One Man's Terrorist....

Harper says he'll unveil legislation this week that allows victims of sue terrorists in Canadian courts. Of course that doesn't mean much unless you first define "terrorist." And there's the problem.

When it comes to terrorists we in the West have often played both sides of the street. To do that, we simply label our terrorists as "freedom fighters." That's how Ronald Reagan was able to run money under the table to the Nicaraguan Contras, as bloodthirsty a bunch of terrorists as they come.

I figure Harper's gang will come out with a pretty blunt instrument that lets them decide which variety of shit stinks when you step in it.

1,000 People Died Yesterday from Climate Change. 1,000 More Will Die Today and Another Thousand Tomorrow.

A lot of us like to think of man-made climate change as a problem that we'll have to deal with later on this century. Because we live in the West (the lucky "least and last" affected) we've been able to ignore the reality that global warming is already killing 300,000 every year and severely impacting on another 360-million in less advantaged countries. Worse yet, the pace of death and devastation is speeding up quite rapidly.

The Global Humanitarian Forum (Geneva) has just released a 127-page report, "The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis" available, free, in PDF format here: http://assets.ghf-ge.org/downloads/humanimpactreport.pdf

This is an excerpt from a summary:

Climate Change is here. It has a human face. This report details the silent crisis occurring around the world today as a result of a global climate change. It is a comprehensive account of the key impacts of climate change on human society. Long regarded as a distant, environmental or future problem, climate change is already today a major constraint on all human efforts. It has been creeping up on the world for years, doing its deadly work in the dark by aggravating a host of other major problems affection society, such as malnutrition, malaria and poverty. This report aims at breaking the silent suffering of millions. Its findings indicate that the impacts of climate change are each year responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths with hundreds of millions of lives affected. Climate change is a serious threat to close to three quarters of the world population. Half a billion people are at extreme risk. Worst affected are the world´s poorest groups, who lack any responsibility for causing climate change.

And we're sitting around singing the praises of bitumen as the key to Canada's prosperity and national unity for the 21st Century?

Why Are We Mocking Harper's Deficit?

The federal government's announced $50-billion deficit has a lot of Liberals positively giggling with delight.

I'm trying to understand that.

What possible joy is there to be found in a massive budget deficit? Do we derive some satisfaction in knowing that a future generation of Canadians is going to have to shoulder this debt? Do we believe that the government of the day shouldn't be pumping billions of dollars into the economy in stimulus spending? If so, why did the Liberal party vote for Harper's budget?

It's not like we didn't have that forced, 2-month vacation when the GG prorogued parliament to work out some alternative, recession-fighting budget proposal of our own. But when parliament did return, we didn't have any alternative to throw in Harper's face. We were left to support or defeat the Conservatives on Harper's budget and we did just that, we supported that budget.

And with the greatest fiscal crisis faced by Canadians in at least two generations, what was our new Leader doing? From what he wrote it seems he was taking the time to complete his latest book, a tract on his mother's family that may be of real interest to his fan club but probably won't do much to benefit the country in its moment of need.

So the Conservatives, with the complicity of the Liberals, managed to foist off onto the nation and the Canadian people a sham of a stimulus budget, devoid of purpose or vision but who could expect anything better from a government as persistently inept as Harper's? That's the thing. We had every reason to assume he wouldn't come up with any meaningful stimulus mechanisms in his budget and so we had every reason to put together a meaningful alternative, something clearly understandable that would appeal to worried Canadians, and then club Harper over the head with it on the budget vote.

The leadership of our party did not take that opportunity to genuinely help the country and so we were left in a box of our own making, forced to support a horrible budget because we had nothing on which to win an election.

So, running true to form, Flaherty and Harper once again underestimated the severity of the fiscal mess and the measure of the deficit we'll be enduring. Yawn. We still haven't come up with clear-headed alternatives to the Pinata budget even though Flaherty hasn't even dipped deep into the stimulus fund yet.

In case you're wondering why I'm adamantly opposed to the Pinata budget, I'll try to explain briefly. The budget is an instrument of rank cowardice. Harper was willing to borrow a lot of money but absolutely shunned responsibility for how that money would be spent. Instead he decided to simply dole it out in a haphazard fashion to any qualified recipient who could get an application in on time.

To be effective, stimulus spending must be strictly held to projects that represent new economic activity in the form of investments that will enrich the nation in decades to come to offset the burden taxpayers will then be carrying. Think FDR. Think national projects to build schools, highways, airports, dams. Pre-war stimulus spending that paid enormous returns during America's post-war boom.

Unfortunately that's not what we're getting out of the Harper/Ignatieff budget and I don't see anything to gloat about in that.

The Pictures You'll Never See

Now that president Obama has ditched plans to release any more Abu Ghraib pix, there's some speculation as to just what they showed that hasn't been seen already.

According to the British newspaper, The Telegraph, there's plenty including rape of both male and female prisoners.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."

“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.

“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

Well, now that is out in the open, next question. Since these damning photographs have been viewed by everyone from Rumsfeld and Bush to members of Congress and, of course, senior US military personnel, just what in hell have they done about what they've seen?

How many of these animals have been arrested, charged and tried for anything? How many of their superiors have been held to account? General Taguba's description of what's in these photos is bad enough but everyone in authority who has seen those pictures and sat by doing nothing needs to be prosecuted as well.

Klueless - From Kabul to Kandahar

I think our politicians have figured out that, when it comes to dirty little wars like Afghanistan, it's a losing proposition unless you win over there and at home. As far as Afghanistan and Canada are concerned, the Afghan war will be decided by the Afghan people over there and the Canadian people over here.

While Canadians are still roughly divided over the mission to Afghanistan, the pro-war side will likely go through some spasmodic changes when that war falls apart and they finally must confront what we really bought with our soldiers' lives and our treasure. At that point the pro-war, yellow ribbon car magnet crowd will do what they always do in such circumstances - they'll start pointing fingers and blaming the whole mess on convenient scapegoats.

Afghanistan has been political poison for every Canadian politician who touched it and it's only going to get increasingly toxic. Harper knows that and so, apparently, does Iggy. Both are looking across the room at the fire escape labelled 2011, wondering how they'll ever get through that to safety.

I'm sure that Paul Martin rues the day he was taken in by the Big Cod and backed Canada into an ugly mess in Kandahar.

I'll bet Stephane Dion regrets that he didn't honour his promise to force Harper to pull our soldiers out in 2009 as scheduled, an election issue he might just have won on, if not in 2007 then certainly today.

I'm pretty sure that Stephen Harper wishes he was getting the Kandahar millstone off his neck this year. As it is, he's got only about a year and a half to figure out how he can keep Canadian troops in Afghanistan in something other than a combat role, a task that the best alchemist would find daunting.

And public opinion for this colossal blunder isn't going to get any better anytime soon. Almost every day there is news out of Afghanistan of how our fortunes are dwindling while the insurgency's are steadily rising. Which brings me to today's offerings.

First up is Canada's ambassador to Afghanistan, Ron Hoffman. This guy dropped the bombshell that the international community underestimated how hard it would be to get Afghanistan back on its feet. Hoffman added that there's now 'a sense of urgency' to come up with some tangible signs of progress and that the Afghan people are disappointed with the results of international intervention. Well, duh. Thanks for that Ron.

And then there's Soraya Sobhrang of A'Stan's human rights commission. Speaking by tele-link to the House of Commons special committee on A'Stan, Sobhrang warned, "We are going back to [something] like the Taliban situation in Afghanistan.” That's right, the good guys, our guys, are going back to their old ways which really weren't much different from the Taliban's anyway. From CBC News:

Ms. Sobhrang said the mood of people she has talked to in Kandahar province is growing bleak.

“Really now [there is] no security in Kandahar,” Ms. Sobhrang said.

“They [people] are losing their hope for the future … their future is looking very, very dark,” she said.

“This is very, very dangerous for a population when they lose their hope.”

Ms. Sobhrang noted that the Afghan supreme court is composed entirely of male judges and said her country's justice system doesn't “believe in women's rights.”

For instance, a woman who petitions a court for a divorce on the grounds of physical abuse is told to return to her husband. “They say you are a woman and you must go back [to your husband].”

And, folks, we don't have a clue how to turn this around. I think reality is finally setting in, including the reality that in this sort of war you don't get do-overs. Eight years actually means something in terms of invaluable time lost and opportunities squandered.

It's not just the Afghan people who see their foreign liberators as ineffectual, weak and unreliable. So does the incurably corrupt Afghan government and so does the increasingly bold, ever growing insurgency.

If I were Obama, I'd send every C-17 in my air force to Afghanistan and start shuttling Afghan recruits to a brand new, mega-base somewhere in Texas. I'd run those recruits through an intensive, three month training course at the end of which, I'd arm them, send them back and start processing the next batch.

I'd keep doing that until they had a properly trained, well-equipped army of, say 140,000, with leadership sufficiently competent to hold the Taliban at bay and, if the government didn't purge itself of corruption, stage a coup in Kabul. I'd do whatever it took to get that army trained, equipped and in the field within one year, tops. Then I'd get them all together for a nice farewell dinner, hand them the keys and say "see ya." Really, that's about as close to a good ending as anyone could hope for.

When Is a Fundamental Right Less Than Fundamental?

Apparently when 52% of a minority of the electorate who bother to turn out at a poll say so.

The same California court that just last May ruled that same sex marriage was a "fundamental right" clawed that back today holding that the slimmest majority on the Proposition 8 in a November referendum to ban same sex marriage trumped fundamental rights, the California consitution and even the American Bill of Rights.

So pathetically ridiculous was California's top court that it found that, while gays were no longer equal to straights on marriage rights, the 36,000 gays and lesbians who tied the knot before Prop 8 are still equal. Their marriages still stand to mock the Court for ever.

Makes you wonder what other fundamental rights in California are up for grabs at the whim of a minority of crank voters?

Eight Years On, We Still Can't Figure Out the War in Afghaninstan

We're doing it wrong. We've been doing it wrong for eight years now. It's what McClatchey Newspapers calls our "risk averse, shorthanded strategy" to combat the Taliban. No matter how you play those cards, it's a losing hand:

...Taliban fighters rule the day and the night in the Bermel district, using threats and atrocities to control the civilian population, Afghans in the valley told a visiting reporter in interviews over two weeks. Accompanied by Arab and Chechen advisers, they behead civilians or sever their hands to force their cooperation. One of the latest Taliban edicts is a ban on cutting trees, so that insurgents can hide and lay ambushes for foreign troops.

From a distance, the U.S. base in Margha, occupied by a platoon from the 3rd Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division out of Fort Richardson, Alaska, is a monument to a risk-averse, shorthanded American strategy in Afghanistan.

...The small U.S. base can be defended against as many as a thousand insurgents at once, confident American soldiers said. That sums up their dilemma, however: The fortress protects American troops, but it does little to help win a guerrilla war that's now in its eighth year and about to enter another violent summer.

The faltering U.S. and NATO efforts in eastern Afghanistan have in effect surrendered the countryside — village after village — to insurgent bands, many of them criminal gangs but some of them with weaponry and the backing of al Qaida.

The American [and NATO] troops descend from their bastion only on occasion, and there's no one to protect Afghan civilians from Taliban fighters, who collect a "zakat," or religious tax, from many residents in Bermel.

Living apart from the citizens they're charged with protecting isn't the only challenge to American forces. Afghans complain about errant U.S. artillery fire, which causes civilian casualties, and the constant infiltration of guerrilla bands from Pakistan.

If the goal of counterinsurgency strategy is to persuade the local population that the U.S. and its Afghan fighting partners are protecting them, it isn't working in this district, which sits opposite the al Qaida haven of South Waziristan in Pakistan.

...A U.S. military intelligence officer working in the district said he was well aware of intimidation by Afghan security forces, in particular a local commander.

"When you (the United States) don't do counterinsurgency well, it is important to make others more afraid of you than the next guy can," the official said of the local warlord, whom American forces have come to rely on. The officer couldn't be named because he wasn't authorized to speak to a reporter.

"The other option when you don't do counterinsurgency well is to intimidate the population," he said. "But when it comes to that, you are really no better than the people you are trying to get rid of."

Read more here; http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/68630.html

The Americans are touting their new commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as being a guerrilla fighter who can make a real difference but David Petraeus was also a top counter-insurgency man and he didn't make a dent in the problems besetting Afghanistan. McChrystal will have an additional 17,500 troops but in a country the size of Afghanistan with a metastasizing insurgency, that's a drop in the bucket and many of the reinforcements in any case are scheduled to be assigned, not to seek out the Taliban, but to defend the capital, Kabul.

The insurgency holds the initiative. It has the US and NATO forces on the defensive, forced to fall back to protect the major cities, abandoning the countryside. If Obama wants to persuade the Taliban he's serious about thwarting their plans, he'd better send 175,000 additional combat soldiers, not 17,500.

I wonder if Barack Obama is beginning to feel a little like Lyndon B. Johnson.

Bush's Holy War

A book just released in France paints a picture of a divinely delusional George w. Bush hell bent on bringing the Old Testament prophesies to life in the Middle East. From AlterNet:

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on "a mission from God" in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

Bush apparently said something along the same lines to then prime minister Paul Martin.

It's really no wonder that Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neo-con clan became so recklessly adventurous. They realized they were truly dealing with the president in the tinfoil hat.

http://www.alternet.org/politics/140221

A Pleasant Surprise

I read a lot of online newspapers, something guaranteed to reward the reader with plenty of eye strain. That's why it was a delight this morning to discover the new website format introduced by the Globe & Mail. It's clean, crisp and remarkably easy to navigate.

To appreciate the change, open the Globe on one browser window and The National Toast in another. Go back and forth, scanning each page. The difference is obvious. I suppose CanWest doesn't have a lot of spare cash these days to update the Post's web site. Then again, format is the least of the problems of The National Toast.

Let's hope the new format is just the start of a makeover for The Globe which could do with a little editorial housecleaning while they're at it.

Watch How You're Flinging that Dung, Steve

Stephen Harper has a lot of gall. It may be the only attribute remaining to sustain him.

I'm no fan of Michael Ignatieff although I do consider him preferable to the current Parliamentary Prelate. While I'm not inclined to exertion in defending Ignatieff from Harper's attack ads (some of which is fair comment) I do rise to confront this latest chapter in Stevie boy's orgy of hypocrisy.

Where to begin?

I think we should start with the claim that, while abroad, Mikey made some unflattering remarks about the homeland and its people. Quite frankly, I don't have enough interest in Mikey to check that out. What I do know is that, assuming the criticism is valid, this is a case of a very charred pot calling the kettle black.

Little Stevie didn't even bother to go abroad to bad-mouth Canada and demean its citizens. He didn't have to. The foreigners, the worst of the secretive American, uber-right cabal, the Council for National Policy, came to him in Montreal in June, 1997. This was Harper's shining moment, his chance to show his true colours and, boy, did he ever.

He told the assembly of arch-Republicans that our country was as low as they come. "Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. Canadians make no connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower than yours, a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the United States.

In terms of the unemployed, ...don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance."

Harper went on to amuse his American friends by slagging Canada for such outrages as gay rights, gun control, universal health care and a gaggle of non-social conservative ideals. It's a riveting speech because it rivets Harper to his true values and his ugly vision for Canada.

Anyone who has slandered the Canadian people as Harper has should resist the urge to criticize anyone else for being un-Canadian or insufficiently patriotic.

And, as for Ignatieff's connections with the United States and the chance that he might just return there when his political career wanes, let's talk about Ari Fleischer, Torture Inc.'s own former mouthpiece. Just why is Harper using our tax dollars to line Fleischer's pockets to elevate Harper's public image in the United States? What else could it be except to test Steve's own post-political prospects south of the border?

So, I'm not saying that Michael (swoon) isn't deserving of a few hard shots. All I'm saying is that it hardly lies in the mouth of dirty dealing Steve Harper to be taking those shots. If there has ever been an all-American bootlicker, it's the guy at the top.

Frum Is Right

David Frum is waging a struggle to reclaim the Republican Party on his web site NewMajority.com. One of his articles is entitled "No Wonder People Hate Us." It's about how the lunatic fringe is destroying the Republican Party. The piece focuses on a right wing, open mouth radio host named Mark Levin who really does abuse anyone not of his own ilk.

Frum provided a transcript of an excerpt in which Levin horribly castigated a woman caller, questioning why her husband didn't just put a gun to his temple. Frum questioned what people like Levin must be doing to any decent Americans:

Imagine some commuter - a nonpolitical person, a family man or woman, a taxpayer and billpayer - who happens to flip the dial on the radio on the way home and hears that exchange. What would such a person think? Wouldn't it be something like, "I dont know what's wrong with that horrible man, but I do know this: whatever side he's on, any decent person would have to be on the opposite"?

I didn't know anything about Mark Levin but this controversy led me to seek him out on YouTube. Here's a clip of this guy tearing into his fellow right winger, Bill O'Reilly, that captures the state of right wing talk radio in the United States today:



I don't have any sympathy for Frum or his Republicans. If you choose to sleep with dogs, don't complain when you get fleas. The Republicans courted these people when that served their purposes just as they courted Christian fundamentalists. The Republicans gave them the necessary degree of credibility and support required for them to flourish. The Republicans provided the rotten fruit needed for this bacteria to grow. They cut their own throats. Now they're left with a party of churls and Quasimodos, a party of hacks and hucksters, names like Boehner, Imhofe and Palin. It was this whole strata of mud dumb bigots and fearstruck fantasists to which Karl Rove looked to cement his permanent Republican majority. Rove never grasped that the key to his success could also be the key to the indefinite collapse of his party and the abandonment of its grotesque movement.

The Republican Party deserves to be led into the desert by the likes of Levin and Savage, Hannity and Limbaugh. There's still a good bit of rotting left to do before they're ready to rebuild, before they can be restored to the company of decent people.

p.s. What's with O'Reilly? If you listened to that clip he sounded perfectly reasonable. Haven't we seen this before on prime time wrestling? The bad guy who needs to revive his tired brand and so instantly switches sides?

Who Gets Tossed From the Lifeboat Says Everything

It has happened in the past. The lifeboat is overloaded. Somebody has to get thrown overboard lest the boat capsize and everybody die. In school we read a case from the early 1800s where the skipper stood trial for just this and lost - not because he threw someone over the side but because he didn't toss the black porter first. California isn't about to make the same mistake.

California is a fiscally overloaded lifeboat in danger of being swamped by far too much debt. The state budget process is such a political football that Governator Arnie can't get consensus on a deficit deal that would save the state. Stuck with a $21-billion shortfall, something obviously has to give. Teachers, firefighters, even cops - sure their ranks will be cut but wait, what about the black porter up in the bow? Doesn't he go first?

In this lifeboat, the black porter is California's poor and the state's needy students and they're headed straight for Davey Jones' locker. According to the LA Times, California is about to indulge in a bit of budgetary Darwinism:

To balance the books, Schwarzenegger is eyeing the dismantling of the state's CalWorks program, which serves more than 500,000 poor families with children, as well as the elimination of Healthy Families, which provides medical coverage to 928,000 children and teens. Mothballing the two programs would save the state about $1.4 billion in the coming fiscal year, officials said.

If the proposals to slash the safety net come to pass, they would completely reshape the state's social service network, transforming California from one of the country's most generous states to one of the most tightfisted in aiding the poor.

Also potentially on the chopping block is CalGrants, a financial assistance program that offers cash grants to lower- and middle-income college students each year. The governor's proposal would eliminate the 77,000 new grants awarded each year at a cost of $180 million, but that saving would eventually grow to more than $900 million as students graduated and the program was phased out.

In so many ways California seems awfully progressive but its willingness, in tough times, to turn on the weakest and most vulnerable, especially those kids, puts all that in a much less flattering perspective. Eliminating health care for a million poor kids? I guess in California, poor is the new black.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-budget22-2009may22,0,4603538.story

Memo to Self - No More Dirty Diapers in Grocery Bags!

The Canadian Plastics Industry Association is fighting back against reusable, cloth bags that are finally taking the place of plastic bags.

The CPIA conducted tests on 24 reusable bags and found in some of them mold, yeast, bacteria and even intestinal fecal bacteria. Association spokesperson Cathy Cirko said the fecal bacteria came from a bag someone had used to tote around dirty diapers. Well, duh!

So, lesson learned. Next time you catch the cashier trying to slip a dirty diaper in with your broccoli, tell her/him "No Thank You."

In fairness, however, I have had more than one cashier tell me horror stories of people who bring really gross reusables to the til. Hey, people. They can get dirty. They are washable.

Iraqi Bloodbath Ramping Up Again

Sectarian violence is returning to Iraq in a big way. 62-deaths from bombings in the past day. Three American soldiers killed. A dozen Iraqi policemen eliminated.

Blame Obama. After all, there's a lot of political hay to be made out of this and the Republican stable has been going without lately.

Yes, violence is returning with the drawdown of US forces but to blame it on that is facile. To do that is to ignore the real problems that beset the nation of Iraq that remain pretty much as they were when Saddam was overthrown.

There's an unresolved Arab versus Kurd problem. A Sunni versus Shia problem. There's even a rift between the nationalist Shiite movement of al Sadr and the pro-Iranian Shiite movement headed by Maliki. These chasms have a cumulative effect. Tensions on one front tend to magnify strains on the others. When the Arabs are divided, it offers the Kurds little incentive to forego their quasi autonomy. When Maliki's Shia can't close a deal with the Sunni or the Kurds, it gives Sadr's Shia opportunities to exploit. When Maliki shuns the Sunni and balks on the promises of reconciliation, it shuts down the Awakening Councils and sends their members back into the old Sunni resistance. And guess what? Al Qaeda in Iraq is staging a comeback and it has nothing to do with Barack Obama either.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/68539.html

What's Next, the English Ocean?

Look at the map. There's the southern part of Vancouver Island. Below it is Seattle and Washington state. To the right is Vancouver and the B.C. mainland. Now check out that narrow ribbon of blue that runs between those points. Does that look like a "sea" to you?

Retired Washington university prof Bert Webber is pushing to have the area roughly demarked by the white line renamed the Salish Sea. Why? Because he's retired and really doesn't have anything else to do.

The word Salish come from the name Coast Salish, the name anthropologists gave to the First Nations language group that resides in the area.

Webber first proposed the name in 1988, but the proposal was soundly rejected at the time. In recent years, the term has caught on with local First Nations leaders and marine biologists, who have started using it to describe the large area of inland waters south and east of Vancouver Island on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.

Last year, a Vancouver Island First Nation leader suggested Salish Sea be used to replace the name of the Georgia Strait, which separates Vancouver Island from the South Coast of B.C.
Webber's expanded designation caught the interest of Chemainus elder George Harris, who said the new name reflects the borderless nature of the area's original First Nations.

"When we meet as the Coast Salish family, the things that tie us together and make us proud of who we are, are things like this," said Harris.

I guess when it comes to that old Spaniard, Senor Juan de Fuca, it's okay to call it a 'strait.' Or maybe that was because it is just that, a strait. Even Juan knew that.

(p.s. when you can see one side from the other side, chances are you're not looking over a sea)

Milking It To The End

We the people are picking up Mulroney's 2-million dollar tab for his performance at the Oliphant inquiry.

You would think for that kind of money he would have answered some questions or at least given some plausible explanations where so many remain missing.

The funding appears to be a perk afforded Privy Councillors, a status that BMPM will cherish to his last breath. I'd love to get a gander at Guy Pratte's accounts for representing that old BM.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he would just give us back the original two million he took us for back when his only dealings with Schreiber were a get togethers for coffee (and envelopes stuffed with thousand dollar bills).

Brian - People With Glass Jaws Shouldn't Throw Wild Punches

If the Oliphant inquiry will accomplish anything, it will be to have provided a forum for Brian Mulroney to demolish the last vestige of his reputation. He promised he would lay it all out and would be vindicated. But in his six days on the stand it became increasingly obvious that he was concealing far more than he was revealing and that his uncorroborated accounts simply didn't add up, didn't make much sense.

BMPM should have been remembered for his environmentalism or his courageous stand against South African apartheid but he's put an end to all that. Now he'll go down in the books as a shifty character who was always hiding something and consorting with n'er do wells on shady, undocumented deals. He'll be the tragic figure who demeaned himself with implausible explanations that defied all credulity.

I can't help wondering how Brian Mulroney saw Brian Mulroney when this inquiry began for it was certainly that self-image that shaped his performance over the past week. He must have given his counsel, Guy Pratte, absolute fits. Every lawyer dreads the client who gets up on the stand and rambles on foolishly, pointing out his own vulnerabilities to all who hear him. I've seen that thing played out more than once. There's a certain shared consciousness that spreads to counsel for all parties and to the bench. As often as not it goes unmentioned but everyone, save perhaps for the witness, knows the undeniable reality of what has just happened. Pratte and Wolson and Oliphant have undoubtedly had a few of those moments already - Mulroney's implausible account of how he simply kept bundles of cash gathering dust in his home safe or some bank safety deposit box, his inability to show anything tangible to evidence the work he supposedly did for Shcreiber, the glaring inconsistencies in his saga of his tax reporting and voluntary disclosure. What he kept saying simply made no sense.

One point that really piqued Oliphant's interest was Mulroney's revelation of an article the Globe and Mail was about to print that exonnerated him, an article that was pulled at the last minute as just another part of the plot to destroy Brian Mulroney. That claim led Globe editor, Edward Greenspon to dash off a denunciation to inquiry counsel Wolson:

In his testimony today, Mr Mulroney made reference to a supposed fourth article in the November 2003 series authored by William Kaplan and suggested this article, on which he "was counting very heavily," was suppressed by the Globe. There was no such fourth article ever contemplated. The number of articles in the series was always three.

It may be that what Mr. Mulroney is referring to is information he offered me in an effort to induce The Globe and Mail not to publish Mr. Kaplan's third article revealing that Mr. Mulroney had accepted cash payments from Mr. Schreiber. When he found out that the Globe intended to publish Mr. Kaplan's story, Mr. Mulroney contacted me several times trying to appeal to me not to publish the story. In at least one of the conversations, Mr. Mulroney offered to trade me information about a story that he said was explosive and would be of greater interest to The Globe than Mr. Kaplan's story about the cash payments.

As though Brian Mulroney's dwindling credibility needed, or could withstand, another hit. So much for his claims that he's always been fothright about his dealings with Schreiber, gladly willing to answer any questions put to him.

It's too bad - for Mulroney - that he used his appearance to take swings at those he feels have betrayed or persecuted him, the current prime minister, Jean Chretien, Norman Spector, William Kaplan ...the list goes on. In doing this Mulroney revealed that the once great prime minister now stands alone, weak and vulnerable.

California's Fiscal Wildfire

California has four seasons - earthquakes, mudslides, droughts and wildfires and, right now, the state is facing a fiscal wildfire - a $21-billion deficit that state voters have rejected.

That leaves governor Schwarzenegger and his legislature to slash spending and the obvious targets are policing and education. Thousands of cops and teachers will be getting pink slips which, in reality, is only good news for criminals and truants.

California is beginning to become a bit like Waziristan - ungovernable. State budgets need a two-thirds vote to pass the legislature which is a formula for gridlock rather than compromise. If the legislature won't pass the budget, the governor's last resort is to call a 'special election' which is basically an invitation to voters to stop by and indicate if they want an increase in their tax bills. The 'nays' have a lot more incentive to show up at the polls. Only 19% turned out for yesterday's vote.

Faced with a deadlocked legislature, Arnie is going to have to start cutting. 5,000 state employees are going for starters. Funding to municipalities will be slashed meaning fewer firefighters and police officers. And tens of thousands of California teachers will likely be thrown out of work.

That's the sort of mischief that ten percent of the electorate can cause a government when direct democracy translates into mob rule under a dysfunctional legislature hatched by a deeply flawed constitution.

I wonder how long it will be before all the 'law and order' types who couldn't be bothered to vote yesterday start screaming about runaway crime on the streets?

Yippee, Now We're Arming the Taliban

Captured Taliban ammunition and automatic weapons appear to be from stocks supplied by the United States to Afghan government forces. Well, surprise, surprise. From the New York Times:

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

The presence of this ammunition among the dead in the Korangal Valley, an area of often fierce fighting near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.

With a government thoroughly infiltrated by warlords whose very history is of playing both sides of the street, is this any surprise? The insurgency is no longer the exclusive preserve of the Taliban. It's long morphed into a coalition of groups - Islamist, nationalist, criminal or those simply aggrieved and seeking revenge.

The United States has been criticized, as recently as February by the federal Government Accountability Office, for failing to account for thousands of rifles issued to Afghan security forces. Some of these weapons have been documented in insurgents’ hands, including weapons in a battle last year in which nine Americans died.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/world/asia/20ammo.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Jeffrey Oliphant's Herculean Chore

Stephen Harper as Eurystheus. Brian Mulroney as the sly King Augeas. Jeffrey Oliphant as Hercules, charged by Eurystheus to clean the stables befouled by Augeas' cattle.

Oliphant's task is Herculean. He has to listen to one of the most powerful prime ministers in Canadian history describe a course of shady dealings and then decide how much of what he hears can be believed. He has a lot of crap to shovel his way through. It's dirty and it smells.

Nobody can avoid noticing how furiously Mulroney, under examination by inquiry counsel, is spinning his evidence. Time after time when asked a direct, simple question, Mulroney uses it as an opportunity to slip into a repetitive churning over of facts and allegations that he claims exonerate him of all wrongdoing. It's positively tiresome. It's as though he's waving his arms at Oliphant and yelling, "no, don't look over there, look over here, over here."

I think Mulroney has tripped himself up over his account of how he treated the cash, or at least as much of it as he admits having received from Schreiber.

If there's one thing that fledgling lawyers have drummed into their pointy little heads, it's the concept of trusts and retainers. Clients are normally required to give counsel money in the form of retainers, essentially security against fees and expenses to be incurred. Lawyers have to treat those retainers according to very specific rules. Those rules govern how the money is received, how it is held and how it is eventually disbursed and accounted for to the client.

Mulroney couldn't give a straight answer about how he received, how he held or how he disbursed the Schreiber money. His tax lawyer told the Canadian Revenue Agency in his 'voluntary disclosure' that the money was earned by Mulroney in 1993, 1994 and 1995. However that's not what Mulroney told Oliphant.

Mulroney's version is that the retainer was an ongoing matter until 1998, the last year he did any work for Schreiber, apparently on some pasta project. It was only when Schreiber was charged in Germany with tax evasion that Mulroney ended the retainer at which point he took his payment, i.e. all the money. Mulroney insisted that, prior to that point, he didn't touch the money because it wasn't his.

The inquiry counsel, Richard Wolson, asked a telling question. Why, if Mulroney believed he hadn't earned the income until 1999, didn't he just declare it as income in that year instead of retaining a senior tax lawyer to tell the tax authorities that it was undeclared income from 1993 to 1995? Mulroney almost suggested that his tax lawyer simply made up the timing of the income in his voluntary disclosure.

This is a glaring inconsistency that Oliphant is going to have to resolve. He's going to have to make some interesting findings on questions of credibility.

In the greater scheme of things, how Mulroney dealt with the taxes on his Schreiber money may appear inconsequential but this is a case full of undocumented agreements, dead witnesses, false statements, inconsistencies and conflicting claims. To sort through that Oliphant is going to have to read tea leaves, the indirect evidence. You have to weigh how witnesses performed under questioning. Where they forthright and candid or were they evasive and incredible? You look at what is clear from whatever hard evidence you do have, what is unclear or inconsistent and what is missing that ought to be there. That is what Mr. Wolson has been doing, putting together a picture piece by piece. He doesn't have any real smoking gun here. This is going to come down to questions of credibility and, as far as I can tell, on that score Mulroney has done himself no favours.

Why Won't Harper Fix Chalk River?

Maybe he's just plain happier devoting his limited talents to attack ads.

The Chalk River nuclear installation is down again. Heavy water leaks. Let's see, the Chalk River facility has been beset by massive problems for two years. That's all been on Harper's watch. It's still screwed up. He fired Keene when he needed a scapegoat but those only come in ones and there is no ducking the scandal this time. Steve has to wear this one.

Atomic Energy Canada, or more correctly, Steve's Atomic Energy Canada has shut down the reactor so it can take a month to figure out what to do. In the meantime that reactor won't be producing isotopes which will leave radiology in a bad way in central and eastern Canada.

Steve's own beloved Alberta, however, apparently knows better than to trust the Harper government to supply isotopes. It gets its supply from Europe. Oh, I guess that explains why Harper could care less.

Spector Rats Out Mulroney

Memo to Brian: Don't mock people who know where you've buried the bodies.

In his opening appearance at the Oliphant inquiry, Brian Mulroney laid into a number of those he considers disloyal including Stephen Harper and even Mulroney's former chief of staff, Norman Spector. This guy doesn't have many bridges left that he can afford to douse them all in gasoline.

Now Mulroney has a headache. Spector has gone to Canadian Press to tell them that his former boss isn't being truthful with the inquiry. From the Toronto Star:

Mulroney has acknowledged that he accepted at least $225,000 from Schreiber to promote the later "reincarnation" of Bear Head after he left office in 1993.

But during four days of testimony last week at the inquiry headed by Justice Jeffrey Oliphant, Mulroney asserted that he had ditched the original proposal after Spector informed him in late 1990 that it would cost taxpayers too much.

Mulroney pointed to that decision, in his first day on the stand, to rebut any suggestion he had been unduly influenced by Schreiber in personal meetings held to discuss the project.

"What we've learned about Mulroney is that he's very slippery with words and evasive with his testimony," Spector told The Canadian Press. "He didn't cancel the project in any incarnation. He never cancelled it."

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/636046

Oh Brian, Brian, Brian. You really must learn to pick your fights.

Mad From Thirst

Thirst - conjures up scenes of lost souls crawling across deserts or adrift on the ocean in lifeboats. It always produces an intense feeling of human vulnerability.

What we are going to have to start thinking of is thirst on a national, even regional scale, thirst that besets hundreds of millions of people. That's beginning right now, in India and China. The Reuters news agency reports that India may soon be forced to buy freshwater for some of its people. For some time now residents of some major Indian cities have been dependent on privately operated water trucks, their municipal water systems hopelessly overwhelmed. Now it's the really poor people in the countryside that are awaiting the sporadic arrival of the water trucks: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/124270350152.htm

The situation is worse in India's next door neighbour and emerging superpower rival, China. Like India, China faces a general water shortage that's only going to continue to worsen as the Himalayan glaciers recede. But China treats its already limited surface water as an industrial waste disposal system, rendering enormous amounts of what remains unsafe for human consumption, some of it unfit even for irrigation.

Faced with an immediate problem, China is resorting to a massive, 'go for broke' solution that may not work and risks severe ecological blowback in the future. The report from today's Guardian delivers a sense of silent desperation, even recklessness, on the part of China's government: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/18/china-water-crisis

What emerges from these stories is that neither country really has a viable, long-term response to its growing freshwater crisis. India seems bogged down in bandaid measures. Yet Mubai seems the least worrisome at the moment. For all we see China as a totalitarian state, it is remarkable how feeble is Beijing's control over its own provinces, their governments and industries. There's a really eerie element of institutional anarchy suggesting that China has all but lost control over its industrial revolution.

Cheney's Tortured, Twisted, Evil Mind

Thanks to McClatchey Newspapers, Dick Cheney will never be able to escape the fact that, under his command, terrorism suspects were tortured to gin up evidence of a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Here's what that Dick told the Rocky Mountain News back in 2004:

"The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back. We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there for anybody who wants to look at it."

Of course, that's what torture does. It gets people to say anything they think you want to hear so that you'll stop torturing them. If you want them to confirm a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq, just keep demanding they reveal the existence of such a link while you continue torturing them. It won't take long for them to realize what you want them to say and they'll say it.

This bastard is sick beyond belief. I'm sure Satan is starting to get impatient waiting for his rotten heart to explode.

Kalifornia Krunchtime

Even the Governator can't save California.

The world's seventh largest economy is teetering on the edge of financial collapse. It's the price to be paid for getting a little too carried away with illusions of democracy. California's constitution requires two-thirds majorities to pass budgets or to increase taxes. The natural result in a fiercely partisan legislature is gridlock with budgets not getting passes and taxes not raised to meet the state's basic needs.

Despite all their dire problems, Californians don't like turning out to vote. That leaves most elections decided by older, established white folks who (this is California after all) tend to be either far right or far left. That, in turn, translates into very little middle ground in the state's legislature or, put another way, a huge no-man's land between the trenches on either side.

And then there's the sorry business of binding referenda. It isn't hard to get a particular proposition on the ballot for the next election and the results are binding on the legislature. Dumb, dumb and dumber. It resulted in the controversial Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage in California. In Louisiana, a state known for its barrel-bottom educational standards, voters were given the opportunity to choose tax cuts or education funding. Guess which option won?

In other words, direct democracy in the form of binding plebiscites breeds dysfunction. California is facing real problems in the very near future. If it can't reform its governance, it's toast.

Let Us Know When You Find Jimmy Hoffa

American authorities have started what will be a six-year project to dredge New York's Hudson River. From 1947 until 1977, General Electric dumped - wait for it - 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from its capacitor manufacturing plants.

The contaminated sludge will be loaded on rail cars and shipped to - where else? - Texas, the environmental cesspit of the United States.

The Slur That Now Leads the Republicans

David Frum appears to be losing his bid to reclaim his beloved Republican Party for intelligent people or at least keep it from sinking to the very bottom of the Slimbaugh cesspool.

A half-century ago, many conservatives followed another leader who accused the president of the day of treason. The leader was Robert Welch and the president was Dwight Eisenhower, whom Welch termed a "conscious and dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy." We all remember that Bill Buckley defied and opposed Welch. Today we admire Bill for doing it. We forget that Bill's actions nearly wrecked National Review, as Welch's followers canceled their subscriptions and accused Buckley himself of adhering to the conspiracy. That seems funny in retrospect, but it was not funny at the time.

The writers at NR have not forgotten this history. And yet that has not prevented us all from reliving it. I fear that the costs of indulging paranoid talk in the conservative world will be far greater than ever they were in the 1960s. Back then, sensible Republicans could ignore Robert Welch. But Limbaugh is omnipresent - and now our former vice president has told us he is to be preferred as a party leader to Colin Powell. Powell - the man who could have had our party presidential nomination for the asking in 1996! The man that Cheney's administration sent to Congress and the United Nations to make the case against Iraq in 2003, because that administration knew that Powell commanded more respect and deference than any other administration member, not excepting the president himself.

The blogger Matt Yglesias made a telling point the other day. The assertion that Limbaugh leads the conservative movement began as a slur, an attack point. It is the weakness of our Republican elected leaders - and the indulgence of those who should be our conservative intellectual leaders - that has elevated the slur into plausible reality.

It's too bad the Republicans chose to make the hicks, bigots, fundies and rednecks their path to power. Now they're stuck with them and, worse, it's not just the camel's nose under the tent anymore. It's the whole damned camel. Hey guys, learn to live with it and, when you get a moment, grab a shovel and clean up that mess in the corner.

Standing In The Lions' Den

Standing in that most Catholic of American universities, Notre Dame, Barack Obama didn't hesitate to address his nation's bitter divide on abortion.

"No matter how much we may want to fudge it – indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory – the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable," said Obama as he accepted an honorary law degree.

...Maybe we won't agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually – it has both moral and spiritual dimensions'," he said. He continued: "Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature."

Obama's comments reminded me of Pierre Trudeau's words during an interview at the time he began the trek to reproductive freedom by decriminalizing abortion. That was 40-years ago. He said at the time that he knew Canadian society was sharply divided on the issue and irreconcilable. He said he also knew that his government's initiative would please neither side and so, in the circumstances, it was probably the best that could be achieved in that society.

There's something about genuine leaders and real courage. A lot of the time you leave a lot of people angry, for a while.

We're Not Leaving Afghanistan - Peter MacKay. Then Again, We Never Were

Erstwhile DefMin Peter MacKay snuck into Kandahar apparently to tell the troops that there'll be plenty for them to do when Canada's combat mission there ends in 2011.

Memo to Pete: stop bullshitting everybody over there and at home.

So long as we have troops in Afghanistan, we don't get to decide when their combat mission will end. That's because the Taliban holds the iniative. We won't have the offensive combat mission but that's not exactly been a roaring success these past eight years anyway. But don't worry about that, Pete, the Taliban are on the offensive. They bring their war to us.

Most of Canada's casualties over the past couple of years haven't been from gunfights but roadside bombs, improvised explosive devices. Now, unless Pete is promising that, post 2011, our soldiers won't be driving down those same deadly roads, he's a lying bastard. Unless Pete can assure Canadian soldiers that they won't have to go anywhere in Afghanistan without being armed to the teeth, he's a lying bastard. Unless Pete can show up in Afghanistan announced instead of having to skulk in and skulk out, he's a lying bastard.

You see combat typically has two dimensions. One is offensive, the other defensive. We started this business years ago on the offensive. Gradually the insurgency has turned that around so that most of the time they're on the offensive. They hold the initiative, decide when and where to give battle or deny it. They have enough freedom of movement to stage highly complex attacks on major cities including Kabul, Kandahar and Khost. They have enough freedom of movement that they can get to the approaches of our garrisons to plant and conceal high-explosive 'improvised' mines.

Whether you're on the offensive or on the defensive, you're involved in a combat mission. The only difference is which side is calling the shots.

The day Canadian forces' combat mission in Afghanistan ends, is the day the last one of them flies out.

Arms Race Update - Pakistan Expanding Nuclear Arsenal

You would think Pakistan would have better uses for the billions in military aid it has received from the United States than to ramp up its ability to wage a war of mutual annihilation on India. Apparently that's not the way Pakistan sees it. From The New York Times:

Adm. Mike Mullen the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the assessment of the expanded arsenal in a one-word answer to a question on Thursday in the midst of lengthy Senate testimony. Sitting beside Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, he was asked whether he had seen evidence of an increase in the size of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

“Yes,” he said quickly, adding nothing, clearly cognizant of Pakistan’s sensitivity to any discussion about the country’s nuclear strategy or security.

Inside the Obama administration, some officials say, Pakistan’s drive to spend heavily on new nuclear arms has been a source of growing concern, because the country is producing more nuclear material at a time when Washington is increasingly focused on trying to assure the security of an arsenal of 80 to 100 weapons so that they will never fall into the hands of Islamic insurgents.

Admiral Mullen's terse admission reflects one of the most intractable problems in this region, one that largely plays out beneath NATO's nose in Afghanistan where our supposed ally, Hamid Karzai, constantly courts support from India. Fareed Zakaria recently noted that India is Afghanistan's main aid donor.

India wants to expand its presence in Afghanistan for reasons legitimate and illegitimate. It does have a pressing interest in the TAPI (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India) pipeline project that could give India access to Caspian Basin oil and gas. But it also allows India to give Pakistan fits over fearing an Indian-dominated Afghanistan boxing it in.

What never seems to get mentioned in the TAPI discussions is how India would secure its pipeline access against interruption by Pakistan. The pipelines would have to pass through Pakistan to reach India meaning Islamabad could turn off the taps for any number of strategic purposes which would cause enormous havoc to the Indian economy.

It's hard not to see Pakistan's drive to acquire more nukes except in the context of a perceived sense of increasing tensions or, worse, a belief in inevitable war with India. Pakistan is all too aware of India's massive drive to rearm and its overall qualitative and quantitative superiority over its Muslim neighbour. It's little comfort to Pakistan to know that India wants a more effective military to try to offset China's rearmament efforts because Islamabad realizes all that new Indian hardware can be used against Pakistan as easily as China.

The West has to solve this problem of growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. The more we allow containment paranoia to spread through Pakistan, the more we nudge Pakistan into the arms of China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. If we think we've got problems now...

All the Fun, Without the Pain

For the past 54 consecutive years, the Euros have gotten together one night every year to utterly shred their dignity. It's called the Eurovision Song Contest which is an astonishing tribute to mankind's ability to write really awful songs to be performed by even worse musicians.

Fortunately this virulent Euro pox doesn't make it across the Atlantic and if you've ever seen it you'll know exactly what I mean.

But wait, there's more (there's always more). Thanks to The Guardian's Heidi Stephens you can relive all this year's excitement by browsing through her live blog from last night. She really does convey all the horror without you ever having to look at the gore. Enjoy:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/may/16/eurovision-bbc

$300,000 Is Not Peripheral To A Poor Man

Jeffrey Oliphant's hardest job may be to put sensible meanings to Brian Mulroney's words.

Brian Mulroney cannot accept the normal interpretation of words so he's invented his own. Take his description of his relationship with Schreiber as "peripheral."

By all accounts, Brian Mulroney was not a wealthy man while he was prime minister. We have that from his aide, Norman Spector. When we do have a wealthy prime minister, a Paul Martin or a Pierre Trudeau, we know about their wealth and where it came from.

Do you remember how Mila Mulroney carried on when it was time for them to vacate 24 Sussex Drive? She even wanted the National Capital Commission to pay her for the wallpaper in the place! Finally the NCC cut her a cheque for $150,000 for furnishings the Mulroneys decided to leave behind at 24 Sussex Drive and Harrington Lake but the cheque was returned after a controversy erupted over just who had paid for those furnishings in the first place.

So a man hands Mulroney envelopes stuffed with thousand dollar bills, a hundred grand a pop, three times, and to Mulroney this was "peripheral"? Now it might have been peripheral to a man who was actually vastly wealthy, someone who could leave his public service job, buy a $1.7-million dollar home and toss in a further million dollars on renos. But Brian Mulroney wasn't a wealthy man, was he? Was he?

Posterity = Prosperity

I have long argued that the genetic flaw in Western society, particularly North American society, the missing gene that pretty much dooms us all, is the absense of posterity in our planning.

A couple of months back I took this look at posterity:

Posterity doesn't fit into our economic model of production and consumption because it creates a fetter on both. We have lost our understanding of the importance of posterity to our society, to our country. We no longer plan today for generations to come far in the future. We no longer look much beyond the next electoral cycle.

Protecting posterity is an act of collective consciousness and will. It is acknowledging that we're entitled to our fair share and no more. We can't have it all without depriving future generations of their fair share.

To try to understand the idea of "fair share" imagine if our great, great, great grandparents had followed our path.

Imagine if our ancestors had two things - the ability to consume everything they could get their hands on and a blind indifference to the day when it was our turn to populate this country. Imagine if two or three generations had gone on a rapacious binge gobbling up the world's resources; going into serious deficit on renewables (emptying the oceans, logging off the forests, transforming farmland into desert) and fouling the environment. Then consider how their depredations might impact on your life today. I think that's beyond the imagination of all but the best science fiction writers but that's of no real matter. It's enough in any event to make the case for posterity and the concept of "fair share."

I'm revisiting the subject of posterity today because of an excellent article in The New York Times exploring why Norway, every teabagger's evil empire, is doing so darned well while the rest of the Western world reels under global meltdown:

The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway.

With a quirky contrariness as deeply etched in the national character as the fjords carved into its rugged landscape, Norway has thrived by going its own way. When others splurged, it saved. When others sought to limit the role of government, Norway strengthened its cradle-to-grave welfare state.

And in the midst of the worst global downturn since the Depression, Norway’s economy grew last year by just under 3 percent. The government enjoys a budget surplus of 11 percent and its ledger is entirely free of debt.

Norway is a relatively small country with a largely homogeneous population of 4.6 million and the advantages of being a major oil exporter. It counted $68 billion in oil revenue last year as prices soared to record levels. Even though prices have sharply declined, the government is not particularly worried. That is because Norway avoided the usual trap that plagues many energy-rich countries.

Instead of spending its riches lavishly, it passed legislation ensuring that oil revenue went straight into its sovereign wealth fund, state money that is used to make investments around the world. Now its sovereign wealth fund is close to being the largest in the world, despite losing 23 percent last year because of investments that declined.

“The U.S. and the U.K. have no sense of guilt,” said Anders Aslund, an expert on Scandinavia at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But in Norway, there is instead a sense of virtue. If you are given a lot, you have a responsibility.”

Eirik Wekre, an economist who writes thrillers in his spare time, describes Norwegians’ feelings about debt this way: “We cannot spend this money now; it would be stealing from future generations.”

It's hard not to contrast Norway's approach to its oil wealth to that of the Conservative governments of Alberta. The Klein/Stelmach machine is still glued to the fantasy that growth will lift their province out of its problems. And it's not just Alberta. The rest of us would do well to give some serious consideration to this same object lesson. Whether we live in British Columbia or Ontario or New Brunswick, we all need to grasp the idea that posterity is the lifeblood of our nation's future.

Posterity isn't about preserving grand edifices for future generations. It's all about preserving a world for those future generations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/business/global/14frugal.html?em

Brian's Little Bags of Cash

Brian Mulroney did his best to act perplexed that Karlheinz Schreiber gave him envelopes stuffed with cash. Cash of all things! Thousand dollar bills no less. Mulroney seemed downright vexed at having to deal in grimy paper currency although he did point out it was valid, legal tender - perhaps simply wanting to use the word 'legal' in conjunction with his loot.

Mulroney gave the impressing he really didn't know what to do with cash so he just stuffed it in his safe at home or in a safety deposit box.

And yet, by some accounts, cash was the Mulroneys very favourite variety of capital. Norman Spector wrote of making a bank run once a month to fetch a supply of cash for Mila.

"Mulroney was not a rich man. Party funds were being drawn, and one of our staff was assigned to pore through personal expenses to determine if some might be reimbursed. Every month I cashed a cheque at a local bank and remitted the funds to Mila," Spector wrote.

Then there was the former prime minister's chef who once claimed he ran a regular shuttle picking up envelopes stuffed with cash from Fred Doucet and delivering them to Mrs. Mulroney - although he later denied every saying such a thing.

Schreiber picked up the 'not a rich man' theme in his evidence when he claimed he was approached by Doucet to give money to the boss because he was hard up.

And then there's the return to Montreal. The oh so not rich Mulroney began his return to private life by purchasing a posh home for $1.7-million. You don't find a lot of poor people who can manage that little trick. Better yet, before they moved into their 'fixer upper' they put around a million dollars into renovations. That's a lot of new toilets and counter tops.

The kicker though, according to Stevie Cameron, is that most of the cost of the renos was - paid in cash.

It strikes me that if this last point can be proven, somebody's got some 'splainin to do, somebody who was oh so not rich. Then again, Cameron seems to have gotten a couple of things wrong before.

Don't Blame Me, I Didn't Even Know the Guy

Now there's something a family can be proud of. One of my distant ancestors led the pharmaceutical research team at AG Bayer in Germany in the 19th century. He was credited with two breakthroughs. One was Aspirin. The other was Heroin. It was actually one of his employees, Felix Hofman who figured out how to stabilize ASA in tablet form but Heinrich raked in the bucks. As for heroin, they believed it was far less addictive than morphine,'heroic' even. Guess they got that one wrong.

Even Russia is Talking War - Resource Wars

While our leaders fantasize about Arctic nature parks, the rest of the world is either engaging in or getting ready for what they know is coming - resource wars. These aren't wars fought to expand empires or to spread ideologies. They're wars to seize or defend resources.

A Kremlin report released today warns that Russia foresees wars on its borders in the future over control of energy resources. From Reuters:

"In a competition for resources, problems that involve the use of military force cannot be excluded that would destroy the balance of forces close to the borders of the Russian Federation and her allies," said the document, which maps out Russia's security strategy until 2020.

"The attention of international politics in the long-term perspective will be concentrated on the acquisition of energy resources," the paper said.

It said regions where such a competition for resources could arise included the Middle East, the Barents Sea, the Arctic, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. Russia also sees increased competition for food, fresh water and land.

The strategy document was approved by President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday and published on Wednesday by the Russian Security Council, which includes Russia's top politicians and intelligence chiefs and is chaired by Medvedev.

Gee, what a novel idea! It sounds remarkably like the assessments that have been coming out of the Pentagon and British Ministry of Defence. It seems consistent with the accelerating militarization underway throughout the Middle East, South Asia and Far East.

We know that Russia is already building a specific military force to bolster its resource ambitions in the Arctic not to mention a new generation of surface and submersible nuclear power plants and a fleet of ice breaker-super tankers. And we're sitting around spouting nonsense about Arctic nature parks? Incredible.

True Patriot Love. That sounds delightful. But what about the other part, We Stand on Guard for Thee?

Not Canadian Forces' Best Day

The Canadian Forces have a problem they'd very much like to just go away.

It all surrounds complaints by Canadian soldiers of having to stand by, helplessly, as their Afghan counterparts sodomized young boys. When the story broke it caused a furore, leading the Canadian Forces to launch an internal investigation into how our military police handled the complaints. Just fine, says the report:

"It was determined that the initial allegations concerning such incidents contained serious discrepancies, could not be corroborated, were not reported to the chain of command and ultimately were not substantiated," said a statement released Tuesday by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service.

The investigation concluded that no Canadian Forces personnel committed "any service or criminal offences in relation to the alleged sexual abuse of Afghan male children."

NDP defence critic Jack Harris said the findings are nonsense:

"It seems there is a total washing of the hands. To our knowledge, it was reported to the chain of command," said Harris, whose party first raised the abuse allegations in Parliament.

"We've got people on the record saying that not only did they witness this abuse but they reported it, and yet this investigation result says there was nothing reported to the chain of command. Something is wrong with this picture."

What's seemingly not being disputed (for good and ample reason) is that Afghan security forces, the guys on our side, have a fondness for little boy bum. They do. It's part of the whole warlord culture. In fact it was this practice that was a key to the Taliban coming to power. The Talibs didn't approve of pedophilia or sodomy and forcefully intervened to rescue a young boy from the clutches of a warlord. Afghan villagers thought it was pretty nice to be able to take their sons with them to market without having to fear some thug grabbing them for his sexual gratification.

Taliban gone/sodomy back. This is from The New York Times, February 21, 2002:

"Though the puritanical Taliban tried hard to erase pedophilia from male-dominated Pashtun culture, now that the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is gone, some people here are indulging in it once again.

"During the Taliban, being with a friend was difficult, but now it is easy again," said Ahmed Fareed, a 19-year-old man with a white shawl covering his face except for a dark shock of hair and piercing kohl-lined eyes. Mr. Fareed should know. A shopkeeper took him as a lover when he was just 12, he said.

An interest in relationships with young boys among warlords and their militia commanders played a part in the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan. In 1994, the Taliban, then a small army of idealistic students of the Koran, were called to rescue a boy over whom two commanders had fought. They freed the boy and the people responded with gratitude and support. "At that time boys couldn't come to the market because the commanders would come and take away any that they liked," said Amin Ullah, a money changer, gesturing to his two teenage sons hunched over wads of afghani bank notes at Kandahar's currency bazaar.

For some reason we'd rather not discuss the fact that the ally we're supposedly propping up has an open penchant for pedophilia, forcible boy rape. Maybe that's our problem over there; our soldiers are only allowed to shoot in one direction.

Man Bites Dog - Mulroney Takes a Bite Out of Harper

Oh this is pleasant - a former, highly successful Tory prime minister giving a boot straight to the crotch of his much less successful Conservative successor.

Calling out L'il Stevie Harper, Mulroney chortled, "You can't form a government without seats in Quebec and if you do you can't govern in this country. And you shouldn't govern." Ouch, feel the burn! Take that, you snot nosed punk.

But Muldoon wasn't finished. This is, after all, the Mulroney-Oliphant inquiry. Lyin' Brian wasted no time labelling Harper a doofus for his pre-recession GST cuts, calling them "bad economic policy."

"There wouldn't be an economist in the finance department or the Bank of Canada that would say that was a smart thing to do. It cuts $12 billion out of your revenue ... it hurts your exports."

No reaction yet from our Furious Leader. There are reports that his staff were seen to flee to the safety of the hallways to the sound of chairs being kicked around the prime minister's office and a team from Sears showed up later to shampoo Mr. Harper's carpets.

Pity, they were such good friends.

Did Mulroney Just Admit Committing Perjury?

The man who set the gold standard for Conservative integrity, Brian Mulroney, says he concealed his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber, "...to avoid the same kinds of deceitful and false purveying of information that had led to the original Airbus matter in the first place."

Say what? Under oath you gave counsel a false account of your dealings with Schreiber to avoid ...deceitful and false purveying of information? What kind of self-serving delusion is that?

In order to further avoid deceitful and false purveying of information, Mulroney said there are two Schreibers: the upright businessman he dealt with back then and the scumbag who has supposedly caused him such grief today. In other words, Mulroney took cash-stuffed envelopes from a really great guy and it's all Schreiber's fault for, well, for spilling the beans.

Why Are We Flying Air Death?

Most humanitarian relief efforts and even major peacekeeping operations rely heavily on air cargo for the supplies needed to keep going. In other words they have to hire private contractors with cargo planes to keep their lifelines open. Now it turns out that most of those contractors work both sides of the street - supplying peacekeepers and NGOs while also ignoring arms embargoes to deliver weapons to any murderous sod with the cash to pay for them.

Evidence that arms dealers have comprehensively penetrated the world market in aid, peacekeeping and stability operations is disclosed in a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). At least 90% of international air cargo carriers named in UN security council and other arms trafficking-related reports have also supplied UN agencies, EU and Nato governments, and non-government organisations, as well as private contractors in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, it says.

The report, Air Transport and Destabilising Commodity Flows, shows how air cargo carriers involved in humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations have also transported a range of other "conflict-sensitive" goods such as cocaine, diamonds and precious minerals.

It cites as an example how UN peacekeeping missions in Sudan continued to use aircraft operated by Badr Airlines even after the UN security council said the company should be banned for allegedly breaking arms embargos. Unicef used Juba Air Cargo, also based in Sudan, even though the UN said it had documented evidence showing the company violated an arms embargo, the Sipri report says.

It says DynCorp, a large US private military company which supplies the US army, contracted Aerolift, a company described in a UN sanctions committee report as illicitly supplying arms to al-Shabab, the Islamist group in Somalia.

The report also shows how individuals involved in organised international criminal networks have penetrated legal government-to-government trade in arms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/12/aid-arms-trafficking-air-cargo

Was Ist Das? Anybody Smell a Rat?

The 'official' Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi. has touched a nerve by proclaiming that his boss, Joe Ratzinger, was never a member of the Hitler Youth. I guess Father Lombardi hasn't had time to thumb through Pope Bennie's autobiography where he notes, quite plainly, that he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth, but he sort of went AWOL from the HY after he got out of the seminary.

I guess Father Lombardi hasn't seen this picture either.

I'm not saying that Joe was an ardent Nazi. The only way we'd have known that was if Germany had won the war. When that scrap didn't turn out too well for the Fatherland, Germany was instantly full of innocents like Joe who'd never really supported Hitler.

Memories of Tet '68

Another major Taliban attack on an Afghan city today, this time the provincial capital Khost.

The insurgents swarmed the city in a multi-pronged attack comprising foot soldiers and a few suicide bombers. The attack opened with the explosion of a suicide car bomb outside the Governor's compound.

The full extent of the operation isn't yet clear but there was one telling episode. Once the gunfire started, the Americans responded by sending a 'quick reaction force' to the battle. The Taliban were ready for them. They had actually prepared an ambush force that, according to reports, caught the Americans by surprise.

The ambush element reveals this as more than one big, hit and run raid. This was a carefully planned military operation. That sort of thing takes time to plan, organize and even rehearse. It takes some doing to muster and deploy these forces undetected and then infiltrate them into a city in American-controlled territory. The attackers would need a lot of local assistance, probably even some collaboration from within the government.

The actual damage inflicted won't be all that great. They are, after all, limited to small arms and a few suicide bombs, hardly the stuff needed to inflict staggering losses on the defenders or the government infrastructure. But that's not what the insurgents are trying to achieve. Their objective is to demonstrate to the Afghan public that they can attack, at will, in an orchestrated fashion - overrunning a city - and the Afghan government, even with American protection, is helpless to prevent it. They're out to undermine the public's confidence in the ability of their government to protect itself and, by implication, the public either.

Lyin' Brian Gets Up to Bat, Brings Own Pitcher

The Brian Mulroney/Jeffrey Oliphant inquiry really gets underway today when Justice Oliphant hands the proceedings over to Mr. Mulroney for a two-day carnival show intended to "frame" the issues.

If the witness was a mortal, like you for example, he would be called, sworn and then questioned by the inquiry counsel, the guy who's supposed to frame the issues. But in this inquiry there are mortals and there is Brian Mulroney, the guy who lied under oath about the very subject matter of this inquiry, the schmeergelder he received via cash-stuffed envelopes from Karlheinz Schreiber.

Recognizing the divinity of The Witness, Justice Oliphant has decided that the inquiry will grant The Witness the indulgence of being allowed to be questioned, not by inquiry counsel, but by his own lawyer, his own advocate for the first day and a half.

An opening statement is one thing - five, ten maybe even twenty minutes. But a day and a half of spin spread in a thick, smothering blanket by Mulroney counsel, Guy Pratte? You may still think this inquiry, with its artificially narrowed scope (don't look here, don't look there, no talking about that or that or that), is legitimate but I don't. Mulroney is the culprit in this proceeding, it's only because his heart still beats that Stephen Harper was forced to stage this set up at all. That he should then be allowed to run the show leaves little doubt this is a grotesque travesty.

Reviving Kyoto - Because That Worked So Well the First Time

Environmentalists and climate scientists were hoping for a real breakthrough in the fight to slash carbon emissions in the new U.N. climate pact. It doesn't look like they're (we're) going to get it. A report in Reuters suggests that we're more likely to wind up with little more than a slightly improved version of the Kyoto accords:

"There's not a lot of ambition around," said Jennifer Morgan, of the London-based think-tank E3G, of submissions to the United Nations published this month to meet a deadline for consideration in a deal to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.

...plans outlined by developed nations add up to average cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of between 9 and 16 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, according to Reuters calculations. That is nearer the goal of the Kyoto Protocol -- an average cut by industrialized nations of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 -- than the 25 to 40 percent reduction below 1990 by 2020 outlined by the U.N. Climate Panel as the order of cutback required to avert the worst of global warming.

"The economic downturn is putting a brake on the level of commitment and investment to mitigate climate change," said Pep Canadell, head of the global carbon project at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

Among developed nations, the European Union says cuts must ensure that world temperatures do not rise more than 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above levels that existed before the Industrial Revolution.

"Submissions so far from all countries are nowhere near 2 Celsius," said Bill Hare, a visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a director of Climate Analytics.

"Many countries are slumbering through the climate crisis like Sleeping Beauty," Norwegian Environment Minister Erik Solheim said, asked about the gap between the rich nations' offers and the expectations of developing nations.

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtUSInvestingNews/idUSTRE5463BY20090507

Cheney Slams Powell

Will Dick Cheney please hurry up and die? And, please, when he does go, let's be sure to put him in one of those containers they use for burying spent nuclear fuel rods so that nothing leaks out - ever.

So what's that bald old Dick up to this week? Well he's jumping into Rush Limbaugh's lap to slam his former colleague, Colin Powell. From Associated Press:

Asked about recent verbal broadsides between Limbaugh and Powell, Cheney said, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh. My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican."

Powell, who was secretary of state under President George W. Bush and held the nation's top military post under President George H.W. Bush, endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president last year. Nonetheless, since the election he has described himself as a Republican and a right-of-center conservative, though "not as right as others would like."

Powell has argued the Republican Party needs to move toward the center and reach out to growing black, Hispanic and Asian communities, but instead has been shrinking because it hasn't changed as the country changed in the face of economic distress. "Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less," Powell said last week.

For months, Powell has urged the party to turn away from the acid-tongued Limbaugh. "I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without," Powell said.
"Colin Powell is just another liberal," Limbaugh retorted. "What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat." Limbaugh said Powell is "just mad at me because I'm the one person in the country that had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama. It was purely and solely based on race."

The dynamics of the Cheney-Limbaugh versus Powell set-up are interesting. Take Viet Nam for example. While Powell suited up for combat, Rush told the draft board he couldn't go because he had anal cysts and might explode spontaneously. Meanwhile Cheney was so intent on serving America that he scored five - that's right, five - draft deferments. He did everything he could short of giving birth to keep his pasty white ass safe and powdered.

God bless the Repugnicans. As long as they've got Limbaugh and Cheney reading their moral compass they'll just drift into slave state obscurity, right where their kind of trash belongs.

All They Have Left to Steal

Africa is well steeped in colonialism. For more than two centuries, European masters from Britain to Belgium carved the place up and helped themselves to the spoils the lands had to offer. Africa has been a bountiful source to meet a great many Western needs from hordes of slaves to gold, diamonds and oil. There's a reason Africans didn't get prosperous from that bounty. We pretty much took what we wanted and, when that got tired, we handed those countries over to petty thugs and criminals who did our bidding in the name of their countrymen. All in all it was a good run, so long as you weren't African.

In taking our leave, we bequeathed Africans the gifts of war, plagues and famine. We had carved up the place into nations that reflected the interests of European rulers, not the ethnic and social realities of the local peoples. The mess we left behind can be measured in the millions of innocents slaughtered in states most of us can't even find on the map - Congo, Rwanda, Chad, Nigeria, the list goes on.

Africa is Ground Zero when it comes to climate change. The wretched irony is that most of those hardest hit have a carbon footprint that's barely discernible. Chalk it up to just another gift the West has bestowed on them. But we're not done with these people, not yet. We've taken their natural riches, we've even taken their bodies but they've still got something left - their land.

There's a looming, global food shortage. World food stocks have been shrinking since 1999. For most of your lifetime, the world maintained grain reserves of about 115- 120 days. By 2006, grain reserves had fallen to 57-days, a situation that's going to get a lot worse very, very soon.

Things are changing. In large swathes of the world's food belt water is becoming a critical issue. The two emerging economic superpowers - China and India - are both facing the prospect of mass famine as the Himalayan glaciers that feed their main agricultural rivers recede. By some estimates, India could be looking at the Ganges turning into a seasonal stream, running dry precisely when its waters are needed to irrigate Indian farmland. It's predicted that India could find itself simply unable to feed up to 250,000,000 of its people. China is looking at the same situation, perhaps even worse. You can't let that many people starve without enduring massive social unrest and you do what you can to postpone the inevitable just as long as humanly possible. Just look at the arms races underway in both India and China. Somebody's gearing up for something very, very bad. (Hint to 'Michael' - this is a reality we ignore at our peril)

But what does all this have to do with Africa? Actually quite a lot. The United Nations Humanitarian Affairs office has released a chilling account of how Big Agriculture is moving in on what remains of Africa's best farmland to meet the world's demand for food and biofuel.

Rich countries and firms are leasing or buying massive tracts of land in developing nations for the production of food or biofuel. An area equivalent to Germany’s farmed land is at stake, and tens of billions of dollars on offer.

On the plus side, agro-industrial production could develop underused land, and broaden the world’s food production base while providing much needed resources for poor countries. But is the land really idle and currently unused? Are small-scale farmers going to be “tractored out” in a murky neo-colonial “land grab”?

Food-importing countries that lack land and water but are rich in capital, such as the Gulf States, are initiating deals to produce food in developing countries, where land and water are more abundant and production costs much lower. Vast tracts of land and huge amounts of money are involved: 15 million to 20 million hectares, almost equivalent to the total area under cultivation in Germany, according to analysts at the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Investment so far adds up to $20 billion to $30 billion, dwarfing foreign aid budgets for agriculture.

Joachim von Braun and Ruth Meinzen-Dick of IFPRI point out in a new policy brief that developing countries with large populations, like China, South Korea and India, are seeking similar deals, including growing biofuel crops. The institute warned that there was a "lack of transparency" in many deals, with the amounts involved "often still murky".

... in its 2008 report on "land grabbing", GRAIN, a Spain-based NGO that promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity, warned that the "very basis on which to build food sovereignty is simply being bartered away" in the deals.

"These lands will be transformed from smallholdings or forests, or whatever they may be, into large industrial estates connected to far-off markets. Farmers will never be real farmers again, job or no job," GRAIN cautioned.

Various Gulf States have struck most of the deals in East Africa, which is facing some of the biggest food shortages globally. IFPRI's von Braun and David Hallam of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) told IRIN it was "too early" to assess the impact of the deals on food security and farmers in the lessor countries.

Unease, resistance and protests Farming and pastoralist communities in the delta of Kenya's Tana River have reacted strongly to reports of government's intention to lease a chunk of this rich coastal land to Qatar. Kenya is facing huge food shortages and high prices after a third consecutive year of drought.

The spectre of poor countries facing famine selling their best farmland to foreigners, exporting the very food products their own people need, is truly depressing. Is this what we've become?

Read more here and be sure to check out the map of which countries are buying and which countries are selling their land:

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=84320

The Curious Case of Ruby Dhalla

I know a bit about nannies. I employed three of them while my kids were very young. Two were Phillipinos. All three were really quite nice and were treated very well. The nanny suite comprised a separate entry, a large bedroom, a sittingroom with stereo and TV and a private bathroom.

I got to meet quite a few Phillipino nannies. It turned out most of them didn't have the sort of suite we provided so they tended to congregate at our place on weekends to socialize. From time to time one of our nannies' friends would have a minor legal problem that I would attend to, giving me a broader insight into their lives.

Most of the Phillipino nannies I met came to Canada indirectly after serving a stint in Singapore or Hong Kong. From their stories it was pretty clear that Canadian employment conditions were a definite cut above what they'd experienced previously. That said there were enough problems for them here in Canada.

What I find particularly curious about Ms. Dhall's situation is that three Phillipino nannies would come forward with allegations against her. Those I've known were very sensitive about authority. Power and authority made them deeply apprehensive. Ms. Dahl is powerful. She has money. They know that. They also know she has some political standing. Remember that Canada is, for them, a foreign country, an unfamiliar place where most hope for nothing more than landed immigrant status. They understand there are many ways to jeopardize that chance and that making waves is one of them.

Nannies are not the sort inclined to make waves, just the opposite. Then what could they possibly hope to gain from exposing themselves in this way? They're not going to get any money out of it. There must be something sufficiently valuable and certain to make them come forward, especially to make all three come forward at the same time.

Jason Kenney says he's not behind this but his assurances are hardly convincing. I think someone is behind this and, as I mentioned, immigration is almost certainly a priority for these women.

These nannies are taking a huge risk. If their complaints are contrived, any skilled trial lawyer should be able to expose them without breaking a sweat. The best liars are the professionals and anyone who's had much experience taking the best down would have a field day with rank amateurs like these three.

There's too much at stake here to leave this to Ms. Dhalla. Michael Ignatieff should, on behalf of the LPC, be hiring his own top guns on this one. If what these women are saying is true and the Tories aren't behind this, that will be apparent soon enough and Ms. Dhalla should go before she can do further harm to the party. However, if this is a set up, that will also be apparent soon enough and then the question will be who lies behind it all? If these women are not telling the truth, there is definitely someone driving this.

Stuck On "Stupid"

When you've been doing something self-defeating for eight years, at some point you begin to look just plain stupid. That's how US forces in Afghanistan look after calling in airstrikes on two villages in Farah province last week that extinguished the lives of 147-Afghan civilians.

So what's the American response? Why, blame the Taliban of course. The Americans say the Taliban used the villagers as human shields, forcing the civilians into homes from which they were shooting at US forces.

The Americans are probably right but that doesn't make their statement any less stupid.

The Taliban does use villagers as human shields. It's all set out in the third chapter of Guerrilla Warfare 101, "Luring the Government Forces Into Attacking the Locals." You see, it's not so much about shielding Taliban fighters as it is about goading the government side to rain down its heavy firepower on the villagers, driving a wedge of shattered bodies between the civilians and their government (that's our side). It's about getting our side to defeat ourselves and, when it comes to that, we're always ready to do our bit.

We're losing this war. In truth, it's probably already lost although we're not yet at the point of understanding that. There are plenty of signs for those willing to look at them and do the math.

We've spent more than two years fruitlessly trying to drive the Taliban out of Panjwai province but we've now ceded that territory to the Taliban, closing up our garrisons and falling back to defend Kandahar City. We 'control' a lot less territory than we did when Rick Hillier first frogmarched Canada's battle group into Kandahar province.

The Karzai government remains terminally corrupt and under the control of warlords, some as dark as anything seen from the Taliban. Karzai has now chosen a brutal warlord as his running mate for the August elections.

Not only has Karzai recruited a nasty warlord as his running mate, The Times reports he's about to ink a 'power sharing' deal with the nastiest of them all, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Until recently, Hek was fighting alongside his one time mortal enemies, the Taliban, happily killing American and French soldiers. Apparently GulHek thinks a few years on our side would be good for his prospects. Remember, the guy we were told so much about who liked throwing acid in women's faces? Yeah, same guy.

And what's the lesson in all this? We've lost control of the Afghan government, a now genuinely 'criminal enterprise.' If the Afghan National Army was stronger there might just be the possibility of engineering a military coup but time is not on our side and the army seems too weak and unstable to be capable of toppling Karzai and his warlords and fighting the insurgency.

But we'll keep plodding on, as we have since 2001, in our grotesque little fantasy where the war in Afghanistan is all about the good guys, us, fighting a valiant battle against the Taliban. We are definitely stuck on 'Stupid.'

Obama's First White House Correspondents' Dinner

The difference between their guy and our guys couldn't be more obvious.

Karzai Courts Hekmatyar? Let's Just Pack Up and Leave Now.

The Times of London reports that Afghan president Hamid Karzai is offering a power sharing deal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. GulHek is a lot like a monster without the Hollywood special effects.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is on America’s “most wanted” terrorist list, is to hold talks with the Kabul government within the next few weeks.

Hekmatyar is the leader of Hezb-i-Islami, which has been fighting Nato troops alongside the Taliban. The hardline group is responsible for many attacks in the eastern and central regions, including the massacre of 10 French soldiers in Sarobi last year. It controls Kapisa province, just 50 miles north of Kabul.

The party is expected to be offered several ministries and provincial governorships in return for laying down its arms and agreeing not to disrupt the presidential elections due in August.

Hekmatyar is, how can I put this, an evil bastard. From http://www.warlordsofafghanistan.com/:

In a Hollywood movie Hekmatyar would be the evil foil to the heroic Masud. He would be an angry Islamic fundamentalist dressed in black, throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women and assassinating local tribal leaders that might rival his power. He would be the pawn of foreign secret service paymasters like the ISI, CIA, and Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia. He would unfeelingly sacrifice peasants for his cause, rocket the helpless civilians mixed in with his enemies, and his ruthless ambition would prevent the creation of a new peace. Unfortunately, in real life Hekmatyar was all these things.

...When Masud finally defeated Najibullah in 1992, all the mujahideen factions converged on Kabul. Masud outwitted Hekmatyar and slipped into the city before him. A round robin of side-swapping, backstabbing, and massacre among Hekmatyar, Masud, Dostum, and Mazari followed. The citizens and buildings of Kabul were the big losers. The problem was that Masud could not be president as he was a Tajik, not a Pashtun. Afghan kings had been Pashtun for hundreds of years. Hekmatyar was the most powerful Pashtun, and had he not been such an evil sod, Masud might have accepted some kind of deal. In the end neither prevailed. The ISI switched support from the stalemated Hekmatyar and backed Mullah Omar, the new leader of the Taliban.

After years in exile in Iran, Hekmatyar returned to Afghanistan and raised another militia once the Taliban were run out of Dodge. This time, however, he threw his hand in with his former rivals, the Taliban. It should be nice having Hek back in his old stomping grounds (he really did stomp the place), Kabul.

This is it, folks. The warlords have won.

Say "No" Now

It's time to say "no" to Stephen Harper. There's a move afoot to send a squadron of CF-18 fighter-bombers to Afghanistan.

Air strikes have proven the greatest disaster in our self-defeating war in Afghanistan. We have to rely on airpower because we have only a small fraction of the ground force we need there. Air strikes routinely kill Afghan civilians. The insurgents have become expert at making us do just that. They're using our aerial bombs to win their war, the war for Afghan hearts and minds, for them.

It's not just that air strikes are ill-suited to this sort of war, it's the way we're forced to use them that's makes the carnage even more disastrous for the Afghan people and for us.

Ceasefire.ca has an online petition to say "no" to Stephen Harper. I urge you to send your own message to the p.m. Follow this link:

http://www.ceasefire.ca/?page_id=1274

Taibbi's Brilliant Take on Faith Peddlers

This article is too good to paraphrase here. What I will give you is a teaser sample and the link. Enjoy:

I’m always on the lookout for religion’s latest counter-arguments, the new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn’t an inherently irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to wasting as much of the world’s time and energy as this particular one. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a baldness cure: you just never stop being surprised at how many different ways men can find to fail at growing hair.

This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children. The esteemed professor’s new book is called Reason, Faith and Revolution, and it’s sort of an answer to the popular atheist literature of people like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens. If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class.


http://www.alternet.org/rights/139927/these_god_pundits_can_give_you_a_splitting_headache/

Just Count the Feet and Divide By Two

100, 113, over 130 - who knows just how many Afghans were killed in the recent US airstrike in western Afghanistan? Who cares? Apparently our side doesn't care because we keep doing the Taliban's work for them by bombing villagers and turning the civilian population against us.

Dumb as mud.

Coming on the heels of video of American officers discussing how to poach Muslim Afghans over to Jesus, the mass annihilation of Afghan villagers is just sure to give a real boost to the insurgents - and to Islamist extremists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and throughout the Middle East.

Counterinsurgency wars like the one we're running in Afghanistan are a tough go for conventional, military forces like ours. We almost never win. They almost never lose. When we do win, we stick to a precise set of proven tactics. We know these tactics and so does the other side. We've even written down these rules. They're in military field manuals, especially the American FM3-24. No one can explain why, in Afghanistan, we're flaunting almost every one of those rules. It's impossible to believe that we're trying to lose but it's really easy to believe that we're not, and never have been, in this fight to win.

Where has this ever worked before?

C'mon, that's a simple question, isn't it? Better yet, it has a really simple answer too. And that kids is why the question is never asked. Let that sink in for a minute. We don't ask any of the simple questions because we don't want to hear the answers. We have several examples of our current tactics - French Indochina is probably the best - where our tactics were tried and failed miserably. We've got books stuffed with critiques of France's folly and the victory of the Viet Minh, many of them written by senior officers from the same armies now treading water in Afghanistan.

Here's another point our people never want to discuss. Just what in hell are we hoping to achieve in Afghanistan? And here's the answer. We're hoping to hang on long enough to flip this insurgency over into a civil war. We want to recruit, train and equip an Afghan army that can give the insurgents enough of a run for their money that we can get out 'with honour.' If we really set our sights higher than that we wouldn't tolerate the Karzai government in Kabul, the guys instrumental in organizing their very government as an integral part of the criminal enterprise we know as Afghanistan. The mind reels, it really does.

Why don't we discuss these things? That's because the answers would raise holy hell with the folks at home. You can't go to them after eight years and tell them these things. They'll kill the messenger, even if the generals and politicians who hatched this harebrained nonsense are long gone. George w. Bush's greatest, perhaps only, success was in dragging out these wars long enough to foist them off on his successor, to make the wars and their failure someone else's nightmare.

I suspect we're probably in the last act of this counterinsurgency screw up. This is the part where the military war drags on for a few years well after the important conflict, the political war, has been decided. The military war continues because it's our war, the conventional war the other side can't win. They can't win because they don't have jet fighters and attack helicopters and they don't have artillery or tanks or reconnaisance drones or anything that would be needed to defeat us militarily.

Here's another simple question that never gets asked. Why are they fighting us at all when they don't have any of this high-tech wizardry? Because they don't need that stuff to fight - and win - their war, the political war, the only war that matters. They don't have to defeat us, they merely have to survive and wait us out. Their weapon is the one we can't defeat and can't withstand - time.

Time was never on our side in this war and yet we squandered it as though that didn't matter. We're still carrying on as though we can just begin again from scratch. Eight years. Amazing.

Any time you hear a politician or a general telling you that we can't afford to lose in Afghanistan, remember the simple questions set out here and ask yourself why these hucksters won't and can't answer them.

China & India Returning to Their Rightful Place at Top of the Heap?

Dr Kishore Mahbuani sees nothing surprising at the notion of India and China dominating the world economy. In fact, he says it's merely a return to normal.

The National University of Singapore professor says that for all but the last two centuries of the last two thousand years, China and India have been the world's dominant economies.

"In the 19th and 20th Century, first Europe took off and then North America," he says. "But the last 200 years were historical aberrations."

Just as Genghis Khan once established an empire that covered more than one fifth of the Earth's surface, stretching from Japan to Eastern Europe, many people feel that China and India are creating Asian world powers once again.

"This crisis has had an enormous impact on Asian minds," he says. "The West was telling us they knew how to run the world, telling us how to create the best economies in the world. How can you believe that any more?"

The US model of capitalism has delivered substantial benefits, however, not least in Asian economies. When China and South Korea copied Western ways of thinking and marketing, their economies took off.

Dr Mahbuani believes that one of the fundamental things Asians have learnt from the West, is the virtues of free market economics.

"It is a question of pragmatism," he says. "Asian states are rising because they have finally understood, absorbed, and implemented the best practices."

There are two serious questions about the predicted ascendancy of China and India. First, is the Western model of globalization really going to survive if we become subordinate economies? The whole idea was premised on the West remaining economically (as well as politically and militarily) dominant.

The second question is environmental. China and India are poised to be the nations hardest hit by climate change. The loss of the Himalayan glaciers will leave both countries unable to feed hundreds of millions of their people and beset by destabilizing social unrest. Sea level rise, severe weather events, general warming - both are particularly vulnerable to these also.

The ascendancy of China and India isn't going to be some smooth, seamless transition. I don't see the West agreeing to go gently into the night.

The Debt Tarnished City on the Hill

Don't look at Washington. Forget Wall Street. Detroit, who cares?

The story of America's real fiscal crisis, the one that will define what the US looks like a decade from now, is to be found in the nation's state houses. Yes, Washington is broke but it's not the federal government that delivers most of the core services on which societies and communities are built.

During America's Age of Darkness (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II), the feds paid scant attention to America's burgeoning national debt, its balance of trade deficits, its balance of payments deficits. But the states were hardly any better. They too gorged on cheap money even as artificially skyrocketing real estate prices and sales taxes from mega purchases their buyers couldn't really afford poured money into state coffers. It was the perfect setup for a recessionary collapse.

And it's not just the slave states that are in a terrible mess. California is struggling with multi-billion dollar deficits. Even the colonial states like Massachussets are in trouble. From the also troubled Boston Globe:

The problems are expected to be so widespread, the solutions so elusive, that the state may have to rethink the size of its commitment to big-ticket programs such as its landmark healthcare coverage plan, aid to cities and towns, and education funding, the specialists said at an emergency budget hearing convened yesterday by members of the state Senate.

Several economic specialists who testified advised state officials to prepare for at least four years of budget problems, foreshadowed by dire records: State revenues declined 35 percent this April over last year, the worst ever. The fall in state revenues for this year, projected to be $3 billion less than budgeted, will probably also be the steepest in state history.

"This is going to be the worst fiscal crisis in the state's history," said Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. "I think it's fair to say it's a catastrophe. That's not an overstatement."

Widmer projects that state tax collections will not return to 2008 levels until at least 2014, as state revenues lag behind a slowly rebuilding economy.

What's by no means certain is how the looming cutbacks in core services - health care and education - will impact the states in the decades to come. America is at a point where it needs more money for healthcare, more money for education, more money for social services yet will have to make do with less money and degraded or sharply curtailed services. These are the sort of programmes that directly impact the health of a society, that are the foundation for its strength. Societies that cannot provide these things are poorly positioned for the future, especially in the face of rapidly emerging rival economies.

Get It While You Can - the Hand of God

You've got about nine hours left (as of this posting) to bid on the Hand of God (HoG) depicted above. This divine bit of hardrock goodness appeared in the backyard rock wall of some dude from Idaho. The winning bidder gets to carve it out and haul it away. It comes complete with all movie and literary rights included.

So far there've been 130 bids and, right now, it can be yours for a tad over $17,000 US. So don't dawdle. This HoG's for you.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Hand-of-God-Rock-Wall_W0QQitemZ150341780892QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item230111859c&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318%7C301%3A1%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A50

American Troops Proselytize In Afghanistan?

Onward Christian Soldiers has a new meaning in Iraq and Afghanistan where American troops are working to bring Christianity to the Muslim hordes.



This stuff, in the hands of al-Qaeda or the Taliban or any other Islamist group is powerful evidence that the Crusader has returned. When the guy on the corner with the machine gun sends a subtle message that you should drop Mohammed and jump for Jesus instead, he's introducing a troubling and potentially disastrous element into our efforts over there.

To understand the truly dark side of how Christian fundamentalism is coming to hold the levers of power in parts of the US military, read the latest Harper's magazine.

It sure doesn't help anyone over there, including Canadian troops, that this video and other like it are now being broadcast throughout the Muslim world. If Washington is going to allow this nonsense to go on, by all means hand their wars straight back to them.

Why Are We Still Propping Up Karzai?

Great. Just as the furore was dying down over Hamid Karzai getting caught signing into law a matrimonial rape bill, we learn that he's chosen a brutal warlord for his running mate in the upcoming elections. From The Guardian:

Senior diplomats and human rights workers lashed out at Hamid Karzai's decision today to select a powerful warlord accused by western officials of involvement in criminal gangs and arms smuggling as a running mate in Afghanistan's presidential election.

Karzai's decision to defy international pressure and appoint Mohammad Qasim Fahim as one of his two vice-presidential candidates for the 20 August poll showed the world and the Afghan people that the president was "moving the country backwards", said a western diplomat in Kabul, who is close to the UN chief in the country, Kai Eide.

...The former militia leader, who goes by the honorary title of Marshal Fahim, is disliked by many Afghans suspicious of the wealth he has acquired since 2001 and disliked by the west for his opposition to the disbandment of the private armies of Afghanistan's warlords. An official with an international mission in Kabul said Mr Fahim had been linked to kidnap gangs operating in the capital. He is also accused of murdering prisoners of war during the mujahideen government in the 1990s.

At some point we're going to have to face up to the facts. We've been propping up what amounts to a criminal enterprise for the last eight years. Anyone who thinks anything good can possibly come out of that is an idiot. I guess that makes Steve Harper an idiot.

Eight years.

Another fact we're going to have to come to grips with are the indisputable consequences of treading water in a counterinsurgency war for eight years. Our eight years of indifference and neglect has merely served to broaden the insurgency, adding to the Taliban ranks a disparate collection of criminals, warlords and ordinary nationalists wanting the infidels out of their country.

It's too late for us to nuke Karzai. We just don't have enough popular support or even trust among the Afghan people to attempt to install our own replacement and most of the homegrown alternatives to the current president are seen as even worse.

And for this we're willing to risk breaking NATO? Incredible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/04/afghanistan-president-hamid-karzai-election

Guess Who Ain't Coming to Dinner?

Britain has decided it doesn't want extremists, even if they are American, entering the country.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she decided to publish the list to show what type of behaviour the government will not tolerate. Those who had the door slammed in their faces between October, 2008 and March, 2009 were determined to be fostering extremism or hatred.

Names on the list include:

Michael Savage (also known as Michael Weiner) – U.S. talk radio host from San Francisco who has called the Qur’an a "book of hate."

Stephen 'Don' Black – founder of a Florida-based white supremacist website.

Fred Phelps – anti-gay preacher at Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., church.

Shirley Phelps-Roper – daughter of Fred Phelps. The pair have picketed the funerals of AIDS victims and said the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is punishment for tolerance of homosexuality
.
Yunis Al-Astal – Hamas lawmaker in Gaza.

Safwat Hijazi – Egyptian cleric and television preacher.

Artur Ryno & Pavel Skachevsky – Russian gang leaders.

Mike Guzovsky – An Israeli settler allegedly involved with military training camps.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/05/05/britain-banned-list050.html

Is Israel Abandoning Democracy?

Israel is something of a pressure cooker waiting to explode. What it values most, its identity as a Jewish state, is under an existential, demographic threat. There are but two ways to relieve the dangerous pressure, neither of them acceptable in Western society.

Israel's problem is that, when it overran territories after its creation, it absorbed a large number of Palestinians who chose to tough it out and stay in their homes rather than flee. This is what we now know as the pre-1967 war Israel. Israel's Arab population, however, is growing much faster than Israel's Jewish population and is expected to become the majority in the near future.

If Israeli Arabs become a majority at the ballot box it won't fare well for the Jewish state. Israeli Arabs haven't always been treated very well by their Jewish masters. They're unreliable, potentially the undoing of what Israel is supposed to be. If Israel is to preserve the nation as a Jewish state it either must ethnically cleanse itself of the Arab population or it must impose some form of apartheid rule, designating its Arab people as a lower order of citizen with sharply reduced political rights. Either way, Israel loses its vaunted claim as the only real democracy in the Middle East. It also stands to lose a lot of what remains of its support in the West.

Like any pressure cooker situation, changes are occurring. One of these is a spreading state repression of dissent and protest among Jewish moderates, intellectuals and peace groups. Read more here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/30/israel-military

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/05/israel-protest-feminism-draft

Another ominous development appeared in reports during the Israeli war on Gaza of fundamentalist Rabbis in the Israeli military egging their troops on to cleanse the Holy Land of these pesky Arabs.

The spread of religious fundamentalism into military forces isn't limited to Israel. Christian fundamentalists are increasingly taking the levers of power within the American armed forces. Many of them see America's military as a weapon to advance their idea of God's will. Read this chilling account from Harper's, "Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military":

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488

It wasn't until I read the Harper's story that I discovered the Christian extremists within the US military go straight up to David Petraeus himself. I can't see how any good can possibly come of this.

Arms Race Update - Australia Goes for Its Guns

When it comes to the arms races now underway Australia is something of a miners' canary and, right now, it's a bird that deserves a lot of attention.

Australia is afraid, seriously afraid of the massive rearmament programmes underway in India and China. Afraid enough that prime minister Kevin Rudd has announced a $75-billion expansion plan for his country's military forces.

Included in the shopping list are 100 F-35 multi-role fighters plus a dozen hunter-killer submarines atop a gaggle of other acquisitions and upgrades. You can find the Australian government's defence White Paper here:

http://apo.org.au/research/defending-australia-asia-pacific-century-force-2030

Sooner or later, some Canadian leader is going to come to his senses and address the global security challenges facing our own country. Strategic balances, especially in Asia and the Pacific Rim as well as the far north, are in a genuine and destabilizing state of flux. Not only are these emerging economies expanding their defensive - and offensive - military capabilities but they're also engaging in quiet campaigns of containment. Ignoring those realities could leave us in a very uncomfortable position.

Canadian Kids Quarantined in China

The Chinese are having qualms about Canadian pork and they're pretty leery about Canadian kids too.

25-students from the University of Montreal have been thrown into a 7-day quarantine in Changchung. From CBC News:

The students, from the University of Montreal, had boarded a plane in Beijing. But when their plane arrived in Changchun an official came on board and asked all the Canadian passengers to present themselves, Martin Deslauriers told CBC News.

Health officials then took them to a room at the airport to have their temperatures taken, said Deslauriers, who is a student at the University of Montreal. No one in his group had a fever, but they were still informed they would be placed in quarantine, he said.

"At first we didn't think it was going to be for seven days and we were finding it very funny. Now it's a bit less funny," Deslauriers said.

They were first taken to a dormitory at a local university for the seven-day quarantine but were moved to a hotel on Sunday where they are the only guests, Deslauriers said.

The group has been told they aren't allowed to leave the facility and meals are being provided, Deslauriers said.

The students have been provided with internet access and have had the opportunity to contact their families, he said.

Recalibrating Our Moral Compass

One of the neatest things about our blogs is that most of them are searchable. Just type in one or two keywords and you can find out what the blogger believed about issues a year or two ago and contrast that to who and what they're supporting today.

For example, most Liberal bloggers were steadfastly against Harper's unequivocal endorsement/absolution of Israeli aggression against Lebanon two years ago... the whole Qana/clusterbomb thing, senseless civilian carnage, etc. But then we had a change in leadership and got our own, unequivocal and absolutist Israel backer and a lot of our expected grievance over the senseless carnage in Gaza evaporated.

Most of us were incensed at the dishonest but effective way Haper skewered Dion's 'Green Shift' carbon tax initiative, the merits of which we staunchly defended. But then we had a change in leadership and got our own anti-carbon tax guy and all that indignation curiously evaporated.

The great majority of us were aghast at the environmental catastrophe known as the Athabasca Tar Sands. But then we got our own, pro-Athabasca leader who relegates the problems to a trifling matter of carbon capture and praises bitumen as a virtual key to national unity.

I guess that's my problem (or at least one of them). I just have a tougher time recalibrating my moral compass.

Americans and their Vaunted Healthcare

I guess healthcare insurance in the United States is great while everyone is awash in cheap money and skyrocketing housing prices but it's not nearly so great when reality sets in. From the soon-to-be-defunct Boston Globe:


As the economic recession persists, people who are unemployed or worried about losing their jobs are putting off medical care and living with illnesses and conditions that aren't critical, but can be debilitating. Some are delaying having precancerous tumors removed; others are forgoing knee or shoulder surgery. While insurance often covers much of the costs associated with such procedures, there are usually deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses that can add up to thousands of dollars. For those lacking insurance, the price of most elective procedures is beyond their reach.


According to a recent Massachusetts Hospital Association survey, 59 percent of hospitals statewide reported a drop in elective surgeries in 2008 and into the beginning of fiscal 2009. The Red Cross, which supplies blood used in surgery, has also seen a drop in demand, causing it to cancel Massachusetts blood drives scheduled for March and April.

And as more people forgo treatment, hospitals are suffering financially, industry specialists say. Their profits depend heavily on lucrative surgical procedures paid for by private insurers. In addition to seeing fewer patients for elective day-surgeries and overnight treatments, hospital income from investments is dramatically down because of the economy. Profit margins at Massachusetts hospitals have dropped from an average of .7 percent in the last quarter of 2008 to .3 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to the hospital association.


To compensate, hospitals are cutting jobs, and canceling or postponing expansion projects. Nursing jobs, once abundant, for the first time in a decade are in short supply.

Is there a better argument than this for universal, single-payer health care?

Dear Michael - Uniting Canadians Isn't the Only Job

"You have failed to understand that a prime minister has only one job: to unite Canadians."

- Michael Ignatieff on Stephen Harper

I read that line attributed to Michael Ignatieff over at James Morton's blog. It immediately struck me as a curious thing to say, especially for a highly-educated, sophisticated person to say.

It led me to ponder what leaders from history have been most successful at uniting their peoples and just how did they manage to achieve their successes?

It dawned on me that truly great leaders rarely are the best at uniting their citizens. They almost always seem to provoke a visceral opposition. That's probably because they view their prime objective as to lead, not to unite.

Achieving near unity is the classic carrot and stick game. You buy as much support as you can with carrots and beat as many as possible of the remainder into submission. Except you don't use carrots and you don't actually use sticks. There is a vast and far more effective arsenal of weapons wielded by uniters.

Look at the great uniters of the 20th century - odious names like Benito, Adolph, Mao, George w. - people who rallied unprecedented and unquestioning popular support from their people. How did they do it? By instilling fear of foreigners, contempt of unbelievers in their own ranks and a contrived belief in the superiority of their beliefs (naturally as explained by their Uniters).

Unity admits of a unipolar existence, a narrow correctness of thought, a stifling of dissent and protest, a collapse of creativity and a tight, rigid fetter on advancement.

I suppose a unity pitch is easier to swallow if you either hold no strong values and principles or if your values and principles can be brought into line with those of the would-be uniter. All the great uniters of the 20th century had powerful values and principles that were imposed from the top down, invariably with disastrous consequences.

A unity pitch becomes much harder to swallow for those who cannot reconcile themselves to the values and principles of the uniter; who see them as flawed or ill-conceived or self-serving.

A genuine leader seeks to actually lead, not to unite. One of the most sensible things I ever heard Richard Nixon say came during a question on leadership from David Frost. Nixon very eloquently described leadership as the ability to persuade the public to accept and support unpopular or unpleasant measures. It's the gift of rational, honest persuasion, a talent notably lacking among the great uniters of the 20th century.

Global Warming Cooking Salmon to Extinction?

Pacific Northwest salmon stocks are severely endangered by global warming.

Salmon eggs need a steady supply of cold, freshwater in their spawning streams to hatch. If the water flow is interrupted - dead eggs. If the water supply gets too warm - dead eggs. It's why we look anxiously this time of year to the snowpack on our mountain tops. That's what ensures an adequate flow of sufficiently cold water to see hatchlings safely out to sea.

Global warming could spell the end to our salmon stocks. While the region is expected to remain wet in the winter months, snowpacks may decline. And what water does reach the spawning streams may be heated beyond the tolerable limits of salmon eggs. From McClatchey Newspapers:

Climate change already has made rivers warmer and spring runoff earlier, disrupting the life cycle of the fish that are an icon of the region.

No matter what actions the world takes to reduce greenhouse gases, river temperatures in more than half of the lower-elevation watersheds may exceed 70 degrees by 2040 - too hot for salmon.

"The only salmon that are going to survive the century mark are the ones in the large populations in the higher elevations that are still going to have snow and cold water," said Jim Martin, a former chief of fisheries for the state of Oregon.

But even these runs and those as far north as Alaska would be threatened if the world does not reduce gases like carbon dioxide over the next 50 years.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/67402.html

Yielding to the Taliban

Anybody remember Operation Medusa back in September, 2006? That's when Canadian commanders told us we had the Taliban surrounded in Panjwai District, Kandahar province, Afghanistan. At the time we were told the bad guys had two choices - surrender or die. The Taliban, it seemed, discovered a third option - leave and come back when the heat died down.

Didn't matter much. Our leaders didn't have a pile of bodies of dead Taliban or stacks of captured weapons but at least we were assured that they'd driven the Taliban out of Panjwai District, itself a real accomplishment.

Then, in December '06/January '07 we were back in Panjwai District this time for Operation Falcon something or other and, once again, we saved Panjwai for the good, government-supporting (not) villagers. We've been saving that place, off and on, ever since.

Now in May, 2009, we're actually surrendering turf in Panjwai to the Taliban so we can fall back to defend Kandahar City. From the Notional Toast:

Canada's military has conceded hard-won territory west of Kandahar City to Taliban insurgents.

...The police substation [in Mushan village], also called a strong point, was dismantled last week, in a large-scale operation called Munkiredal, the Pashto word for deny.

In a briefing Sunday with reporters at Kandahar Air Field, Canadian officers explained that the 64 Afghans stationed inside the fortress, with a rotation of eight Canadian military mentors, were not able to disrupt insurgent activity in the area.

The village is about 40 kilometres west of Kandahar Air Field.

It is now under Taliban control, the officers said, as is much of the Panjwaii peninsula, an area of some 160 square kilometres where poppy is a major cash crop for insurgents.

The Canadian officers deny that Canada has abandoned the local population. "I can see how it could be [interpreted that way]," said Maj. Stephane Briand, operations planning officer for the Quebec-led battle group in Kandahar. "But the main reason for the draw back was to reassign [troops]."

Yes, indeed. I can see "how it could be interpreted that way" too, especially if you're an Afghan villager who has spent the past two years watching the Taliban drive government and Western forces out of your neighbourhood. It's pretty hard to see any other way it could be interpreted.

It could also be interpreted as an admission of the mounting threat the Taliban pose to Kandahar City and our need to fall back to defend the provincial capital even if that means surrendering the countryside.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1559427

Iggy's Arctic Dreamland

Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff has a dream - a dream of a pan-Arctic park, a pristine nature enclave where the habitat and ecology of the Arctic will be preserved. Where he came up with that silly idea is anyone's guess. Perhaps he hadn't heard that Russia had already launched the first in what's supposed to be a fleet of ice breaker/supertankers being built specifically to help exploit the massive energy reserves believed to lie beneath the Arctic Ocean floor.

Before Mike wastes more time daydreaming about Arctic parks, maybe he should read The Guardian. It's reporting on Russia's plans to build 'a fleet' of floating and submersible nuclear power plants to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves. That's 'submersible' as in underwater as in underwater nuclear power plants Mike.

A prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year. Agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February.

The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia's biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years.

In addition, designers are known to have developed submarine nuclear-powered drilling rigs that could allow eight wells to be drilled at a time.

The British paper notes that Russia has a history of nuclear dumping in the Arctic Ocean.

Countries including Britain have had to offer Russia billions of dollars to decommission more than 160 nuclear submarines, but at least 12 nuclear reactors are known to have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste, on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya.

Let's see - oil drilling, gas drilling, seabed mining and nuclear power plants. What more could you want in a nature park? Oh yeah, I know. A permanent Russian Arctic military force would be the icing on the cake. What? They're organizing that too? Oh my.

Wait a Minute - Weren't We All Supposed To Be Dead by Now?

Swine Flu, the Great Plague, the Black Death. That's all we've been hearing from our media since a new strain of influenza was diagnosed as coming out of Mexico. It sounded oh so grim with Mexicans dropping off in the hundreds. Surely it would lay low the strongest of civilizations in its unstoppable path. The World Health Organization screamed warnings of pandemic. The end was nigh.

Or not.

Seems the NewFlu bug wasn't remotely as virulent as feared. Pretty mild in fact and not terribly contagious after all. Now the WHO says there's no evidence of sustained spread in communities outside North America, meaning no pandemic.

Oh well, we can always dream:

Gun Nut Paranoia

Timothy McVeigh lives on.

Long, Hot Summer? - You Betcha

La Nina has finally outstayed her welcome, signalling a return to warmer, dryer conditions. The region of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Peru is coming to be understood as impacting seasonal weather conditions worldwide.

The British met office is forecasting a hot, dry summer for Britain with temperatures routinely spiking into the 30s. The same trend is expected to extend across northern Europe.

Today, Environment Canada issued its outlook for June through August, 2009, depicted in the first map below. Red areas, virtually all of Canada, will be hotter than normal. Only the small pockets of blue are expected to get below normal temperatures.

First It Was Houses, Now It's the Malls

Trying to find the eye in America's fiscal hurricane isn't easy but it is generally considered to be residential real estate and the myriad ways that was gamed by homeowners, mortgage lenders, securities traders and the political establishment.

Now America is on the verge of being hit by another wave - commercial real estate. From McClatchey Newspapers:

Thousands of commercial mortgages valued at hundreds of billions of dollars are approaching their renewal dates, and by some estimates, two out of three no longer will meet the original loan conditions and won't be able to refinance. With prices for commercial properties expected to plunge, a vicious cycle could unfold, much as it has in the nation's housing market.

"It's the next wave to hit. It's the next round of bad news," said Scott Talbott, the senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade group for big banks and other financial institutions who are collectively concerned about the coming problems.

A commercial mortgage meltdown is likely to prolong the nation's economic recovery. Falling prices of commercial real estate would lead to additional bank losses at a time when banks already are sapped by home mortgage defaults and soaring credit card defaults. This could lead to future additional taxpayer assistance for the banks.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/67187.html

Writing Off CanWest

Fairfax Financial Holdings has a problem on its hands, an outfit called CanWest Global Communications Corp.

In 2007, Fairfax picked up an 11% interest in CanWest when the shares were trading at $6. The investment firm subsequently doubled that stake.

Now with CanWest shares trading at 28-cents and the future of the company in serious doubt, Fairfax has simply written off its stake in the Winnipeg-based communications company. It sounds like Fairfax isn't holding its breath waiting for Lenny Asper to salvage CanWest.

http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/627037