bill supplies $8.4 billion for transit projects, and an additional $8 billion for high-speed rail. There are an estimated 787 ready-to-go transit projects eligible for funds from the programs to purchase buses and equipment needed to increase public transportation and improve intermodal and transit facilities. These would also put Americans back to work to the tune of nearly 20,000 jobs for every $1 billion invested in mass transit.

There is also $20 billion in clean energy tax incentives, including a three-year extension of the Production Tax Credit for wind and other renewable energy projects. Due to the credit crunch and recession, many wind projects have had difficulty attracting investors. To address this problem, the bill “provides grants of up to 30 percent of the cost of building a new renewable energy facility to address current renewable energy credit market concerns.”

So that gives you an idea of the direction in which Obama wants to steer his nation. How does Steve Harper's bold vision stack up to Obama's?

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/02/recovery_plan_captures.html

The Curse of Nadya's Sprogs

They're almost as bad as the global warming denialists - those who adamantly deny that the world has an overpopulation crisis. The reproductive antics of Nadya Suleman has brought them out in droves.

For the record, we have an overpopulation crisis. It arrived in the mid-80s when humanity's consumption of renewable resources first exceeded our planet's ability to replenish them.

The typical response from the denialists is that, if we only managed our planet's resources better, there'd be plenty for everyone. Yes, and if my aunt had balls... well, you know.

For almost two decades we've been running an overdraft on earth's renewables. We've been eating our seed corn. Deforestation - we've been savaging our forests. Desertification - we've been working arable farmland to exhaustion, transforming it into desert. Groundwater depletion - we've been draining our aquifers as though they were truly bottomless wells (they're not). Species extinction - we've emptied large tracts of just about every ocean and sea of fish species, the poor man's main source of protein, and we just keep "fishing down the food chain." Pollution - we've been overwhelming the earth's ability to clean our air and our water.

On just about every front we're degrading or destroying our habitat in our quest to produce more to meet the demands and the needs of a relentlessly growing population.

And then there's Nadya Suleman and her fourteen babies. I'm not particularly concerned with all the social costs. Her community and her local government can deal with those. What troubles me is the idea of another fourteen American consumers.

Look at it this way. Since WWII, the US population has grown by about a hundred million - it was two and change, it's now three and change. A hundred million in a planet of 6.5-billion doesn't sound like all that much, does it? Well it begins to sound like a lot when you compare resource consumption on a national basis. For example, the average American consumes roughly ten times more resources than the average Indian. Suddenly that extra hundred million Americans places the equivalent pressure on Mother Earth of a billion Indians and do we really need another billion Indians? Just ask an Indian.

There's one immutable truth about our planet. At the end of the day it wins, not us. We can be as rapacious as we want but we can't make earth renew its bountiful resources any faster.

And we used to make fun of lemmings.

Dead Flowers

Just because...

Is the IPCC Slowing the Fight Against Global Warming?

The Achilles' Heel of the International Panel on Climate Change reports is the fact they're consensus-based. That means representatives from countries that want to drag their heels on slashing greenhouse gas emissions can withhold their approval until the reports finally emerge seriously watered down.

That the reports are unduly optimistic has been borne out by the number of IPCC forecasts which have turned out to be understated. Again and again we've seen that the forecast speed of change has been understated, the degree of change is routinely understated and the frequency of change effects is regularly understated.

Yet governments and international bodies tend to treat the reports as "worst case" scenarios, impacts that could possibly occur at some time in the distant future, and they act accordingly. To accept them as "best case" scenarios would trigger a broad gamut of remedial and adaptive measures that we're just not seeing.

This weekend, Dr Chris Field, co-chair of the UN's IPCC and director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institute, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago at the weekend that the IPCC's last report on climate change in 2007 had substantially underestimated the severity of global warming over the rest of the century. From The Guardian:

The report concluded that the Earth's temperature is likely to rise between 1.1C and 6.4C by 2100, depending on future global carbon emissions. "We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," Field said. The next report, which Field will oversee, is due in 2014 and will now include future scenarios where global warming is far more serious than previous reports have suggested, he said.

Field warned the assembled scientists that the tropical rainforests could soon turn into tinderboxes.

"Tropical forests are essentially inflammable. You couldn't get a fire to burn there if you tried. But if they dry out just a little, the result can be very large and destructive wildfires. It is increasingly clear that as you produce a warmer world, lots of forested areas that had been acting as carbon sinks could be converted to carbon sources," he said. The result could lead to runaway warming.
Field's warning was echoed by French scientists, who said the IPCC's estimate that sea levels would rise around 40cm by 2100 was likely to be a best case scenario.

The top IPCC officials tell us their reports are understated. Their warnings keep getting proven by the pace, degree and frequency of observed change. Why then do our leaders treat the IPCC reports as realistic and reliable? I'm sure it's not intentional, but the IPCC may just be enabling an awful lot of heel-dragging that will exact a severe price as this century progresses.

Earth Times One Hundred Billion

Astronomers are churning the math these days over how many earth-like planets likely exist in our galaxy alone and how many of those probably have intelligent life.

BBC News reports that Dr. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science has given an estimate of up to 100-billion earth-like planets in our galaxy, many of them with life forms:

"Not only are they probably habitable but they probably are also going to be inhabited," Dr Boss told BBC News. "But I think that most likely the nearby 'Earths' are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago." That means bacterial lifeforms.

Dr Boss estimates that Nasa's Kepler mission, due for launch in March, should begin finding some of these Earth-like planets within the next few years.

Earlier this month, a study by University of Edinburgh researcher Duncan Forgan was published in the International Journal of Astrobiology estiimating how many of these earth-like planets in our galaxy are likely to have intelligent life. The research indicated at least 361 and possibly up to 38,000.

In his new approach, Mr Forgan simulated a galaxy much like our own, allowing it to develop solar systems based on what is now known from the existence of so-called exoplanets in our galactic neighbourhood.

These simulated alien worlds were then subjected to a number of different scenarios.

The first assumed that it is difficult for life to be formed but easy for it to evolve, and suggested there were 361 intelligent civilisations in the galaxy.

A second scenario assumed life was easily formed but struggled to develop intelligence. Under these conditions, 31,513 other forms of life were estimated to exist.

The final scenario examined the possibility that life could be passed from one planet to another during asteroid collisions - a popular theory for how life arose here on Earth.

That approach gave a result of some 37,964 intelligent civilisations in existence.

If these folks are right, I have a couple of wishes. First I hope we find them before they find us. Second I hope they don't have the basic human instinct to attack.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891132.stm?lss
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7870562.stm

Obama's Gordion Knot

It's one thing to launch a war but it's another thing altogether to politically inherit a war, especially when it's two wars, two wars that are going very badly, two unpopular wars, too wars that are bleeding your country dry. Welcome to the world of Barack Obama.

The American people have a low tolerance for defeat. It's why they tell themselves they won the War of 1812 and Korea. You probably don't fully grasp this point unless you were around to see America go through the aftermath of Viet Nam. This is a reality that ties the hands of the new American president.

Obama needs a way out but it has to be one that can give the illusion of, if not victory, at least something less than defeat. Truth be told, Iraq isn't much more of a victory today than it was when Bush appeared in front of the Mission Accomplished banner in 2003.

There's a sizzling, popping sound in Baghdad and it's the fuze burning on the Kurdish constitution which, when it reaches the powder (also known as Kirkuk), could blow Iraq into pieces. Right now everything's on hold - the unresolved Kurd versus Arab struggle; the Sunni versus Shiite conflict and the in-house Shia contest between the nationalists of Sadr and the pro-Iran moderates of Maliki.

Getting out of Iraq is going to be tricky. It's a question of optics, a problem that bedeviled Richard Nixon three decades ago. He talked about "vietnamizing" the war and literally chanted "peace with honour" like a mantra but there weren't many who believed it and those that did were crushed when Russian-made tanks rolled through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. In America, somebody had to pay and, with Nixon in the death grip of Watergate, he got tagged. Nixon resigned and the Marine helicopter took out the trash.

Obama needs to get out of Iraq quickly because that's his only chance to pin what's coming on Bush/Cheney. It's also why Petraeus is said to be working to undermine Obama's plans. The Pentagon is in "musical chairs" mode too and Petraeus doesn't want to be the general tagged with losing Iraq. Generals associated with defeat don't tend to have successful political careers afterward.

But, even if Obama does manage to slip the noose of Baghdad, he's still got Kabul to confront. The American public might tolerate watching Iraq explode but they probably aren't ready to accept a defeat in Afghanistan.

A key problem with Afghanistan is trying to figure out just what a victory would look like. It doesn't help that neo-con morons like Bush and Harper defined the objective as defeating the Taliban and establishing a secular democracy. Based on what these clowns so loudly promised us, we've already suffered a double defeat.

To weigh Obama's options it's necessary to consider where Afghanistan was on 11 September, 2001 and where it is today. In 2001, Afghanistan was still wrestling with the power vacuums left over from the ouster of the Soviet Union years earlier. The Taliban were the titular government but were caught in a stalemated civil war with what we came to call the "Northern Alliance" (there were others). It was rebellious warlords versus the Pashtun administration of the Taliban backed by Pakistan.

So stalemated was the civil war that the exhausted adversaries had lapsed into trench warfare, reduced to a daily ritual of lobbing artillery barrages at each other. That's why the CIA with just a small number of agents and the enormous firepower of the United States Air Force was able to transform the stalemate into a full-bore Taliban rout that went so quickly that America couldn't keep up with it. They literally begged (unsuccessfully) the Northern Alliance warlords to slow down, to let them catch up.

Washington really didn't have a post-Taliban game plan and, in fairness, there wasn't time to come up with one. So they grabbed a compliant Pashtun warlord named Karzai, installed him in power and left it to him to forge a suitable government.

What Washington never thought to do, and probably never had the means to accomplish, was to dismantle Afghan warlordism. To the contrary, warlords quickly demanded and achieved stations of power in the central government while others were installed as provincial governors.

The warlords are a key factor to the future of Afghanistan. They're beyond the scope of this post but it's enough to understand that they are warlords in every sense of the word - lords of war. In conjunction with Afghanistan's tribalism (Pashtun, Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara, Turkmen, etc.) their very existence creates divisions and power struggles that inevitably undermine the prospect of a viable central government in Kabul. Warlordism plus tribalism is the recipe for civil war. Complicate that with a corrupt government and a massive criminal enterprise, not to mention a growing insurgency, and the prospects of a viable, central government ruling the country begin to approach nil.

These warlords are not illiterate peasants. Many of them, such as the Pashtun warlord we know as Hamid Karzai, are university educated. They're also incredibly skilled in the dark arts of betrayal and treachery. It is said there isn't one among them who hasn't, at some point, been at war with and allied with each of the others. Some of those who purport to back Karzai today are weighing their future with the insurgency instead.

What began as an insurgency a few years back is inching ever closer to an actual civil war. The Taliban aren't just planting roadside bombs and firing on NATO convoys. They're actually establishing power structures - political, even judicial - either in place of or in parallel to the Kabul government.

This is the dilemma facing Barack Obama. Maybe just holding the Taliban to a mere insurgency, preventing a full-blown civil war, is a real victory but it won't be politically satisfying at home. The American people need to see bin Laden's head on a pole especially if they see Mullah Mohammed Omar's right beside it.

Maybe Obama can persuade the American people that there was never going to be the sort of victory promised by the Bushies in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe Obama can persuade the American people to accept that the future of Iraq and Afghanistan will be decided by the Iraqis and Afghans and, in all likelihood, through plenty of violence. Maybe Obama can persuade the American people to simply let go.

Iggy's Strange Courtship of "The West"

It's sort of like he's inviting the fat girl to the prom because her folks have a pool. He'd rather not but he just can't wait to go swimming.

Maybe Michael Ignatieff doesn't know that we Westerners read papers and that we also read between the lines but it sure sounds like he didn't get that memo.

“Sometimes we've fallen prey to the temptation to run against the West, you know, to run against Alberta, to run against the Saskatchewan energy sector. This is not the way to go.”

“The Western economy is the beating heart of Canadian progress in the future. This is where the action is. And, if this is where the action is economically, then we have to be there, too.”

So, in Iggy-speak, opposing the environmental disaster of the Athabasca Tar Sands is, "...to run against the West." I guess that twisted logic explains why Tar Sands Mike has become far less critical of the devastation than even Stephen Harper or, for that matter, Ed Stelmach.

Then, in an ass-backward way, he assures Ontario with a wink and a nod that he'd rather not pander to these damned Westerners but, "...if this is where the action is economically," he'll do whatever it takes to win votes.

Iggy seems to be a man of unconditional love. He showered unconditional love on Israel when it smashed its way through the Gaza Palestinians and now he's lavishing the same thing on the Tar Sands.

Will it work? Probably. I suspect Iggy's going to get invited to the pool but I think he's going to be restricted to the shallow end and Tuesday mornings only... and he's going to have to keep dating that girl.

Unless he stumbles badly I think Iggy can probably defeat Harper in an election but I think that's as much due to Harper's inherent weakness as Iggy's strength. Ignatieff would probably discover that he's painting himself into a "minority" corner.

And then there's Obama. I think Canadians are less troubled that Harper is to the right of the American president. He's from Calgary, he worshiped at the altar of Bush/Cheney - we get that. Iggy's the one who'll really come off looking bad. He's a Liberal and Liberal leaders aren't supposed to stand to the right of American presidents, even Democrats. That's something we notice.

Ignatieff's comments come off as simply patronizing. If we have to... well then okay. And there's one other thing he needs to understand. There's a hell of a lot more to "the West" than the Tar Sands and a lot of us think he's dead wrong on Athabasca.

Growing Older and - Dimmer

Damn! It'll be the Big Six Oh (as in "Oh How Did This Happen - To Me?") this year and, on that account alone, I'm entitled to this Pity Party.

I am a genuine Boomer, the second son of a returned Canadian soldier home from the war in Europe. Dad was a few years older than most going in and I guess he felt that left him with a tad more catching up to do once he got back. That accounts for why the "first" son and I are just 10-1/2 months apart. Then again, three and a half-years overseas separation from his stunningly beautiful, newly-wed wife might have had something to do with it I suppose.

Growing up we didn't have "everything" but I'll be damned if we didn't have an awful lot of most everything. I sometimes think parents back then - the good ones anyway - were both more loving and more indifferent to their kids. They really wanted the best for their kids because they'd spent a lot of their lives with the worst but they weren't afraid to let their kids find the best on their own too.

We made our own way to school, made our own way home too - even elementary school. We were free to play in vacant lots amid the dirt and rusty nails and - gasp - microbes. When we got bikes we received the true gift of mobility and its handmaiden, independence. We hit the streets with full force and rode, separately and together, to wherever whim took us. Moms would say "be home for dinner" and, beyond that, we were free to do pretty much as we pleased.

My kids never got that. Parents drove their kids to school and back home again at the end of the day. Parents didn't let their kids find their own amusements but, instead, enrolled them in this programme or that. For girls, backyard baton twirling gave way to leotards, funny shoes and ballet. For boys it was soccer and such, always under the watchful eye of a parent or coach.

Maybe that made all the difference for, when I was a kid, I was bursting for adventure. Long before I made it to the RCAF Aircrew Selection Centre, all my senses were not merely alive but on fire. I had the eyes of a hawk and the hearing of a rabbit and the reactions of a Swift, Swallow or Purple Martin in high mosquito season.

All of those skills or, perhaps, "gifts" paid off huge returns. In conjunction with the optimally focused training regime (essential disipline I couldn't have bought) they imbued a sense of confidence (neither arrogance nor hubris) uncommon to those my age yet remarkably common in those of the previous generation that had been through the forge. Some pretty unusual things happened, almost by understated force of will.

Maybe it was because so many things came to hand so easily that I became smitten with doing so many things, like a wayward chrome ball on a pinball table. Factory worker (many varieties), bartender, gravedigger, pilot, schoolkeeper, fundraiser, refinery worker, journalist and broadcaster and - for many years - motorcycle wanderer - before it all came to wrack and ruin and I turned into a lawyer.

Today we spend too much time trying to keep our kids safe (as in "isolated") from the perceived perils of the world, real and imagined, and far, far too much time trying to shape shift them into "doctors and lawyers and such." In this we do society and them no service. No good will come of it.

Today's "tweens" face a future far more ominous than either Hitler or Stalin presented in their grandparents' day. The world they'll inherit will be vastly more challenging than the Great Depression/World War calamity met and mastered by my Dad's generation. It will be devoid of the comfortable ease and plenty of my own.

I do not wish I could live another 60-years but I would give anything if my children and their children, each in turn, could somehow live the past 60.

Now before you heap me with your rebuke, remember I'm clearly "past it" and therefore deserving of your quiet indulgence. No matter your age, I hope this gives you something to ponder, something both pleasant and just a tad rewarding.

P.S. I guess this rant is appropriate this year. Late last summer I buried my best friend, my Dad, and tomorrow is my late mother's birthday. They really were pretty neat parents for the "Ozzie & Harriet" thing.

Obama and the Law of Gravity

For eight years the White House and Congress floated along, aimless and bloated, defying gravity. They waged unwinnable wars (on borrowed money), granted lavish tax cuts to those who needed them least (again, on borrowed money), paved the way for an insanely lethal housing bubble (inflated, once again, with borrowed money), jury-rigged the nation's financial system to exploit the cheap, borrowed money game, and generally spent borrowed money like drunken whores.

Then, just as the nest of scams collapsed under its own, massive weight, the executive branch took its leave and handed the mess to the new kid, Barack Obama.

Barack Obama, the man who promised hope and a better day, landed in a mess so bad that he can afford to deliver neither. Just how bad is the mess? That depends on who you listen to. There are the false prophets who ginned the whole thing - going back to Reagan whiz kid David Stockman and Fed boss Alan Greenspan and an enormous supporting cast with names like Abramoff, Gramm and Cheney. Or you might prefer to listen to some people that last bunch used to dismiss and ridicule - people like Nobel prize economist Joe Stiglitz or Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman - the guys who were yelling "fire" while everyone sat comfortably in their seats and chomped the popcorn. I think I'm going to give those guys a chance this time.

According to these guys, "bad" doesn't begin to describe America's fiscal catastrophe. Stiglitz has worked out that Bush's War on Terror will cost America's taxpayers about three-trillion dollars when all the hidden costs are worked in. That's a 3 followed by 12 of these - 0.

It is so bad that Barack Obama will be the first Democratic president since WWII who will have to increase the federal debt as a percentage of gross domestic product. That will put him in the club with the fiscal lunatics who prescribed his fate - Ronald Reagan, George H.W.Bush and his idiot son, W.

Obama had a plan for a trillion dollar stimulus package to help free the American economy from the muddy bottom of recession. The idea was that,if you could just get it moving upward, it would find the surface on its own. All it takes is enough lift.

Krugman has maintained a trillion isn't enough to free the hull from the sticky mud - but he said it's a start. The floaters in Congress didn't see it the same way. They trimmed over 200-billion dollars worth of lifting power from the package and, worse, demanded that tax cuts be built into a huge chunk of the remainder. Tax cuts? Don't these idiots understand that it was irresponsible tax cuts that helped drive their nation's economy straight to the bottom?

For a guy who hasn't been in the job a full month yet, it's a pretty shitty situation but there's worse to come. There's a move afoot in Congress, being spun like crazy by rightwing think tanks, to offset the stimulus spending by raiding the unpillaged remainder of American workers' Social Security fund.

You hear the word "entitlements" floated around a lot these days and it's being transformed into a dirty, socialist word. Entitlements are just the undeserving public sucking at the dry teats of government, a throwback to the nanny state.

Now the first three years of the Iraq war have proven one thing beyond any doubt. If you tell the American people a blatant lie, even a whole bag of lies, and you feed it to them often enough, from every direction - they'll believe it. Much as Americans claim to be the best informed people on the planet, they're actually the most readily misinformed, the most disinformed, the most gullible and the least skeptical folks to evolve since the end of WWII. The far right know that, they know how to exploit it and they're counting on it to convince the American working public (as in the "American people") that they're somehow undeserving of the entitlements they've already paid for in full.

Imagine if you walked up to a bank teller, pulled a gun and said "give me all the money, your bank doesn't deserve it", and the teller sheepishly handed it over with a simple "okay" and then just let you walk out of the bank to freedom.

The Social Security programme is holding on to about 2.5 trillion bucks in workers' payroll tax contributions. There ought to have many times that much on hand, invested and generating even more income except that congress stole it. For decades the American congress has been siphoning off the Social Security surpluses, popping those trillions into general revenue and issuing IOU's in exchange. This is, of course, the very same congress that allows a White House to wage enormously expensive failed wars on borrowed money while simultaneously granting tax cuts to the most advantaged few, again with borrowed money. These were the surpluses that were supposed to be amassed for the day when the Baby Boomers began to retire. Gone.

But there's still a bit of meat left on the Social Security skeleton and the right wingers are fixin' to steal that too. The way they'll do it is by making the blue and white collar classes believe that they're not actually entitled after all.

Now, imagine you go up to that same teller, this time to withdraw your savings. But the teller says you really don't deserve it and explains that the bank simply can't afford to pay it. What the teller leaves out is the fact that the bank has stolen your savings and handed it over to the rich folks. There's only one way to pull off that scam. They have to make you believe, actually believe, that you don't deserve what you've had to pay for all your working life.

Some American observers think this will be the defining and possibly the most daunting challenge for Barack Obama. Will he stand up for the American people or will he turn his head while they're raped again by their own congress in order to buy support for stimulus spending?

Gunning for Afghan Druggies? NATO Mutinies

NATO's top general, an American as always, recently ordered NATO forces in Afghanistan to target any and all drug traffickers and their facilities. Shoot to kill, kill'em all - that was the intent of the order. From Der Spiegel:

On Wednesday, SPIEGEL ONLINE reported that a dispute had emerged internally among the highest NATO commanders in Afghanistan over the circumstances in which the alliance can apply deadly force. In a classified letter, a so-called, "guidance," which is equivalent to an order on the strategic level, NATO Commander Craddock calls for an immediate offensive hunt for "all drug traffickers and narcotics facilities."

The content of the order is explosive. It is "no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective," Craddock writes in the guidance.

I searched the web sites of the G&M, Toronto Star, National Post and CBC and couldn't find a single mention of General Bantz John Craddock or his "kill'em all" order. While it seems to have caused a near-mutiny at NATO headquarters in Brussels and an uproar in some European capitals, the whole thing went unnoticed in North America.

Craddock's order has now been watered down. NATO forces are to attack traffickers and facilities but only those clearly affiliated with the Taliban. In other words, only those individuals and facilities that could be construed as legitimate military objectives are to be attacked.

The distinction may seem subtle or vague but it's not. Craddock's order would have compelled NATO soldiers to kill ordinary criminals, something tantamount to murder. It would have turned NATO commanders and soldiers acting under this order into war criminals.

It's rumoured that General Bantz John Craddock has worn out his welcome as NATO commander and will be sent packing in short order. The sooner, the better.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/934/in1.htm

Aussie Soldiers Bag One Taliban and a Whole Bunch of Afghan Civilians

Australian special forces serving under NATO command in Afghanistan took part in a night time gun battle yesterday that bagged just one Taliban fighter but killed and wounded nine or ten Afghan civilians.

In all, five children were killed, at least two children and two adults were wounded and one insurgent was also killed in the raid in Oruzgan province where Australian and Dutch troops operate.

It appears to be the standard story. The Australians were conducting a series of night time raids. Taliban fighters opened up, the Australians responded and, when the dust settled, there was mainly a bunch of dead and wounded Afghans - most of them children - to show for it.

Okay, time to refer to FM3-24, the U.S. Army's new counterinsurgency field manual, pages 47-51, chapter entitled "The Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations":

"Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction"

"Often insurgents carry out a terrorist act or guerrilla raid with the primary purpose of enticing counterinsurgents to overreact, or at least to react in a way that insurgents can exploit—for example, opening fire on a crowd or executing a clearing operation that creates more enemies than it takes off the streets. If an assessment of the effects of a course of action determines that more negative than positive effects may result, an alternative should be considered—potentially including not acting."

C'mon people, this is a no-brainer. The insurgents opened fire on you to goad you into slaughtering civilians. It worked. They won, you lost. Can you possibly be any dumber? They're already winning this war, why do you insist on making that easier for them?

Jeebus, it's right there in the book. It's in the damned book! Hell, it's right in every respected and informed book on this subject written by everyone from T.E. Lawrence, to Guevera and Giap.

You're Australians and special forces at that. You spent years learning these lessons in Vietnam. You know better.

If we're going to insist on losing this war, why don't we just leave and spare the civilians?

A Century of War Looms

The British government's former chief science advisor, Sir David King, has issued a dark warning - we're heading for a century of resource wars. From The Guardian:

The Iraq war was just the first of this century's "resource wars", in which powerful countries use force to secure valuable commodities, according to the UK government's former chief scientific adviser. Sir David King predicts that with population growth, natural resources dwindling, and seas rising due to climate change, the squeeze on the planet will lead to more conflict.

"Future historians might look back on our particular recent past and see the Iraq war as the first of the conflicts of this kind - the first of the resource wars," he told an audience of 400 in London as he delivered the British Humanist Association's Darwin Day lecture.

Implicitly rejecting the US and British governments' claim they went to war to remove Saddam Hussein and search for weapons of mass destruction, he said the US had in reality been very concerned about energy security and supply, because of its reliance on foreign oil from unstable states. "Casting its eye around the world - there was Iraq," he said.

This strategy could also be used to find and keep supplies of other essentials, such as minerals, water and fertile land, he added. "Unless we get to grips with this problem globally, we potentially are going to lead ourselves into a situation where large, powerful nations will secure resources for their own people at the expense of others."

Sir David's warning ought to be a wake up call for all resource-rich, small population nations. Hey, wait a minute!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/13/resource-wars-david-king

Blackwater No More

The infamous security firm, Blackwater, has decided a name change is in order. It's now 'Xe' - pronounced Zeee.

Zeee's president, Gary Jackson, sent a memo to employees saying that Blackwater (oops, sorry!) will no longer be seeking out security gigs but will, instead, focus on training other unemployed would-be mercenaries to shoot up civilians.

"This company will continue to provide personnel protective services for high-threat environments when needed by the US government, but its primary mission will be operating our training facilities around the world, including the flagship campus in North Carolina," Jackson said.

US Judges Sent Kids to Prison - for Kickbacks

It's as Dickensian a story as they come. American judges sentencing wayward kids to private detention facilities in exchange for kickbacks.

From The New York Times:

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.
...The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

...For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Judge Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.

“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

The paper reports the pair have worked out a plea bargain to serve just 87-months in a federal prison. Seven years, out in five? That is outrageously lenient. In a nation so fond of life imprisonment and 400-year sentences, these two deserve to spend the rest of their natural lives in the Greybar Hotel.

America's Republican Malignancy

Forget the fact that they hatched, and for three decades nurtured, the Era of Greed that has finally brought the United States to its knees. As the New York Times' Paul Krugman writes, the Republicans aren't finished, not yet.

...it’s now clear that the party’s commitment to deep voodoo — enforced, in part, by pressure groups that stand ready to run primary challengers against heretics — is as strong as ever. In both the House and the Senate, the vast majority of Republicans rallied behind the idea that the appropriate response to the abject failure of the Bush administration’s tax cuts is more Bush-style tax cuts.

And the rhetorical response of conservatives to the stimulus plan — which will, it’s worth bearing in mind, cost substantially less than either the Bush administration’s $2 trillion in tax cuts or the $1 trillion and counting spent in Iraq — has bordered on the deranged.

It’s “generational theft,” said Senator John McCain, just a few days after voting for tax cuts that would, over the next decade, have cost about four times as much.

It’s “destroying my daughters’ future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs,” said Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute.

What Krugman illustrates isn't Republican perfidy - that much we've come to expect. It's that the Republican message continues to resonate with a sufficient segment of the American electorate that the tax cut/trickle down/Voodoo economics scam still lives.

Maybe Americans have been so dumbed down that they're now just too stupid to save themselves - maybe. It seems that the party that decriminalized the fraud that doomed Wall Street - and the global economy - can still peddle its poison. The Republicans have lost Congress and the White House but they're an insidious malignancy that might not quit until they've destroyed the United States.

OPEC's Dilemma

The world's oil producers have a problem. For many of them, oil truly is Black Gold. For some of them, oil revenues have become the mainstay of their regimes, the grease that keeps the corrupt and oppressive wheels of their states turning.

Ask Steve Harper. It's a lot easier to rule an unruly electorate when you've got a treasury full of petrobucks to spread around. Pretty much anyone, even Steve Harper, can handle that. It's when those oil revenues stop flowing in that you get to see whether you have a bold leader, someone with vision, or a timid, feckless pretender to the throne (a.k.a. Stephen Harper).

But you can't think of oil without mentioning the Middle East. Saudi oil comes out of the ground so "sweet" that it can be pumped straight into waiting tankers. Total cost of production - ten bucks a barrel! So, even when the world oil price crashes to $40 per barrel, the Saudis still rake in a hefty profit.

When prices soared to $150 per barrel it truly was manna from heaven for the Middle East. And who can blame them for believing what the rest of us were told - that oil prices were only going up with $200 a barrel expected within a year? And so, with that in mind, they began spending like there was no tomorrow.

Even Dubai, which is essentially nothing more than a lovely beach, got into the act, building the world's most opulent hotels and lavish homes. The money was flowing in so fast they even built entire communities offshore in developments created in the shape of palm trees (see above).

Now, of course, that money has dried up and Dubai doesn't have any oil to sell, even at 40-bucks a keg. Thinking it could play banker to all the oil-rich nations around it left Dubai holding the bag with a bunch of banks in Wall Street meltdown mode.

Foreigners are fleeing Dubai as though the place has turned radioactive. The New York Times reported that Dubai's airport parking lot is littered with as many as 3,000 cars simply abandoned by foreigners who once sought to make their fortunes in that country. Apparently the exodus has something to do with Dubai law that sends defaulters to debtors' prisons.

It's a sign of the times. Dubai is a member of the United Arab Emirates and the only one that has no oil. You might have thought its fellow Emirates would come to the rescue to bail out Dubai's banks, Washington or London-style. Nope. There's a message in that.

It's a message that provides the subtext, the back story to OPEC's efforts to cut oil production in hopes of stabilizing and boosting world oil prices. Most producing countries simply can't afford to cut production. They've become utterly addicted to oil revenues to the extent they can no longer say no.

Gwynne Dyer addressed this addiction some time ago in discussing the perceived dangers of encouraging democracy in the Middle East demonstrated by election victories of Islamist parties such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Dyer's take was that, given the brutal oppression of the Arab people by regimes we've supported (Mubarak, the House of Saud, etc.), it shouldn't be a surprise that Islamists win democratic elections. But he predicts that might last two, possibly three election cycles before moderates would begin to take over. And, in the meantime, the oil would just keep flowing because no Arab government, even an Islamist ruling party, could afford to turn off the taps.

A Reuters article places the producers' problem in perspective. To fund its current social programmes and infrastructure at current production levels, Venezuela needs $100 per barrel, Iran needs $90. Cutting production really isn't an option for those countries. Likewise Saudi Arabia has promised its people to build "economic cities" to offset unemployment and over-reliance on oil revenues (i.e. to prevent mass uprisings) for which it needs $50 per barrel. Apparently Saudi Arabia is already anticipating a deficit in 2009 of more than $17-billion. Even the Saudis aren't in a great position to start slashing production.

Taken in isolation, the Middle East's oil problems are serious but they're greatly magnified when placed in the context of the political and social unrest simmering throughout the region. This might not be the best moment to be a prince of the House of Saud.

The Neo-Conservative Comedy Hour Comes to Calgary

I can understand people going to hear an address by Bill Clinton or Henry Kissinger or even Tony Blair (gag) but Calgary has its own idea of political luminaries.

George W. Bush is coming to Calgary to tell 1,500 eager Amerophiles all about the great achievements of his eight years in the White House. The Bush address is to take place some time between the main course and dessert.

Geoff Pradella of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce is optimistic of a good turn out for Shrub, ""We've had what I would describe as a pretty favourable response so far."

Every True Curmudgeon's Favourite Country Song

Caution - exceedingly vulgar (and to the point)

RCMP Taser Guidelines - Sort Of!

Jeebus that was fast - not.

Tory insider/RCMP Commissioner Bill Elliot has unveiled new guidelines on when mounties can use tasers. Now the stun guns can only be used when the officer or a member of the public is in "physical danger."

That still leaves far too much wiggle room. Almost any police-civilian encounter carries at least the possibility of some physical danger to the officer. The more cowardly the cop, the more likely he/she will perceive the risk of physical danger.

Elliot did say that simple refusal to obey an officer's commands will no longer be enough to warrant the use of tasers.

Call the Cops - Kabul 9-1-1

For years American and NATO forces have been doing the work of the Afghan Army in trying to hold back the Taliban and Islamist terrorists. We've done such a lack lustre job at battling the insurgency that we're now going to saddle those same troops with doing the work of the Afghan National Police service - drug interdiction.

NATO has finally taken the plunge, ordering its forces in Afghanistan to go after poppy cultivators, opium processors and traffickers associated with the Taliban. Putting that last little rider in ensures we won't be interfering with the opium interests of the central government and those warlords who aren't supporting the Taliban. I guess that means that Karzai's brother, Ahmed, won't have anything to worry about either.

Mid-Space Collision - We Can't Say We Weren't Warned

This article was first posted on October 14, 2006. I brought it back because today it finally happened - a major collision between an American and a Russian satellite resulting in an explosion that launched hundreds of bits of space shrapnel into a heavily used satellite band in low orbit. From Reuters:


Space officials in Russia and the United States were on Thursday tracking hundreds of pieces of debris that were spewed into space when a U.S. satellite collided with a defunct Russian military satellite.

The crash, which Russian officials said took place on Tuesday at about 1700 GMT above northern Siberia, is the first publicly known satellite collision and has raised concerns about the safety of the manned International Space Station.

The collision happened in an orbit heavily used by satellites and other spacecraft and the U.S. Strategic Command, the arm of the Pentagon that handles space, said countries might have to manoeuvre their craft to avoid the debris.

The U.S. Joint Space Operations Center was tracking 500 to 600 new pieces of debris, some as small as 4 inches (10 cm) across, in addition to the 18,000 or so other man-made objects it previously catalogued in space, he said.Russian Space Forces said it was monitoring debris that was spread over altitudes between 500 km (310 miles) and 1300 km (807 miles) above earth.

The priority is guarding the International Space Station, which orbits at 220 miles (350 km), substantially below the collision altitude. One Russian and two U.S. astronauts are currently aboard the station.




For years we've been living with the risk of cascade. The feared phenomenon called the "Cascade Effect" refers to what may, perhaps inevitably will, happen when space junk collides.

There is all manner of debris orbiting earth. Bits of old rockets, satellites old and new, space stations and random stuff that has fallen off all of these. The material is all over the place and - here's the problem - it's all going at speeds of up to 20,000 miles per hour. At those speeds, a bolt-sized object ploughing into a satellite will probably blow that device into hundreds of bits, each of them in turn launchd in some skewed orbit. The odds are other space vehicles will start getting hit, transforming them also into hundreds or thousands of destructive bits of debris. Once this begins it won't take long for the satellite systems to be destroyed.

Right now, the cascade effect is a threat but no immediate certainty. There is even talk about developing the equivalent of a space janitor to go around sweeping up these items and rendering them harmless. However, for all the talk, these programmes aren't being funded and so they remain theoretical.

So,who cares? You ought to care and, if you don't, try learning more about this problem. Our societies are dependent on our satellite networks. We need them for our security. We need them for our science and research. We need them for our very communications. They guide our aircraft and our ships. They enable us to respond quickly to downed aircraft. They help us predict weather catastrophes.





We've become utterly dependent upon a functioning space technology system to the point where, if it went down, we don't have effective, terrestrial backups.

Maybe we'd could just put up new satellites, right? Sorry, no. The junk fallout of a cascade pretty much stays up there for many, many years and that would make space unusable for a couple of decades.

Right now the Cascade Effect is something we need to address while we still have time. The last thing mankind needs is to develop ways to make it a certainty.

Grandma, Put Down the Gun!

And I Thought Mulroney Was The Consummate BS'er

They didn't call him Lyin' Brian for nothing. Yet it seems Deceivin' Stephen isn't going to let his Tory predecessor hold onto the mantle of Prime Prevaricator.

It's getting nigh impossible to keep track of the outright fabrications Stephen Harper has foisted on the Canadian public. It's not just his magnificent string of broken promises either. It's the outright lying.

Hardly a day goes by that we can't log yet another tall tale spun by the Chief Stiff, our Furious Leader himself. Today? Well that'd be Harp's laughable explanation of why he dropped his defamation lawsuit against the Libs. Harper's story? He dropped the suit - no apology, no damages, no injunction, not even a dime in costs - because Stephane Dion is no longer Liberal leader. Groan.

Who does Canada's Prime Bullshitter think is going to buy that one? Why did his former counsel, Rick Dearden fire him, the sitting prime minister, as his client? Oh I know, maybe Mr. Dearden's in-box got too full. And why did Harp drop the law suit just when he was going to have to explain to a judge why he hadn't answered a bunch of questions or produced a ream of relevant documents? Wait, I know, with the deficits and all it wouldn't have been fair to the taxpayers to hit them with an extra twenty bucks in photocopying charges.

No, Steve, let's be honest - just this once. You dropped the lawsuit because it was a loser and you didn't want to risk a court order forcing you to show your hand and reveal potentially troublesome information and documents to the opposition and the voting public. All that Bully Boy nonsense that served you so well, for so long and masked your inability to lead doesn't work any more. And without that Steve, even your friends turn on you.

By the way Steve, do you still get the National Post? That must be a painful read these days.

Afghanistan - 2011

There's no way to tell for sure what lies in store for Canadian forces in Kandahar in two years. Harper has repeatedly promised that Canada's combat mission in Kandahar will end in 2011 but don't expect those soldiers to actually leave Afghanistan.

Yesterday's happenings in Kabul may give a clue to what lies in store. Eight Taliban fighters launched three, coordinated attacks focusing on the Justice Ministry. When they were finally eliminated they had killed more than 20 civilians.

My guess is that Canadian soldiers will be in Kabul or Kandahar City by 2011, trying to secure them against Taliban attacks. It's been apparent for months that the Taliban are massing around Afghanistan's major cities. The prison break in Kandahar, the Indian embassy bombing in Kabul and now the attack on the Justice Ministry demonstrate that the insurgency is sufficiently well established inside the key cities that it can operate with remarkable freedom.

By threatening the capital the Taliban can force a significant diversion of Western forces from the effort along the Pakistan-Afghan border. In this way, a small contingent of insurgents can effectively tie down a large number of defenders.

If the U.S. and NATO can't secure the cities, the war is essentially lost.

Stephen Harper's First Real "First"

His deficits sort of rank up there with the Mulroney years but Stephen Harper has just logged a real first - Canada's first trade deficit in 33-years.

Part of the turnaround results from plunging commodity prices. But another part, one that Harper was dead keen on promoting, is our over-reliance on the American market. Exports to the U.S. dropped 10%.

December figures show a trade deficit of just under half a billion dollars where, just months ago, we were accustomed to 5-6 billion dollar monthly surpluses.

The good news is that commodity markets do bounce back. The better news is that, by the time that happens, we'll probably have a new prime minister and a new government.

I think Harper's days are numbered. He's simply too invested in the now discredited Republican ideologies hatched during the Reagan era. Despite his visionless (and hence ineffective) deficit budgets, Steve doesn't grasp that America, and the world, have ditched what he so deeply cherishes.

The struggle between Keynes and Friedman has taken three decades to play out and it ended with the Friedman school presiding over global economic catastrophe. Stephen Harper is a man for the ages - or at least the 80's and 90's. His moment has passed. Now if we can just get through the aftermath.

Petraeus Sabotaging Obama

Inter Press News Service reporter Gareth Porter claims that Centcom commander, General David Petraeus, is leaking misleading information intended to manipulate his own commander in chief, Barack Obama:

The Petraeus account, reported by McClatchy newspapers Feb. 5 and then by the Associated Press the following day, appears to indicate that Obama is moving away from the 16-month plan he had vowed during the campaign to implement if elected. But on closer examination, it doesn't necessarily refer to any action by Obama or to anything that happened at the Jan. 21 meeting.

The real story of the leak by Petraeus is that the most powerful figure in the U.S. military has tried to shape the media coverage of Obama and combat troop withdrawal from Iraq to advance his policy agenda - and, very likely, his personal political interests as well.

This writer became aware of Petraeus's effort to influence the coverage of Obama's unfolding policy on troop withdrawal when a military source close to the general, who insisted on anonymity, offered the Petraeus account on Feb. 4. The military officer was responding to the IPS story 'Generals Seek to Reverse Obama Withdrawal Decision' published two days earlier.

The story reported that Obama had rejected Petraeus's argument against a 16-month withdrawal option at the meeting and asked for a withdrawal plan within that time frame, and that Petraeus had been unhappy with the outcome of the meeting.

It also reported that Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and retired Army general Jack Keane, a close ally of Petraeus, had both made public statements indicating a determination to get Obama to abandon the 16-month plan.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45720

Andrew Coyne's Lament for the Late Conservative Party

It's something I've heard from some of my Conservative friends - a mix of anger, frustration and disappointment at what has become of their party under the leadership of Stephen Harper. But Andrew Coyne sums it up best in the latest MacLeans:

Think back to the late 1990s, and what the Reform party then stood for. Not just balanced budgets, but balanced budget laws. Referendums—on tax increases, on constitutional amendments, on citizens’ initiatives. Tight controls on spending. A flat tax. Abolition of corporate subsidies, and of their “regional development” dispensaries. Reform of employment insurance, of the Canada Pension Plan, of the CBC. A federation of equal provinces and citizens. An elected Senate. Free votes in Parliament. More power for ordinary MPs. Open nomination races at the riding level, free of interference by the leader’s office. Fixed election dates.

By the time Stockwell Day was running for prime minister in 2000—the Canadian Alliance having replaced the Reform party, and Day having replaced Preston Manning—a third or more of these were already gone. But the pace only quickened from there. By the time of the 2004 election, the newly formed Conservative party was still vaguely interested in abolishing corporate welfare, and still mentioned tax cuts. But mostly it was interested in telling you what it wouldn’t do: it wouldn’t cut spending, for instance, or much else that might upset someone, somewhere.

The party’s founding policy convention in 2005 took things still further: gone was any mention of referendums, for example. Spending cuts were out; subsidies were in. The courting of Quebec nationalists, which Harper had once warned against, had begun in earnest. Probably the delegates thought they were making a prudent set of concessions to reality, in a bid to establish themselves, once and for all, as a centrist party, ready to form a government. But in fact they were only softening things up for the next round. The accession to power, after so many years, did not mark the end of the party’s concessions. It merely provided it with the means to make still more, each more jaw-dropping than the last: on Quebec, on Afghanistan, on confidence votes, on foreign takeovers, on fixed election dates, on appointing senators, on corporate bailouts, until at last we arrived at last week’s establishment of a regional development agency for southern Ontario.

So they’ve given up everything they ever stood for, and what have they got in return? Pretty close to nada. They’re stalled in the polls, again. The fabled majority remains firmly out of reach. Those disposed to mistrust them are as suspicious as ever, while their own followers are now thoroughly demoralized. They have not moved to the centre; they have only succeeded in shifting the entire political spectrum to the left. The Quebec experiment, likewise, is in tatters, Quebec more nationalist than ever. The destruction is total. The failure is absolute.

Once, long ago, there was an answer: a new party. But you can only do that once: no one’s got the energy to climb that hill again. The harsh fact is that there is no longer anything resembling a conservative party in this country, nor any prospect of forming one. And conservatives have only themselves to blame.

Defending His Honour. What Honour?

I figured it wouldn't take long before details began leaking out about Stephen Harper's abandoned defamation suit against the Libs. 72-hours was about right.

A big question was whether the Libs paid a settlement to Harper to make the suit go away. According to the Toronto Star, insiders say there was no payment - no damages, no costs.

Why did Harper, who had pledged to sue the Libs to restore not just his but his family's reputation, run for cover? Again, according to the Star, it seems Harp wasn't eager to hand over documents and answer some pertinent questions about just what did go on in the Cadman affair. The paper claims that side dispute was nearing a court hearing when Steve folded.

Harper just may have placed a pretty low value on his reputation but he did get something useful out of his suit. While the matter was before the court, it prevented the Libs from using it against Harper in the last election campaign.

Scientists Massing For Assault On Politicians

Next month. Copenhagen. Scientists from around the world intend to rally to shake politicians out of their stupor over global warming while there's still time to act.

From The Guardian:

Climate experts from across the world will gather in Copenhagen next month to agree a stark message to policy makers, which they hope will break the political deadlock on efforts to curb rising temperatures. The meeting follows "disturbing" studies that suggest global warming could strike harder and faster than expected.

Katherine Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen, who is organising next month's event, said: "This is not a regular scientific conference. This is a deliberate attempt to influence policy."

One issue to be addressed next month is whether it is still possible to limit average global temperature rise to 2C, which the EU defines as dangerous. Richardson said a key question for politicians is the balance between efforts to limit warming and steps to adapt to the likely consequences. Watson has warned that nations should prepare for an average rise of 4C. The IPCC said temperatures could soar by up to 6C by 2100 if current rates of carbon pollution continue.

A number of "disturbing" trends seem to have accelerated since the IPCC report was published, he said, such as a decrease in the amount of carbon pollution absorbed in the oceans, and an increase in Greenland ice melt. But he denied that the new findings made the IPCC report obsolete. "They are not so radical as to undermine the report. They reinforce it."

Truth be told, if the IPCC reports were a mine canary you would wind up with a lot of dead miners. The reports are consensus based, meaning that their findings - and forecasts (or warnings) - are significantly diluted by just a handful of holdouts. What you're reading are the results the holdouts are willing to accept. That's why the reports continuously understate the magnitude of the problem and the pace of its onset.

But don't worry, we have Stephen Harper to step in to protect Canada and other nations. Sorry, take that back, you should worry.

"Attainable Goals" - Obama's Focus for Afghanistan

"It doesn't need to be a democracy, just secure." That's how a senior NATO official described the new, lower goalposts for Afghanistan. From The Guardian:

Richard Holbrooke, Barack Obama's new envoy for Afghanistan, General James Jones, the new White House national security adviser, and General David Petraeus, the new commander of the Afghan campaign, all stressed that the US president's policy on the Taliban and al-Qaida would be governed by "attainable goals" matched by "adequate resources".
In the first major foreign policy speech from the new administration, the vice-president, Joe Biden, told a security conference in Munich that the strategic review on Afghanistan under way in Washington would "make sure that our goals are clear and achievable".

Notable by its absence in any of the speeches from the American team was any mention of building democracy in Afghanistan. Instead, the emphasis was on creating sustainable security to try to prevent the Taliban from extending their grip on the country.

Is this surrender, a capitulation of the neo-con vision of secular democracy for Afghanistan? Perhaps but, seven years down the neo-con road, you have to ask just how well that vision was advancing?

Obama's pragmatism surfaced at a moment when the United States and Britain are renewing calls for NATO members to increase troop support in Afghanistan.

British defense minister John Hutton argued , "This is not an aberration. This is the pattern of future conflicts. I do not believe we are properly preparing for it."

Nato should show a "wartime mentality" over the campaign in Afghanistan, but instead it possessed a "peacetime culture obsessed with process", he added.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/08/obama-afghanistan-us-foreign-policy