The Disaffected Lib

Harper Knows How to Walk Away from International Commitments, Why Is He Stuck On the F-35?

2012-02-15T08:04:00.000-08:00

Steve Harper knows how to weasel out of commitments.   Remember how we were in Afghanistan "to stay" until we had the Taliban crushed and the country safe for democracy?   Harper wrung every drop of political gravy he could squeeze out of that one and then walked way. Then he upped and walked out on the Kyoto climate change pact, making Canada the first and only signatory to bail.

Yet he still claims to be firmly behind the proposed purchase of the Lockheed Martin F-35.   Italy has just announced it will be paring its order, if and when that comes, by 30%. Then again, Italy claimed it was going to get 131 F-35s for 15 billion Euros. That was wishful thinking. Britain has cut its intended buy and has said it will hold its decision on a go ahead until 2015. Australia is holding.   Even America, which was to have ordered 2,400 of the damned things has postponed an initial order of 175 aircraft to allow "more time for testing."

Each delay, each cancellation bumps the price of F-35s that are ordered, eventually, sometime, maybe.   Lockheed has told Canada that the US postponement of its initial order will increase our price by an unspecified "single digit."   Single digit indeed.

Now, in a sane world, the supplier who delays delivery gets dinged for the costs of not performing. The buyer doesn't pay for that. He's pissed off enough already because he hasn't got his stuff. But, when it comes to the F-35, Lockheed somehow gets to add its screw ups to the customer's tab?

Just last week the Pentagon's purchasing agent, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Frank Kendall, lambasted the F-35 programme as "acquisition malpractice." He said America will pay a bloated price for ordering the F-35 into production years before its first test flight.   And they'll be passing along that bloated price for their malpractice to other nations still willing to buy the F-35, nations such as Canada.

Question.   If the American military-industrial complex screwed up, why should it get to lay part of the costs of that onto its allies? Why should we be asked to clean up the Pentagon's mess? Isn't that sort of like asking the patient to help pay for the doctor's malpractice?

Bear in mind that bloated costs are just one problem for the F-35 buyers.   Anytime you're paying a big premium for the "latest and greatest" technology, you're buying a thoroughbred race horse. It only has a limited number of years when it can possibly be a winner and, after that, it has to be put out to pasture (or worse).   The F-35 is already getting long in the tooth for a technology that was supposed to be delivered and in service years ago. It's still years off, possibly many years distant.   That gives its potential adversaries all the time in the world to prepare for the day it does pose them any threat.

But time is not on Harper's or the F-35's side. We're already hearing faint rumblings about maybe cutting Canada's order.   Fewer jets for the same money. That sounds like a bargain doesn't it? That makes a joke out of Harper's claim that the 65-aircraft were just enough to do the job.   Hell, if the Arctic does heat up as expected, 265 probably won't be enough.   This is as farcical as trying to control Kandahar province with just 1,000 fighting soldiers and we all know how well that turned out.

The big question now is what country is going to run cover for Harper?   He hasn't got the guts to do this himself, notwithstanding Kyoto.   No, this means messing with the Americanos, the same bunch he's been beating over the head with threats to divert Athabasca bitumen to China.   Leading a F-35 walkout would make Harper look like the most anti-American Canadian prime minister of all time.

Check This Out

2012-02-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

Want a good idea of what's happening in our world? Two views of the same spot in Shanghai, one as it was in 1990, the other as it was just 20-years later.

Last Night's New Rules from Bill Maher's Real Time

2012-02-12T11:13:00.000-08:00

Who Shipwrecked America's Economy?

2012-02-12T11:03:00.000-08:00

Bill Moyers points a finger

Bill Moyers Essay: Who Shipwrecked Our Economy? from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Is Mutiny Waiting in London for Rupe Murdoch?

2012-02-12T10:03:00.000-08:00

What happens when you have a newspaper mired in scandal, several of its key personnel arrested, and a gaggle of unruly journalists suspicious that you're about to throw them to the wolves? That's the predicament that has Rupert Murdoch winging his way to London to supposedly rescue his beleaguered Sun newspaper.

The Murdoch conglomerate has stumped up tens of millions of dollars in compensation payments in an attempt to contain the phone hacking scandal that besets the empire, but the impact of the latest arrests in the highly sensitive areas of the Defence Ministry and the military are expected to inflame opposition to Murdoch and News Ltd in Britain.

...the anger was almost palpable among journalists because the arrests were reportedly the result of millions of emails that News Ltd had given to the police investigation into the phone hacking scandal and payments to police. Paying police for information is illegal in Britain.
Journalists and the National Union of Journalists interpreted the arrests - 10 staff from The Sun so far - as tantamount to staff being thrown to the wolves in an attempt by the company to distance itself from practices that were said to have been widespread across all British media for decades.

Murdoch, of course, has demonstrated his ease at dodging blame and laying it all at the feet of his trusted employees when he appeared before a Parliamentary committee over the News of the World scandal. As far as Rupe is concerned, "the buck stops here" principle in no way applies to himself, never, ever. Team Rupe has good reason to be leery of the bossman.

A Central American Free Drug Corridor?

2012-02-12T09:50:00.000-08:00

Guatemalan president Otto Perez Molina is proposing that Central America become a zone where drugs are legal to make, possess and transport.

Mr Perez Molina will test the waters by discussing the subject with Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes when Mr Funes visits today.
The Guatemalan president said the war on drugs and all the money and technology received from the US has not diminished drug trafficking in the area.

He said drug cartels are to blame for the high rates of violence in Guatemala, which has a homicide rate of 45 per 100,000 people.

The Fantastic Voyage of the Rubber Duckie

2012-02-12T09:38:00.000-08:00

20-years ago off the Aleutians a cargo ship lost some containers in a heavy storm. Among that cargo were nearly 30,000 bath toys. Since then some of these toys have circumnavigated the world.

Tracking the several paths those toys wound up taking has given science valuable insights into ocean currents. But at the end of the day, those toys and the plastic debris that now fills vast tracts of ocean will take their toll.

Never mind that only 5% of plastics actually ends up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume 400m tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas will in the not-too-distant future run out. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals release greenhouse gases when they break down. What's most nefarious about plastic is the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting.

Britain May Be In a Deep Freeze But It Remains In Drought

2012-02-12T09:24:00.000-08:00

Soggy old Britain is facing the prospect of mega-drought. Even at the height of winter, aquifers are being used to keep English rivers and lakes from running dry.

Andrew Chapman, a senior environment planning officer with the agency warns, '...the position is becoming very serious. In simple terms, unless we get a downpour that lasts for several weeks in the very near future, we are in trouble. There could be severe water shortages in many parts of the country.' Worst affected areas would include the Midlands, East Anglia and the south-east of England, say agency officials.

...The impending water crisis is particularly worrying for farmers. At this time of year, many build storage lagoons to hold water that they can use later in the year to irrigate crops. But to be allowed to dam up water that would otherwise flow into rivers, farmers have to be given permits by the Environment Agency
.
So far this year, 345 applications for such stores have had restrictions placed on them by the agency, limiting the powers of farmers to provide water for their crops during the forthcoming growing season.
"We are facing drastic reductions in yield," said Andrew Nottage, who runs the Russell Smith farm at Duxford, Cambridgeshire. Among the crops grown by Nottage are potatoes and onions – vegetables that have a high demand for water. "We can switch crops to less water-intensive types, but there is a problem doing that," he said. "Farmers are locked into long-term contracts with supermarkets to provide them with the vegetables they want to provide for the British public later in the year.

"It is therefore difficult to switch crops even if you know that you are going to be in trouble when it comes to supplying water for them."

The problem for Britain is that East Anglia is one of the nation's principal food-producing regions. It is also the driest in the country. "Rainfall patterns here are similar to Israel," said Nottage. "That makes farming a tricky business some years."

The Real Hoax Behind Global Warming

2012-02-12T08:49:00.000-08:00

Oh there's a hoax all right, a well-funded, carefully scripted hoax that's being played out by the denialist community and its backers, the fossil fuelers.   And, as the pieces continue to fall into place, the scam becomes so obvious the deniers are being faced with something they won't be able to deny, their own perfidy.

The beginning of the end for the deniers and their enormously wealthy and powerful patrons arrived quietly in 2009 when scientists calculated our atmosphere's CCC or climate carrying capacity.   They worked out the maximum atmospheric CO2 we could sustain without probably sending our biosphere straight through the 2C limit. That's not the safe limit, it's not a limit we can live with, it's the maximum limit we must stay below before beginning to drop atmospheric carbon levels until they're below 350 parts per million, ppm. Independent teams came at the CCC figure in different ways but arrived at a remarkably similar figure of 565 gigatons of CO2 as the remaining capacity.   565 gigatons more and we're at our CCC.

This calculation set the cat among the pigeons. It meant the debate could move beyond abstract and all but meaningless emission reduction targets of some percent or another by some distant year or another.   The Germans and others argued the remaining capacity should be allocated to nations by population.   After all the atmosphere belongs to no one and, hence, everyone, no?   The developed world wasn't keen on that at all because an equitable sharing would leave them having to virtually decarbonize their economies and their societies almost overnight. Blah, blah, blah - and the predictable (and in some corners, desired) deadlock ensued.

But the CCC factor popped up again in a remarkable new way early this year. Some bright lights had compared the magic 565 number to the CO2 emissions values of existing known oil reserves, the stuff Big Oil is sitting on.   What they found was that burning the remaining oil reserves would add 2,800 gigatons of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, five times the maximum remaining capacity.

And so the other shoe drops. Big Oil is sitting on oil reserves the lion's share of which will have to be left in the ground if our grandkids are going to stand much chance of ever seeing grandkids of their own.

So now let us return to the denialist community and take a closer look at these characters.    The denialists are a motley crew of shills, hacks and whack jobs sprinkled with a thin and stale layer of actual scientists or former scientists of sorts. I use "denialists" rather than "deniers" because it has evolved into something of a refined art form.

The denialists carry out a variety of functions that share one trait - none of them is grounded in actual science.   Their objective is to undermine public confidence in climate change science and to give the frightened and gullible false assurance.   Some contrive non-carbon emission explanations for the current warming (i.e. the "sunspot" brigade).   Others deny the fact of warming all together. A sub-species maintain the Earth is actually cooling. Others still allege conspiracies and hoaxes supposedly rampant through the scientific community.   Some maintain that there exists somewhere (curiously never specified quite where) a mountain of scientific research that refutes mainstream climate science and, hence, the "science isn't settled." Others argue it's all a Socialist plot to transfer enormous wealth out of the hands of those who earned it and into the grubby mitts of the undeserving Third Worlders. It goes on and on.

How to decide? That's actually pretty easy when you even briefly consider the wildly different approaches taken by the climate science community and the denialist community.

It should be a given that anthropogenic global warming is a question of science. It involves geology, hydrology, physics, math, biology, zoology, atmospherics, chemistry - all that stuff you probably hated in high school. It's a scientific question, plain and simple, albeit the question itself is complex and challenging.   Ever since man stopped sharing caves with dinosaurs, you know - six thousand years ago, we have focused on separating wheat from chaff.   This often involved a scientific technique - trial and error.   Over centuries this sort of approach evolved into what we today call the "scientific method."   I look into a question. I run a bunch of tests. I record results (data). From the data I draw conclusions, even theories sometimes. Then I present my findings, my genius to my adoring and worshipful colleagues.   Now, to be taken seriously, I must also reveal my research, how I came to be such a genius. I must do this so that others can replicate my research and come up with their own data that will confirm or refute my conclusions.   It's called "peer review." Consider it the opposite of bluffing.

The climate science community works on the scientific method. But what of the denialist community?   If they're right, the easiest and surest avenue for them is also the scientific method. Take the research, take the supporting data and simply show where it's wrong. Blow holes in it.   That's the easiest and surest way but only if they genuinely believe the science is wrong.   If this really is a hoax it'll unravel like a three-dollar sweater.   But they don't have any interest in the scientific method. No, they're happier with something remarkably akin to the "legal method."

The legal method doesn't always get at the truth.   O.J. walked, didn't he?   But it is a terrific vehicle for obscuring truth and delaying outcomes.   Any experienced civil litigator can attest to these things.   And if you've watched even a few cop shows, you know how far some people get by simply denying everything. It's the one place where "the dog ate my homework" actually has legs.

The denialists get to deny everything.   They get to treat proven stuff as unproven - because they say so.   They don't have to disprove it, they just have to deny it in ways that will convince enough people to produce results.

Never underestimate the intrinsic value of delay.   Sometimes the delay factor is enough to decide the outcome of a case.   Rich parties sometimes get to run weak adversaries into the ground, broke. (sorry, you only get as much justice as you can afford) Problem solved. In other circumstances delay affords a welcome postponement of a day of reckoning. It can be a way to buy valuable time to do or keep doing things the outcome of the case could otherwise stop.

The denialist community uses the legal approach but with one added and invaluable advantage - no judge. A judge would narrow the question to be decided, evaluate evidence according to relevance, and keep the case moving toward resolution.   But there's no judge in the denialists' case which means, like the movie Groundhog Day, every day is a fresh repeat of all the days before it. Like the snake oil salesman of the medicine show, it just goes on from town to town.

If you're still in doubt, let's play "follow the money."   A common denialist claim is that scientists keep running bogus research in order to reap the bounty of government grants.   They're in it for the easy dough. You believe that? Just how much do you think a research scientists takes in? It's amazing what people will do for a high-5, low-6 figure income.

But why not follow the money on the denialist side. That's where the interesting stuff is. Check out the leading denialists and explore how much funding they receive, directly and indirectly, from the fossil fuelers and associated interests.

Then check out the US Congress.   Take a look at how much each congressman gets from the energy industry and associated interests. Call that X. Then look at how much they get from the climate science community.   Call that Y.   Now deduct Y from X and what do you have? Surprise, it's still X.

But there's an even bigger money telltale in all this and it goes back to the 565 versus 2,800 gigaton issue. Big Oil is said to be sitting on reserves equivalent to 2,800 gigatons of CO2 emissions. Yet that's more than 2,200 gigatons over the supposedly safe limits. That means Big Oil should be leaving almost four out of five barrels of its reserves in the ground, permanently.

What are those reserves worth today?   Trillions of dollars. So what is four fifths of that worth?   Still trillions of dollars.   That is what's at stake for Big Oil, almost.   But there's more. If people come to realize that we can't use most of that oil, Big Oil finds itself with a glut of oil on its hands.   And, with that, the per-barrel price plummets along with Big Oil's share price. Oh dear. That's why a group of leading British investment, science and political types wrote the governor of the Bank of England warning that oil reserves are the new "sub-prime" assets.

So here's the thing. Why is Big Oil responding to what is virtually an existential threat with a clown car full of shills, hacks and whack jobs?   Why isn't Big Oil spending tens of billions of dollars on its own peer-reviewable research to disprove the climate science community. Why isn't it fighting back in the scientific method forum, the one place where, if the science community is wrong, it can score a decisive victory, safeguard world oil prices and ensure the future of all those massive oil reserves?   Sometimes what's not happening speaks louder than what is.

If Big Oil isn't pouring tens of billions of dollars into research to dispel the powerful consensus of the climate science community, you're left to draw just one conclusion.   Big Oil knows the climate scientists have it right.

If Big Oil knows the climate science community is right, what's with all those guys with the baggy pants, long shoes and bright red noses, the denialists?   Again there's just one conclusion.   They're a distraction, a way to muddy the waters of public opinion and a great way for Big Oil and its political minions to buy time and forestall the day of reckoning.   And that alone is worth countless billions to the bottom line.

By now you should be getting an "us and them" sort of feeling about this. You probably should be getting mad about this. The fossil fuelers are at war, at war with humanity, in a war they cannot win.   So what they're going to do is to make this as bloody as possible, to drag this out for as long as they can.   The only side delay harms is ours, humanity's.

What we need now is a "put up or shut up" event.   If the fossil fuelers can't win their case in the scientific method forum, they must shut the hell up. In the meantime we are entitled, even prudent, to consider the fossil fuelers to be lying their asses off, utterly indifferent to the harm they're causing us.   And it is at this point that we're entitled to turn to our elected representatives to, well, represent us for a change.   Let's get these issues settled, let's use our sovereign powers to find out if there's a petro-con game being played, one that will have serious consequences for us down the road if it's not stopped soon.

What this post lays out is, I believe, a compelling prima facie case for Big Oil and the rest of the fossil fuelers to answer.   Isn't it time your political leaders saw to it they did?

Update - As with a previous post, I have sent this via e-mail to the offices of Bob Rae.   I will post any response he may provide.

What Business Does a Sitting Government Have Proclaiming Policies Another Government Would Have to Introduce?

2012-02-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

When Harper was in Davos he was practically busting to tell the high priced nobs that he was going to trim Canada's sails, especially our nation's Old Age Security programme. That promptly backfired sending Tory MPs slithering for cover into their favourite dark places.

Not to worry. Tiny Jim Flaherty, Harper's pet leprechaun, now assures us that old age pension security won't be cut until 2020 at least, maybe not even until 2025. What? In other words, some future government will have to implement the legislation, not Harper's.

Gee, I'd really like what passes for a government today to focus on the very real problems confronting our land today and stop dicking around with something some future government may or may not do. Sheesh.

Okay, I Get It. Harper Needs China to Buy Bitumen So Canada Can Buy F-35s to Defend Canada Against China.

2012-02-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

Okay, now it all makes sense.

According to PostMedia's howler, Matthew Fisher, Canada needs the F-35 to defend Canada against the creeping Red Menace, China:

Despite its staggering cost, the jets' capabilities have appealed to western governments deeply concerned with how quickly China is acquiring aircraft carriers and expanding its blue water and sub-surface navy to project military power far out into the Pacific Ocean. Beijing is also building a fleet of icebreakers to operate in the Arctic Ocean.

But when you're talking F-35, you're talking mega-bucks. Canada as we know is running a structural deficit Harper created by shaving points off the GST so we're going to have to get bucks by the boatload from somewhere. Now where would that be? Oh, I know, China! That's why Harpo has gone to China to ink all those deals, so the Chinese will give us the money we need to buy airplanes to defend ourselves against the Chinese. And China gets the Canadian fuel it needs to run those aircraft carriers and ice breakers that we need the fighters to keep us safe from. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? My brain hurts.

What Were We Thinking? Libya Dissolves.

2012-02-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

Steve Harper likes to boast how Canada and our NATO allies saved Libya by bombing the hell out of Gaddafi's forces.   It sounds nice but it's hogwash.

As the United States and coaltion did in Iraq, as we all did in Afghanistan, so we got into the Libyan war utterly indifferent to realities on the ground.

In our hubris we ignored a lesson that's been repeatedly taught to us over the past decade, one we've paid in blood to learn.   You can't build a stable Muslim state without first overcoming the two-punch scourge of warlordism and tribalism.   If you don't suppress warlordism and tribalism, when you topple the ruling strongman all you're left with is warlordism and tribalism.   Those people are all about wielding power, not giving it up.

So Libya, quite predictably, stands poised on the verge of a civil war that's probably inevitable at this point.

The government of the interim Prime Minister, Abdel Rahim el-Keeb, is virtually paralysed by rivalries that have forced it to divide power along lines of regions and personalities, by unreachable expectations that Muammar Gaddafi's fall would bring prosperity and by powerlessness so marked the national army is treated like another of the many warring militias.

This week one militia assaulted another militia at a seaside base in Tripoli to rescue a woman who had been abducted.
When the guns fell silent, briefly, the scene that unfolded felt as chaotic as Libya's revolution - a government whose authority extends no farther than its offices, militias whose swagger comes from plentiful guns and residents whose patience fades with every volley of gunfire that cracks at night.

This didn't have to happen. There was an alternative, one that would have quickly ousted Gaddafi and left no room for the warlords and religious extremists to undermine Libya's future.   Instead we let the Libyan problem fall into the hands of the West's astonishingly incompetent military and political leadership to achieve the predictable result that besets the Libyan people today.

How Screwed Up Is Afghanistan? Look at Their Schoolbooks.

2012-02-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

The Afghans have figured out a way to produce a history textbook that everyone can accept. Make sure it stops at 1973.

Afghanistan's newly approved history textbook is free of the last four decades of the country's history. No Soviet invasion, no Mujaheddin, no Taliban, no American invasion, all the stuff Afghan leaders feel gets in the way of forging a national identity.

''Our recent history tears us apart,'' Afghanistan's Education Minister, Farooq Wardak, said. ''We've created a curriculum based on the older history that brings us together, with figures universally recognised as being great. These are the first books in decades that are depoliticised and de-ethnicised.''

Great. The best way to learn about Afghanistan is to not learn about Afghanistan. Makes perfect sense, no? You betcha.

Are the Petro-Pols Setting Canada Up For a Crash?

2012-02-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

Michael Ignatieff referred to it as the "beating heart of the Canadian economy in the 21st century." Prime ministers, Liberal and Conservative alike, have dared to dream of Canada as a global "energy superpower."   Stephen Harper has led the charge as no other, championing high-risk pipeline projects to the American south and British Columbia's pristine northern coast.

The temptation must have been irresistible. Like latter day Jed Clampett's, they saw "black gold" in massive quantities just lying there for the taking.   Who needs a real economy when they've got such a vast treasure right beneath their feet and Big Oil companies from around the world vying for the rights to extract it?

And so our prime ministers and premiers have done the Petro-dance with Big Oil, settling for minimal royalties, lining the industry's pockets with tax breaks, subsidies and free natural resources, deferring both environmental costs and Canada's 'fair share' of the plunder.   And we've done this based on a conviction that today's world oil prices are solid and they're only going one way, straight up. After all, it's tomorrow's world oil prices from which we'll reap our share of the bounty.

But what if we've been had?   What if we have deluded ourselves about world oil prices for the rest of this century?   What if we've made an enormous and potentially disastrous bad bet?   What if world oil prices collapse, permanently, instead of soaring? You see, when it comes to the Tar Sands, there's no way to cover the downside.   That's a bet you can't lay off, not that anyone in Ottawa is even interested - yet.

The warnings are sounding.   Oil assets are "sub prime", as toxic as the overvalued house mortgages that brought America's economy low and sent the world into meltdown in 2008. If oil assets are sub-prime, our leaders are building Canada's economy on a house of cards just waiting to blow down. Shit, oh dear.

So what's all this "sub prime" business?   Why should oil reserves ever be worth less than today's world prices?   And what about the notion of "peak oil"?

The viability of world oil assets was quietly dealt a mortal blow a few years ago when teams of researchers began looking into the carbon-carrying capacity of our atmosphere.   They wanted to know how much more CO2 our atmosphere could hold if we were to stay within the 2C safety zone for global warming.   How much CO2 could we put in the air before we risked triggering natural feedback mechanisms, also known as runaway global warming, nature's very own civilization crusher.   These teams, operating independently, came up with surprisingly consistent numbers.   We have, by their calculations, about 565-gigatons of atmospheric CO2 capacity remaining.   565, that's the number.   So, what does that have to do with world oil prices?

Big Oil is big because it holds rights to untapped oil reserves around the world.   These reserves are carried on Big Oil's books as assets. At today's prices, they're worth trillions. But those reserves, if extracted and consumed, will generate 2,800 gigatons of CO2.   The "do not exceed" figure is 565.   The oil reserves number is 2,800. 565, 2,800. So, if we're to attempt to leave a habitable world for our grandkids, we're going to be able to use just one-fifth of those oil reserves.   The other four-fifths are going to have to be left in the ground.   That's the price we'll pay if we want our civilization to survive.

Is this for real? Yep. Two weeks ago a group of senior British investment, science and political types sent a warning letter to the governor of the Bank of England.   They said oil reserves are "sub prime" assets and urged the Bank to rein in oil speculation. Big Oil, they said, had created a "carbon bubble".   And, as Bill McKibbin points out, Big Oil is fighting hard to keep that carbon bubble from bursting.

So if these warnings are right and Big Oil is truly just fighting for time that's bad news for the fossil fuel industry and for countries with petro-economies.   It's bad news for Iraq and for Saudi Arabia and for Venezuela.   But it would have special repercussions for Canada.   That's because what we're producing in Athabasca isn't conventional crude. It's not the Middle East product that's easy to pump out of the ground, easy to refine, easy to transport.   No, we have bitumen laced sands.   Hard to get out of the ground, hard to refine, a real bitch to transport.   Compared to the competition it's expensive, carbon filthy and ecologically devastating.

So if the world wakes up one day and accepts we can only consume just one-fifth of known oil reserves, what's it going to be - sweet Saudi crude that comes out of the ground so pure it goes straight into tankers - or the filthiest, most expensive fossil fuel on the planet?   See where this is going?

Canada, Canadians, you and me - we need some straight talk about the future of oil in the 21st century.   We need to figure out what our exposure may be, both economically and environmentally, if the markets come to treat oil as a sub-prime asset.   Even if we should just treat this as a possibility, we need to explore and implement precautionary measures to safeguard the Canadian economy against a worst possible outcome.

One thing you need to keep in mind.   If there is a global carbon bubble, it's first going to burst right here in Canada.

Update

I e-mailed this piece to Bob Rae. I'll post any response I receive.

Why Big Oil Can't - and Won't - Let Go

2012-02-09T15:03:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder why Big Oil doesn't take its massive profits and take over the alternative ("clean") energy business? Why do the fossil fuelers make such an expensive and concerted effort to thwart the spread of renewable energy?

There is a reason, a very big one, and it pits the fossil fuel industry against humanity itself.

What's going on is nothing new. From 1936 to 1950, General Motors joined forces with Firestone, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Mack Truck to create and operate two transit companies, National City Lines and Pacific Lines. What those companies did was this:

They bought up and scrapped about a hundred electric streetcar systems to make way for their gasoline and diesel powered buses. GM and some other companies were convicted in 1949 of conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and related products.

But what does this have to do with the fossil fuel cartels? Like GM, they see themselves at risk from the competition - alternative energy. That is mainly because they're holding fossil fuel reserves that are carried on their books at wildly unrealistic values. What they're facing is a "carbon bubble" that threatens their very existence. By the way, this is the same "carbon bubble" that led a team of prominent British investors, scientists and politicians to warn the governor of the Bank of England that massive reserves of oil, gas and coal should be treated as "sub prime" assets.

The notion of a "carbon bubble" has now been explored by Bill McKibbin of 350.org. As he sees it, Big Oil is now pitting its own survival against mankind's.

We’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality.

What.. ...the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining.

And this warning has special import for Canada. If fossil fuel assets are indeed "sub prime", the worst of the lot has to be the filthiest and most expensive to produce, the Athabasca Tar Sands bitumen. That puts Harper & Co. in the same ranks with the scum responsible for all the toxic mortgages scammed on liar loans. Only liar loan mortgages never jeopardized the future of mankind.

Aussies Fight Back Against Big Coal Propaganda Mill

2012-02-08T12:03:00.000-08:00

What you're looking at appeared in full page format in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was published in reaction to a call by whacko global warming denier Lord Monckton for Australia's "super rich" to fund an Aussie equivalent of FOX News.

The ad/public service announcement was the doing of an advocacy group, Get Up, in response to a coal baroness' recent purchase of a big chunk of Australian media giant, Fairfax Media. Gina Rinehart is known for, "her fiercely right-wing politics and promotion of climate sceptics such as Lord Monckton."

Get Up has posted a video of Monckton addressing a board meeting of a 'free market think tank', the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation, where he sings the praises of people like Glenn Beck.

F-35 Programme - "Acquisition Malpractice"

2012-02-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

It May be Overpriced Crap But We're Good with It.

The man now in charge of the Pentagon's weapons purchases has lambasted the F-35 programme, denouncing it as "acquisition malpractice."

"I can spend quite a few minutes on the F-35, but I don't want to," Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, said Monday. "Putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been done, OK? But we did it, OK?"

"...he said the design tools weren't perfect, the models weren't precise enough and now the military has found problems in all three variants of the F-35.

"'Now we're paying the price for being wrong about that,' he said. Kendall was not with the Defense Department's acquisitions office when the F-35 deal was inked with defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin in 2001.

"While the F-35's counterpart, the beleaguered F-22 stealth fighter, has a higher price tag per plane, the F-35 is one of the Pentagon's biggest ever acquisition programs at an estimated $379.4 billion for over 2,400 jets. Over the next half-century, the Pentagon plans to spend up to $1 trillion in operating costs for the planes. A new report from the Government Accountability Office says every hour of flight in the jets costs nearly $30,000."

Now, let's take that from a Canadian perspective. If we buy the F-35, we too will be paying the price for America's "acquisition malpractice." In other words, their mistake will become our mistake, our "oopsie." And we'll wind up saddled with 65-fighter jets that will cost us $30,000 for every hour we operate one. Neat, eh? To put that in perspective, an F-16 costs about $5,000 per hour to operate; the upgraded F-18 comes in around $7,400 hourly; the state of the art Eurofighter Typhoon runs $14,000 per hour.

Wouldn't it make more sense to buy an aircraft that evolved out of a properly managed development and acquisition programme, one that perhaps doesn't come with massive, built-in malpractice costs?

Meanwhile Britain has announced it'll wait until 2015 to decide just how many F-35s to buy. Back in 2001, the Brits said they'd take 138 of the machines but the government has since said it will be paring back on that purchase. Australia, Turkey and Italy are also getting wobbly.

At the same time, key US senators are giving the F-35 programme a real mauling, criticizing Defense Secretary Panetta for prematurely pushing through the US Marine Corps buy.

"The unusually blunt talk about the most expensive U.S. arms program at a Monday hearing came a week before the release of a fiscal 2013 budget plan that is expected to postpone funding for 179 warplanes until after 2017, a move that has Australia and other international partners questioning their own procurement plans."

Senators John McCain and Carl Levin, a senior Michigan Democrat, didn't pull any punches in their letter to Panetta:

“We appreciate that the development of F-35B has enjoyed some success over the last few months, after several years of having fallen short,” write Levin, the committee chairman, and McCain. “We similarly understand that engineering solutions to known problems with the F-35B’s structure and propulsion have been identified. However, in the intervening time since probation was imposed, more problems with the F-35B’s structure and propulsion, potentially as serious as those that were originally identified a year ago, have been found. This is salient where the F-35B has completed only 20% of its developmental test plan to date."

South Korea has found that the F-35 design may fail to meet two of their key criteria - the ability to carry weapons externally and to fly at Mach 1.6 or faster.

"...the Korean military has clearly outlined the two key features as compulsory requirements in its request for proposal (RFP) released Jan. 30."

"Randy Howard, Lockheed Martin’s director of the Korea F-35 Campaign, also acknowledged that the external carriage may come as an option for Korea.

“Lockheed Martin did not cancel it, the U.S. government prioritized it,” Howard said, explaining why doubts have been raised over the development of the F-35’s external hard points.

“The F-35 is designed to carry weapons internally. That’s what it does, and that’s why it is stealthy.”

He argued that the F-35’s primary attribute, the ability to penetrate into the enemy’s territory without being detected, will be significantly compromised if Korea chooses to mount weapons externally.

...Other industry officials, however, refuted Howard’s claim, saying the development of external pylons not only reduces the aircraft stealth capabilities, but also requires a fundamental change in the aircraft design, which the USAF is not willing to pay for."

One thing that every prospective buyer of the F-35 (perhaps save Canada) has in common is doubt about the viability of the F-35, both in terms of cost and performance. Even the Americans are cutting the number they'll buy and postponing purchase commitments. In fact the only country that seems to be sticking with its initial deal is Canada. What does that say about Harper and the DND he runs as its shadow, Commander in Chief?

Post Mortem - Madonna's Half Time SuperBowl Show

2012-02-07T13:00:00.000-08:00

If you watched the Super Bowl, not that there's really something wrong with you if you didn't, you might have enjoyed the half time show. Madonna staged an elaborate presentation and did a decent job of it. That said it was the Super Bowl and it wouldn't be right if there wasn't a bit of controversy.

Part of that came when one of the guest artists, M.I.A. flipped the bird sending the straightlaced into a furious rage. Made me wonder about "the bird" and how that all began. Seems 'the finger' is as old as civilization itself.

As many writers have pointed out, the middle finger became a symbol of the penis at least 2,500 years ago. In Aristophanes’ 423 B.C.E. play The Clouds, the character Strepsiades jokes that when he was a boy he kept time by tapping his phallus rather than his middle finger. If showing someone the middle finger wasn’t already a common insult at that time, it became one within the next century. The Greek philosopher Diogenes showed his middle finger as a sign of disrespect to the orator Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C.E. (The ancient Greeks also associated the penis with birds, although there’s no evidence that they ever referred to the middle finger itself as a bird or showing it to someone as “flipping the bird.”) The ancient Romans called the middle finger digitus impudicus, or the impudent finger. In a show of superiority, eccentric Roman Emperor Caligula made senators kneel and kiss his middle finger, which was understood to represent his phallus.

So there, we got that sorted out. You might have also noticed a guy bouncing around impressively on what looked like a low-slung tightrope. This guy:

It turns out he goes by the name of Sketchy Andy and this is what he likes to do for fun:

Robert Reich on America's New "Downward Mobility"

2012-02-07T11:50:00.000-08:00

What goes up must come down. Who knew that might be the epitaph of America's once mighty Middle Class?

Robert Reich sees through the latest unemployment numbers. They may look good but they're a harbinger of a new "downward mobility."

"Most of the new jobs being created are in the lower-wage sectors of the economy – hospital orderlies and nursing aides, secretaries and temporary workers, retail and restaurant. Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain working only because they’ve agreed to cuts in wages and benefits. Others are settling for jobs that pay less than the jobs they’ve lost. Entry-level manufacturing jobs are paying half what entry-level manufacturing jobs paid six years ago.

Other people are falling out of the middle class because they’ve lost their jobs, and many have also lost their homes. Almost one in three families with a mortgage is now underwater, holding their breath against imminent foreclosure.

...Mitt Romney says he’s not concerned about the very poor because they have safety nets to protect them. He says he’s concerned about the middle class. Romney doesn’t seem to realize how much of the middle class is becoming poor.

But Romney doesn’t like safety nets to begin with. He’s been accusing President Obama of inviting a culture of dependency. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society,” he says over and over, arguing that our economic problems stem from a sharp rise in dependency. Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

...The real scandal, as I’ve said before, is America’s safety nets are too small and shot through with holes. Only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits, for example, because they weren’t working full time or long enough on a single job before they were let go. The unemployment system doesn’t recognize how many Americans work part time on several jobs, and move from job to job.

Romney’s budget proposals would shred safety nets even more. According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, his plan would throw 10 million low-income people off the benefit rolls for food stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or some combination. “These cuts would primarily affect very low-income families with children, seniors and people with disabilities,” the Center concludes.

At the same time, Romney’s tax plan would boost the incomes of America’s most wealthy citizens, who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of that nation’s total income. Romney wants to permanently extend George W. Bush’s tax cuts, reduce corporate income tax rates, and eliminate the estate tax. These tax cuts would increase the incomes of people earning more than a million dollars a year by an average of $295,874 annually, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

The downward mobility of America’s middle class is the big news, but the GOP apparently hasn’t heard about it. Maybe it’s too hard to hear about from that far away.

And I thought one of the things Americans are proudest of is their revolution. Maybe it's time they revisited the idea.

Global Weirding, European Style

2012-02-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

One feature of climate change is the erratic arrival of weather extremes. Australia, for example, is enduring its second year of massive flooding following many years of extreme drought. Meanwhile, Europe is caught up in a severe cold snap. These photos via Der Spiegel:


The Forum - Rome


Trevi Fountain - Rome

Venice


Waiting for the Thaw - Lake Geneva

Barcelona Forest

Parked Cars - Serajevo


Construction Site - Berlin

Gorge in South Germany

California Gays Headed to the Supremes

2012-02-07T10:49:00.000-08:00

It'll be up to the US Supreme Court to decide the validity of California's ban on gay marriage. A US Federal appeals court has ruled the ban violates the US Constitution.

"...the panel found that Proposition 8 – passed by California voters in November 2008 by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent -- violated the equal protection rights of two same-sex couples that brought he suit. The proposition placed a specific prohibition in the State Constitution against marriage between two people of the same sex."

Happy Birthday Charlie

2012-02-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

Charles Dickens turns 200 today - or he would have were he still alive. With my admittedly plebeian tastes in literature, Dickens and Twain are a complete banquet.

"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant," said Dickens' biographer, Claire Tomalin. "The great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament ... You name it, he said it."

Disaster Capitalism Goes Celestial

2012-02-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

Eco-sleight of hand may reach stratospheric proportions if Bill Gates and other members of his Club of Billionaires succeed in pushing geo-engineering as the solution to anthropogenic climate change.

The allure of geo-engineering is powerful, seductively irresistible to those who are themselves powerful and rich. It's a multi-faceted gambit.   It buys time. Why worry so much about man-made warming now if, when necessary, we can somehow seed the atmosphere and induce an offsetting cooling effect. It saves massive amounts of money. Why 'upset' the economy now by switching to a decarbonized economy and society when geo-engineering solutions are cheaper. It creates the potential for almost unimaginable wealth in the future.   We have to act now, the time for pursuing alternative energy solutions has passed, so your only real hope is to pay us to implement geo-engineering mechanisms to save your backsides and keep your toxic economies ticking.

In some ways, geo-engineering seems the environmental equivalent of feedlot cattle production.   Once it takes hold, you're stuck with it.

The doctors of disaster capitalism are gathering to plot the future of geo-engineering.     Names like Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Canadian Tar Sands magnate Murray Edwards are funding studies into geo-engineering options to "save" the planet.

"We will need to protect ourselves from vested interests [and] be sure that choices are not influenced by parties who might make significant amounts of money through a choice to modify climate, especially using proprietary intellectual property," said Jane Long, director at large for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, in a paper delivered to a recent geoengineering conference on ethics.

"The stakes are very high and scientists are not the best people to deal with the social, ethical or political issues that geoengineering raises," said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace. "The idea that a self-selected group should have so much influence is bizarre."

But Gates, Branson et al did not get where they are by failing to spot opportunity. How could they be expected to miss the rich opportunities from political ineptitude and intransigence just laying about for the picking?

The shortfalls and pitfalls of geo-engineering are myriad.   Massive amounts of research into climate history going back hundreds of thousands of years has been required just to understand how we got to where we are today and what probably awaits us. It has taken us decades to synthesize all this information, study and analysis into a coherent theory of anthropogenic global warming.   Yet we're to pin the future of mankind on possible solutions of questionable value, indeterminate longevity and with unknown side effects and potentially irreversible consequences.

It's entirely foreseeable that geo-engineering will be, at best, a lifeboat for the first-class passengers and a dark, final swim for everyone else.   Just as global warming is impacting different parts of the world in different ways, to different degrees and at different speed, it's just as likely that geo-engineering, the ultimate "one size fits all" response will be anything but universal, at best, and, at worst, may benefit a few regions at the expense of the many.

And we need only look at the developed world's magnanimity toward the most vulnerable countries when it comes to helping them cope with the impacts of global warming to get an idea of just how generous we're likely to be when it comes to spending vastly more on them to extend geo-engineering benefits their way.   It may actually cost far more to geo-engineer our own way out of this if we try to do it for the whole planet.   Costs and efficiency could well dictate that to save ourselves we really have to throw the rest of mankind to the wolves.

EU Climate Chief Wants a Fresh Take on Growth

2012-02-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

It's going to happen. We don't have any other choice.   Growth, the crack cocaine of post-war industrialism in the Western World, has (pardon the pun) outgrown its social, economic and even political utility.

Now it's the EU Climate Chief picking up the refrain that growth is our problem, not our salvation, and we need a to overhaul our ideas about it.

Overconsumption of critical resources, and the rising prices of key commodities such as food, energy and natural materials as a result, risk derailing the world economy – but these problems will not be tackled unless today's economic models are overhauled, according to Connie Hedegaard, EU commissioner for climate action. That is because judging economic growth purely on the basis of production and consumption, as happens now, encourages rampant overconsumption and fails to value the natural environment.

...If this year's summit is to have the far-reaching consequences of its predecessor, countries must seize the chance to sign a firm resolution to change the way growth is measured, she said.

That could involve moving away from GDP to broader measures of wellbeing, and putting a value on natural resources rather than regarding important assets such as clean water, clean air and biodiversity as free, as current economic models do.

"This is an opportunity to rethink [how we measure growth]," Hedegaard told the Guardian. "The knowledge is out there, the analysis has been done. We can take this decision in Rio."

Current models of growth prize only consumption and production, rating countries' performance according to their GDP.

However, there is a growing belief among some economists that this long-standing model has outlived its usefulness, and provides no protection for the natural world. The Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz has been one of the leading voices calling for a change, and world leaders including David Cameron, the UK prime minister, have heeded the call, promising moves towards a broader definition of economic value.

This argument is more than compelling. At some point we're going to accept it, even if begrudgingly, because we live in a world in which we just keep running into walls. The evidence is everywhere. Some aspects are visible to the naked eye from space - dust plumes sweeping out of China across the Pacific to North America; desertification of once arable farmland; deforestation; ice in retreat, lakes and rivers drying up, regions battered by sustained or cyclical floods and droughts.   Others, such as the collapse of global fish stocks, are slightly harder to discern.

This reality, however, isn't going to be welcome in the Capitol Building or in the chambers of our very own Petro-Parliament.   There the idea of pricing water and air is blasphemy.   They need to pretend we're still in the 1970s to make their chicanery even economically viable.   If we were to properly price water and air, the viability of Steve's pet Tar Sands would be dealt a fierce if not mortal blow.   Steve, like his American Idols, believes in Socialism but only when it's for the rich and powerful, outfits like Big Oil.

Summing Up Republicans In One Paragraph

2012-02-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

The Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts has captured the sorry face of today's Republican party and he did it in just a few lines:

Under Reagan, optimism about the future was the Republican brand. But that brand has curdled in the ensuing 30 years and the party that once sold hope has become instead the party of grouchy codgers yelling at the future to get off their lawn. More to the point, it has become a party of those unable to process the sense of dislocation, the loss of primacy and privilege our present demographic path portends. Thus, it has become the party of resentment and resistance, the last stand against ongoing racial, religious, cultural and sexual upheaval, the Alamo in the fight to forestall change.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/02/03/137545/commentary-ronald-reagan-would.html#storylink=cpy

How to Put Planned Parenthood Out of the Abortion Business

2012-02-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

The fundie Right doesn't hesitate to condemn Planned Parenthood for providing abortion services. Slate's William Saletan offers a brilliant idea on how to put Planned Parenthood out of the abortion business - send it as much money as you can.

Look at the latest annual report from Planned Parenthood Federation of America, issued two months ago. The table on page 5 shows that over the course of a year, PPFA provided 3,685,437 contraceptive services and 329,445 abortions. That’s a ratio of 11 to 1.

Internationally, the ratio is even higher. Look at the latest annual report from the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The table on page 13 shows that over the course of a year, IPPF provided 33,854,786 contraceptive services and 1,411,494 abortions. That’s a ratio of 24 to 1. Did I mention condoms? IPPF distributed 152,397,194 condoms. That’s 108 condoms per abortion.

What happens when you provide condoms and contraceptive services? Women who don’t want to get pregnant don’t get pregnant. Which means fewer women are in the market for abortions. The abortion business dries up.

...If you want to drive Planned Parenthood out of the abortion business, don’t send them less money. Send them more. Help Planned Parenthood become what it has wanted to be all along: The organization that helps women avoid unwanted pregnancies, so they don’t have to abort them.

Of course the fundie Right, yielding to their fundamentalist compulsions, refuses to accept the education-contraception-abortion link. And that's just one reason why they're dangerous idiots.

Russia, China Veto SC Resolution on Syria

2012-02-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

Steve Harper's latest moral mood swing is all about China. He can't wait to get supertankers full of Athabasca bitumen sailing the vast Pacific to waiting refineries in the People's Republic.

Well, today Steve's new BFF joined with Russia to take Syria off the hook at the UN Security Council. China and Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution aimed at ending the violence inflicted by the Assad government to suppress a Syrian people's revolt.

The Security Council voted 13 to 2 in favor of a resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria, but the measure was blocked by Russia and China, who opposed what they saw as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty.

Pressure mounted on the Security Council to act as Syrian opposition leaders said more than 200 people were killed in the attack in Homs, and the White House accused Syria of having “murdered hundreds of Syrian citizens, including women and children.”

Maybe Steve should let Beijing know it doesn't have everything its own way, not yet at least. Scrapping the Northern Gateway would surely get that message across.

Afghanistan Down. Iran Next?

2012-02-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

Some time in the next two years the United States will pack up its guns and leave Afghanistan. Like Vietnam, and to some extent Iraq, it will be able to boast that its military was never defeated in battle. Like Vietnam and even more like Iraq, the United States will leave Afghanistan having utterly failed to achieve any of the strategic objectives that led it to invade. It was all for nothing - all the lives, military, insurgent and civilian; all the billions that not even America could afford to squander; all the lost opportunities.

Canada got roped into a bad deal, a prime minister horribly misled by his top military guy who, as events have proven beyond any doubt, had no idea of what he was doing - none at all. Big Cod my arse. But worse was to come in the form of an ideologically bent leader in whose twisted mind keeping this party going made sense.

Canada, of course, was not alone in this folly. The Guardian's Simon Jenkins neatly summarizes Britain's failure:

Every warning was disregarded in a classic of "cognitive dissonance". The Afghan war has been sustained by years of mendacity and deceit from western governments. Elected representatives, the media and public opinion were induced to buy the line that success was "just around the corner". Embedded journalists would report that the army was "winning hearts and minds" and the Taliban were on the run. Sooner or later Nato would "retrain" the Afghan army, despite constant reports of the hatred and unreliability this army felt towards the occupation. Just last week, the British government bizarrely pledged to build "an Afghan Sandhurst", presumably as a palace for some future Taliban warlord.

All military and diplomatic experience, all the history and the scholarship in the world, did not stop this crude punitive venture being backed by conservatives and liberals alike in both the US and Britain. It was declared a good war. The drumbeats of battle stifled criticism. Any general got a cheer who could boast that the war would be over in weeks, and without a shot fired. Critics were met with the timeless, drear refrain, that their talk was defeatist, cowardly and lacked patriotism. Like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, they were drowned by the lust for glory.

...this is not the endgame. Britain is even now rattling sabres and dicing with disaster alongside the US against Iran. Such a war would be as catastrophic as could be imagined, and against a country that poses no conceivable threat to western security. The sole reason for going to war against Iran is to go to war against Iran. That is how we went to war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Clearly, nothing has been learned.

No Ho Like a Rich Ho

2012-02-02T13:37:00.000-08:00

If you're going to struggle with a hooker so bad she winds up needing surgery, and if you're busted for forceable confinement of the woman, and if you're going to get caught by police with illicit drugs, and if the cops are going to find you holding an illegal handgun too - you had damned well better be rich if you don't want to get slammed up in prison.

Vancouver billionaire David Ho has just pleaded guilty to all three offenses. This is the same dude who pleaded guilty to another weapons charge last year when a switchblade was found in his bag at Vancouver airport.

This time the prostitute was trying to leave after a four-hour gig with Ho. He tried to keep her from leaving. In the scuffle she fell, breaking her ankle. As he grabbed at her she slipped out of her pants and top. Before she got away she lost her bra too. Finally, clad only in her underwear, she made it to a neighbours and safety.

Ho has pleaded guilty to the charges but, for this mega-affluent repeat offender, the Crown is asking only a year probation and drug rehab.

This is one time where it's money that walks.

The Myth of Free Market Capitalism

2012-02-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

Criticize supposed "free market" capitalism these days and that makes you a flag-burning, god-hating, Socialist to some.   There are some very wealthy capitalists who spread a bit of their wealth around to fund organizations, like the Tea Party, to get that very message out. It just sounds so much better when it comes from some old granny sitting on a cheap lawn chair.

What's curious is how these same wealthy capitalists actually work to destroy truly free markets so that they can make even more money.   For them, it's "do as I say, not as I do."   If anything, their corporate ethic is eerily reminiscent of the way business once got done in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was known for narrowly held control of broad sectors of the Soviet economy.   The state decided how collective farms would be organized, what they would produce and in what quantities. The state decided most aspects of production and consumption including how resources would be allocated. We knew this as an incident of Communism.

Barry Lynn explores this in a fascinating essay in this month's Harper's , "Killing the Competition, How the New Monopolies are Destroying Open Markets." Lynn traces the powerful narrowing of control of American market sectors, transforming small producers into serfs to an insidious form of feudal capitalism.

"...every day, there are fewer buyers; fewer of them. Hence they enjoy more and more liberty to dictate terms - or simply to dictate.

"...monopolization of our public markets is first and foremost a political crisis, amounting to nothing less than the re-establishment of private government. What is at stake is the survival of our democratic republic.

One sector Lynn examines is the high tech world of Silicon Valley.

"...today's lords of the Valley ..enjoy the power to choreograph competition among the latest generation of upstarts and then buy whom they please, when they please. ...the Justice Department complained in 2010 that senior executives at Apple, Google, Intel, Pixar and two other corporations had 'formed and actively managed' an agreement that 'deprived' the engineers and scientists who work for them of 'access to better job opportunistic.'"

It's the sort of thing we recall from movies about Hollywood. "Do that and you'll never work in this business again." Employees live in fear. If they lose their jobs their employer can see to it they're blackballed. It creates an inequality between the provider of services and the few buyers that can lead to perverse outcomes. Lynn interviewed the worker who stood up, leading the class action suit against the Tech Barons.

"Sure the pace was grinding, the hours crazy. One team, he recounts, worked for 110-hours per week for nine months straight. But 'everyone believed they were making something important.'

"...his attitude began to sour after Lucasfilm completed a particularly ambitious project. The very next day, he says, shaking his head, executives came in and 'fired almost everyone.' These were employees who hadn't had a day off in months. 'People were running around crying. It was a bad sight.'"

You can only treat faithful employees that brutally if your other employees live in abject fear of losing their own jobs and have no decent prospects if they bolt.

Another sector Lynn looks at is America's poultry industry where giant megacompanies harness small, independent producers, their suppliers, into a form of servitude that often pits one against the other.

"The concept of such competitions - or 'tournaments,' as the industry calls them - is generally credited to the economist Edward Lazear, who served as one of George w. Bush's top advisers. ...The idea, first laid out in a 1981 paper titled 'Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimim Labor contracts,' is straightforward.   Rather than pay all workers the same rate for any particular task, Lazerar wrote, why not set up a 'labor market contest,' in which those who produce more also get paid more per task or per piece? Such a system of reward (ad, for those at the bottom, punishment would, he claimed, increase the incentive to work harder."

This distortion of capitalism institutionalizes inequality between seller and buyer. There is no open market. No producer is allowed to know the price his neighbour gets on market day. He can't judge what the market will bear. All he knows is what he's told he will get and, if he gets out of line, he may find his once perfect chickens will be graded as inferior.

Lynn's essay is well worth a read.    Check out the latest Harper's.

U.S. to Wrap Up Afghan Combat Mission in 2013

2012-02-01T15:59:00.000-08:00

By mid-2013 Afghan security or, arguably its civil war, will again be the responsibility of Afghans. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has announced that he hopes America's combat mission will wrap up by then as his country's forces prepare for departure in 2014.

Coming in the immediate wake of a leaked Pentagon report that concludes the Taliban, with Pakistan backing, will again rule once infidel forces leave, it's hard to accept Panetta's announcement is entirely coincidental. He said U.S. forces will remain 'combat ready' so they'll be able to defend themselves.

Republicans Just Cannot Help Themselves

2012-02-01T07:41:00.000-08:00

They're complete boneheads, the lot of them. The real contest between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney at times seems to be which of them can talk without jamming a foot or two in his mouth.

This time it's Romney's turn. After his impressive win in the Florida primaries, MMM, the Mormon Multi-Millionaire, actually said this to CNN's Soledad Obrien:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor.”

Of course not, why would he? It's not like they're going to be voting Republican anyway and certainly not for Daddy Warbucks. Romney, it seems, thinks the "very poor" are doing just fine in the U.S. what with their government's generous safety net and all.

Then again, if this is your idea of your Utah "ski cabin" chances are you may not really get what it means to be "very poor" in America.

European Youth Reeling

2012-02-01T07:30:00.000-08:00

We're flooded with stories about Greece and the Euro and the European Union leaders and their deals. Blah, blah, blah. What these stories almost always overlook are the real victims, Europe's young people. They are on the verge of truly becoming a "lost generation."

A report in The Guardian reveals staggering levels of youth unemployment - 28% among Italians 16-24; Spain 51%, Greece 43%. In the Great Depression, America's unemployment rate briefly spiked at 25%. Worse yet, some sectors of the European economy aren't expected to recover for at least a decade.

The article reports an exodus of Europe's "best and brightest" young people similar to what befell Ireland after its collapse.

As subpar Euro leaders like Britain's Cameron remain fixated on austerity campaigns that can only worsen conditions for their youth the question becomes for how long they can possibly suppress widespread unrest and what awaits their countries when that dam breaks.

Pentagon Ups the Ante on Iran

2012-02-01T07:17:00.000-08:00

Count the carriers. One US Navy fleet aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf is routine. Now there are two, the Lincoln and the Vinson. A third is scheduled to deploy to the Gulf in March and a fourth, the USS John Stennis is loitering just days away.

The United States doesn't tend to marshal that much firepower until it is ready to pull the trigger.

A former British ambassador to Tehran says the West may be dangerously miscalculating. "I don't think they are playing Iran anything like as well as they think they are. The oil embargo tends to give those elements in Iran who want to have maximal defences, including nuclear defences, added weight to their arguments. Also they are poking Iran with a sharp stick but this is not accompanied by a new negotiating incentives."

It May Not Sound Like Much, But...

2012-02-01T06:35:00.000-08:00

A welcome advance in boosting disaster risk reduction and preparedness in poorer countries has arrived in the form of a new data service being provided by the World Meteorological Organization.

Comprehensive weather data, regional and local, will be made available by the WMO to aid, "Researchers and experts on food security, water management, disaster risk reduction and health."

It may not sound like much but it is going to save lives and improve the lot of a great many of the less fortunate, especially in regions now experience severe droughts and floods.

Americans Foresee Return of Taliban Rule

2012-02-01T06:20:00.000-08:00

When the West stops playing whack-a-mole in Afghanistan, the Talibs, with the backing of Pakistan, are poised to return to power.   That is the conclusion of a secret US military report, The State of the Taliban, 2012, that has been leaked to the BBC and The Times.

Islamabad is supposedly furious that the Americans would accuse their military intelligence service, the ISI, of conniving with the Taliban, the worst kept secret in that entire region.

The US report also details widespread collaboration between the insurgents and members of the Afghan police and army. I wonder how many of these double-agents have been trained by our forces.

Underlying all of this is the reality everyone from that region knows - we are not there to stay, we never were.   When we finally leave, it becomes their show again.   They get to play their game, by their rules.

The report's conclusions, "that the Taliban's strength and morale are largely intact despite the Nato military surge, and that significant numbers of Afghan government soldiers are defecting to them, are in stark contrast to Nato's far more bullish official line, that the insurgent movement has been severely damaged and demoralised."

The American report pretty much writes the obituary for NATO's futile mission in Afghanistan. They Tried, They Died, They Left. Even Canada sacrificed so many lives for such an empty gesture.

The only aspect of Canada's mission that made any sense was the initial commitment authorized by Paul Martin.   That was when we decided to send a small contingent to house sit Kandahar province while the Americans were supposedly finishing up in Iraq. Only the Americans got bogged down in Iraq and a successor government decided we should stay.   When this became Harper's war it went straight downhill.   Then again, he was only in it for the political points and he didn't mind spending Canadian lives to buy those points.

The Grinch That Failed to Steal Florida

2012-01-31T17:19:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich warned Floridians that, if he won their state primary, he would be the Republican nominee for president. That was apparently enough to bring an end to the Gingrich rampage that took fire with his win in South Carolina.

Early CNN poll results had Romney walking away with just over 50% compared to Gingrich, trailing 21 points down at 29%. Newt, however, has vowed to stay in the race hoping the slave states will rescue his race-baiting ass in months ahead.

Welcome to the Snake Pit

2012-01-31T17:13:00.000-08:00

By snake pit I mean the Florida everglades, a former refuge for a wide variety of small mammals now being overrun by introduced pythons. Sightings of prey species such as possums and racoons are down by around 99%.

The Obama administration has responded by banning the importation of several species of python and anaconda, a measure promptly criticized by Republicans and other reptilians. Republican lawmakers say they're trying to protect the constrictor breeding cottage industry.

Pythons have also been discovered swallowing whole swamp alligators up to six feet long. If the Everglades top natural predator isn't safe, nothing is. (If you follow the link you'll find a photo of a python that literally exploded after swallowing a mid-size alligator.)

If the pythons don't ruin the Everglades, water shortages in Florida, Georgia and Alabama might finish the job. The states' groundwater drainage is causing seawater to flow into the freshwater Everglades, something bound to be worsened by sea level rise and storm surges.

Canada's Made-by-Harper Structural Deficit

2012-01-31T15:05:00.000-08:00

To hear Steve Harper tell it, Canada's finances are a mess. He ought to know, he created the mess.

Yes, the federal government has a "structural deficit" that won't simply go away once the recession ends (whenever that might be). Underlying that isn't excessive government spending but, as The Globe's Stephen Gordon points out, the decision by econo-genius SHarper to gut revenues by slashing the GST.

With a hapless Opposition, Steve has Parliament well under control. As Gordon points out, no party is willing to talk about raising taxes to restore the government Steve defunded which leaves the only way out the very revenue cuts Steve has wanted from the get go.

We know Steve wants to trim government spending and he's more than willing to start with Canada Pension benefits but, overwhelming instincts aside, he may have to trim his own austerity sails instead.

As Krugman has repeatedly claimed and as his lab rat British PM David Cameron has proved, austerity is all well and good but only when it the timing is also well and good. Austerity heaped on the back of a weak economy only weakens the economy. Even the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization have finally accepted that in an open letter to European leaders.

Unfortunately the West is on the brink of another severe recession that can only be made worse by political stupidity. We can only hope that Steve has finally figured out that he's far from being the smartest man in the room. All he has to do is look at his awful track record of the past six years.

I'll Get On To That Right Away

2012-01-31T11:17:00.000-08:00

A UN report examining population increase concludes that, by 2030, just 18 years from now, we'll need 50% more food, 45% more energy and 30% more water to meet humanity's needs.   Secretary general Ban ki-Moon said "We need to chart a new, more sustainable course for the future, one that strengthens equality and economic growth while protecting our planet."

Strengthening equality, a term that, to some, is code for sharing, perhaps even rationing among nations and peoples. The UN panel calls for a transition from "unsustainable lifestyles, production and consumption patterns." If you don't think that's aimed at you, think again.

An interesting recommendation is a new way of valuing and pricing goods and services incorporating the full environmental and social costs of production and consumption.

It's difficult to see how this could possibly work. It would necessitate some transfer of wealth and resources and a broad based sharing of economic and political powers with the poorest and most vulnerable states.   The recent fiscal meltdown has already left people in the West feeling set upon.   How willing could they possibly be to accept gratuitous transfers of wealth and power for the sake of sustainable growth elsewhere?

The one thing the UN panel can't address is where to find the will, public and political, at local, national and global levels necessary to pull this off. It's hard to see that the world the panel needs in order to make this happen is or will become a reality within the relatively small window available to effect these changes.

If there's one thing that this report is probably right about it's that, by 2030, mankind will need 50% more food, 45% more energy and 30% more water.   Using that baseline, try to imagine what the world of 2030 is going to look like without those essentials.

What Keeps the F-35 From Crashing?

2012-01-31T09:54:00.000-08:00

It's mainly this:

Lockheed has mastered the game of spreading around a government's money to see to it that government has to keep sending it more money. Not socialism exactly, but...

The jet fighter is needed to replace aging U.S. military planes, but — already the most costly weapons system ever, at $385 billion and rising — it might be more expensive than the nation can afford.

Despite criticism from defense secretaries, government investigators and powerful senators, the Pentagon still wants the Joint Strike Fighter — but the Defense Department might want more plane than it needs.

"A lot of times, the Pentagon just wants to sexy these things up and make them do wow stuff when wow is not required," Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told McClatchy.

In the current budget crisis, with the Pentagon facing $1 trillion in possible cuts, the F-35's high price tag makes it a prime target. But thanks in part to campaign contributions from its main contractors and their jobs spread across the country, the fighter plane has its own congressional caucus of 48 lawmakers dedicated to saving it at all costs.

In releasing the Pentagon's budget priorities this month, [Defense Secretary Leon] Panetta restated the Defense Department's commitment to the troubled Joint Strike Fighter while delivering an endorsement that felt more like kissing a second cousin.

"In this budget, we have slowed procurement to complete more testing and allow for development changes before buying in significant quantities," he said.

Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Cater provided a blunter assessment. "The Joint Strike Fighter is not ready to go into full-rate production," he told PBS late Thursday.

It was the third slowdown in as many years for the beleaguered program.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/30/137359/f-35-story-shows-why-its-so-hard.html#storylink=omni_popular#storylink=cpy

It seems America's defence industry has joined the ranks of the country's banks and Wall Street, too big to fail. The all too flawed F-35 will limp along. Because of its political backing, it may even survive the emergence of technologies that neutralize its supposed stealth cloaking.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/30/137359/f-35-story-shows-why-its-so-hard.html#storylink=omni_popular#storylink=cpy

When Is America Truly #1? When It Screws Up.

2012-01-31T09:28:00.000-08:00

All the King's horses and all the King's men cannot save America from its own stupidity.   There are many examples of American hubris but one that stands out is the legacy of Dick Cheney's frolic in Iraq. Asia Times has published an interesting overview of America's greatest, perhaps its conclusive, strategic defeat in the Middle East.

"The US's major mistake in Iraq - in stark contrast to the United Kingdom during its colonial quest - is that it tried to engage in "regime change", where the entire state structure of the old regime was not superseded but destroyed. Later, the US tried to restore it, but the damage was irreversible.

"Secondly, Washington, following the dictum that democracy should spread to any part of the world, launched what were the freest elections in Iraq's history. Both decisions were grave mistakes and led to disaster, at least from Washington's perspective.

"The destruction of the state unleashed anarchy and a milieu where jihadis and other extremists could flourish. The election led to the Shi'ite majority - with its strong pro-Iranian sympathies - gaining power. Then the only force that would have been able to stabilize Iraq and prevent it from becoming Iran's proxy - US troops - left. .

"With an industrial base in the process of erosion and mounting debt and budget cuts, the hands of Washington were tied; and it would be naive to attribute the withdrawal from Iraq conducted recently to the naivete of President Barack Obama."

"...With the US's departure, a trend where Baghdad was drawing closer to Tehran has intensified, and Iraq supports the regime in Syria - Tehran's proxy.

"At the same time, Sunni violence, with the possible participation of jihadis, has intensified. This also could be said to a lesser degree about the Kurds, who have not lost hope of building an independent state.

"This process has provided an opportunity to Sunni jihadis, the enemy of not just Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government but also that of his masters in Tehran.

"Moreover, they could well reinforce the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, who are the enemy not just of the US but also of Iran. It is not surprising that Iran has engaged in moves not just to prepare for a potential war with the US/Israel but also started maneuvers near its borders with Afghanistan."

American arrogance engineered its own defeat in Iraq and the Middle East.   Cheney-Rumsfeld thought their tidy little war would be over in as little as 60-days.   Wolfowitz told Congress the cost would be nominal - a few tens of billions - and would essentially be recovered out of Iraq oil deals.   These miscreants ignored warnings, even retaliated against those who would speak truth to their power.

Iraq today is the inevitable hellspawn of the union of religious fundamentalism, ideological radicalism (neo-conservatism), a rampant military-industrial complex, and a corrupt, bought and paid for government.   It speaks of a people who no longer understand their own nation, a people rendered inert by a force-fed diet of fear and anger.

Now Can the World Have Its Forests Back?

2012-01-31T08:28:00.000-08:00

A main cause of deforestation in South America and Asia has been clearing land for palm oil production. Palm oil has become a major source of biodiesel, a supposedly green fuel. Not so fast.

The Guardian has received leaked EU data that shows palm oil biodiesel the second carbon filthiest fuel, next only to Tar Sands bitumen.

Hint - think twice before investing in palm oil futures. To meet EU standards for certifying biofuels as "sustainable" they have to be 35% lower in CO2 emissions than conventional crude. By 2018 that jumps to 60% cleaner. Those are only emissions standards that don't take into account costs or other factors. For the Tar Sands the figure given doesn't begin to incorporate the many associated environmental costs of bitumen extraction, shipping and processing.

The more you look at this the more it can come to resemble a dog chasing its tail. If the warnings from climate science are right, the effective solution is to decarbonize our economies and our societies.

What Could Bring the Tar Sands to Heel and Cost Canadians a Gazillion Dollars

2012-01-29T10:41:00.000-08:00

A Saudi prince once quipped, "the Stone Age didn't end because they ran out of stones."   His point was that the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil. He is right.   There are a number of factors that will render oil energy unviable well before it's exhausted.

When I finally quit smoking several years back it was the result of several factors - cost, inconvenience, the way I was feeling, knowledge of what probably lay ahead if I didn't.   All of these factors came together to create the incentive powerful enough to overcome the power of my addiction.   Something similar lies in store for fossil fuels, including oil.

One of these factors being scrutinized now is climate change and the probable effect of an international agreement to limit warming to 2C.   Over the past year the numbers have been tossed around and it has become plain that, if we are to limit GHG emissions to meet that target, we'll be able to use not more than roughly 20% of known fossil fuel reserves.   That's it - 20 per cent.

A key factor in skyrocketing oil prices is the perceived shortage of supply.   But if we're coming into a world that recognizes we have to leave most of that stuff in the ground those prices become wildly unrealistic.   That's why, about ten days ago, a group of prominent Brits from the investment, science and political ranks, wrote to warn the governor of the Bank of England of the risks of a "carbon bubble" similar to the housing bubble that wreaked such destruction in the US economy.   The group went so far as to declare energy assets "sub prime."

If these assessments are right, what does that mean for Canada's Tar Sands, at once the world's filthiest and most costly oil assets? The Tar Sands have always been world price-vulnerable.   They need today's hefty oil prices to be marginally profitable.   Their profitability is also dependent on substantial government subsidies and deferred obligations such as environmental remediation.

If world markets go cold on oil, come to see it as an investment with significant risks, perhaps even sub-prime, that's really, really bad news for the Athabasca Tar Sands.   Our governments' bargaining position with Big Oil, weak as it now is, would probably collapse. Our chances of extracting a meaningful return on our subsidies and enforcing Big Oil's wobbly promises for site remediation could also be undermined.

But, of course, we have Steve Harper driving this so there's nothing to worry about, right? Wrong.   If there's one thing Steve has shown himself incapable of it's seeing the train barreling down the tracks before it hits us.   Here are just two examples.

When the world fell into economic meltdown in 2008, Steve didn't see it coming. He even absolved himself of his failure by claiming no one saw it coming.   What nonsense.   Plenty of very knowledgeable people saw it coming and sounded the alarm. Steve just didn't want to hear their warnings.

Then there's Steve's own Davos meltdown over old age pensions at home.   "Major transformations" are coming, he warned a gaggle of world leaders who won't be impacted by his plans.   This begs the question of why Steve was so horribly incompetent when it came to his 2008 mega-stimulus budget? He squandered tens of billions of dollars of borrowed money on giveaways that will have paltry long-term impacts. He had to borrow that money and leave working Canadians saddled with the debt because he had earlier defunded the federal treasury that was well stocked with 'rainy day' funds when he took over.   But, instead of investing that stimulus money on projects that will deliver returns to the taxpayers for decades to come, he just threw it away so we could put new decks on our cottages.

How do we expect a guy who so consistently gets it wrong, who can't look up long enough to see what's so obviously coming, who is incapable of devising effective solutions to great problems of any sort, how do we expect Steve to protect Canadian interests against a potential "carbon bubble"?

As though we needed another reason for a change of management in Canada.

About that "Secret Agenda"

2012-01-28T09:14:00.000-08:00

L'il Steve Harper has spent the past six or more years assuring Canadians at every opportunity that he really doesn't harbour any "secret agenda."

Then he goes all the way to Switzerland, drops his pants, and announces that he's got "major transformations" in store for his small folk at home.

An effective Opposition would be clubbing Harper over his tightly quaffed head on this like a Newfie on a Harp seal. So, where exactly are they?

Just Too Dumb to Be an Atheist

2012-01-26T10:46:00.000-08:00

There I've said it.   I'm just too damned dumb to accept atheism.   And, the way I see it, so are you even if you won't admit it... yet. It's the whole faith thing that stops me in my tracks.   What is faith but a willingness to accept as true something that you cannot prove and otherwise wouldn't believe? It's a suspension of the common sense skepticism that we invoke every day to see us safely through a limitless variety of situations great and small. I know that's a crude definition but it works for my purposes.

To me, atheism is itself a quasi-faith.   The belief that there is no greater moral power than man himself is a bit over-reaching.   It is a conclusion that is founded on man's own intellect which is probably quite feeble and flawed. It's a conclusion that cannot be reached until we know everything that is inside us and outside us.   Do we have any real idea of what a God would look like, how we can discern the presence or absence of a God?

Just look at how precious little we actually know.   Quantum physics suggests there are no fewer than eleven dimensions.   Mankind's entire experience is based on just four dimensions, one of which we don't even understand.   We have the left/right dimension, the up/down dimension, the forward/backward dimension and we have something that may or may not actually even exist, time.

Time may not exist? Absolutely. Years ago I heard this perfectly explained by a senior US Navy officer who commanded the atomic clock at the US Naval Observatory.   Every day he went to work with an awareness that we don't understand time, we can't even prove it exists.

All of our faiths, atheism included, are formed out of this four-dimensional awareness.   Any other dimension could instantly shatter the wobbly foundations of our strains of faith.   And who is to say that our dimensional realities - four, seven, nine or eleven - would be constant throughout our universe or anything that lies beyond?

It is no wonder we cling to so many "revealed" religions, each founded on one or several supposed human-deity interfaces from the ancient past.   All it takes is for some guy to convince his people that he just had a quiet word with their Maker who told the guy to pass along thus and so. It either gets traction or it doesn't.   If it gets traction, there you go - scripture.   And then you can hand that down, century by century, unless your religion gets overtaken by another faith or your faithful get trashed by conquerors who set up their Gods instead.   But the longer you keep it going the more certain adherents are to believe it's true.

Revealed religions are, in my opinion, hooey.   That's why there are so many of them each convinced that all others are hooey. See, no matter what revealed religion you embrace, you already agree with me about each and every other revealed religion.   That speaks volumes.

But this is about atheism which, for many, seems to be the default option when revealed religion is rejected.   Why?   Because you say so. Really? Because you with your pointy little head, you who understands so little, you who has never looked high and low or far and wide, you can't see God so he can't exist.   And we're supposed to put aside our skepticism because of that?

So where does that leave me?   I think I'm going to go with Einstein and accept that, somewhere on a scale between possibly and probably, there exists a superior being that we can perceive as Godlike. I'm going to accept this is evident in the vast mysteriousness of the universe and in human consciousness, compassion and reason.   I guess that is a loose sort of Deism. Maybe that's just where you wind up when you're too dumb to be an atheist.

Capitalism No Longer Fits

2012-01-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

"Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us." What a curious thing for the founder and chairman of the Davos World Economic Forum, professor Klaus Schwab to declare. "A global transformation is urgently needed and it must start with reinstating a global sense of social responsibility," he added.

"Growing inequities within and between countries and rising unemployment are no longer sustainable ... We must rethink our traditional notions of economic growth and global competitiveness, not only by focusing on growth rates and market penetration, but also, equally — if not more importantly — by assessing the quality of economic growth."

"How sustainable is it and at what cost to the environment? How are the gains distributed? What has become of the family and community fabric, as well as of our culture and heritage? The time has come to embrace a much more holistic, inclusive and qualitative approach to economic development."

Into this burst of overdue enlightenment plods Canada's own mildewed cardboard leader, Steve Harper, to deliver an unlikely keynote speech laced with economic Calvinism.   Steve is widely expected to scold the Euros and preach fundamentalist capitalism as the cure for what ails everyone else.

Why is it that, no matter the venue, Steve must be such an embarrassment to his country and the Canadian people? His followers say Steve always considers himself the smartest man in the room but that only begs the question of what perverse notion of "smart" must this out-of-touch demagogue hold?

Like Obama, the Davos chairman is zeroing in on the malignancy of inequality.   Professor Schwab speaks of sustainability and the environment, community, socially responsible capitalism.   These are notions utterly alien to Steve Harper, beyond the realm of his constipated intellect.

The good thing is that broadbased movements like Occupy, shifting public attitudes and an awareness at the altitudes inhabited by people like Professor Schwab and Barack Obama, suggest that we're on the brink of social change that, at this point, probably can't be stopped.   The bad thing is that there remain plenty of Steve Harpers with atrophied and myopic thinking that will have to be swept out of the way before the floor is clean enough to move on. These obstacles to progress are invested in their fundamentalism and they won't go until they're forced out. And we owe just that to them.

The Disneyfication of America

2012-01-24T10:19:00.000-08:00

It's much easier to understand the bizarre antics of our cousins to the south when you realize they're not on the same page as the rest of the world. In fact, they're not even on the same book.   The thing is, it's not funny.   It's potentially quite dangerous - to them and to everyone else.

Retired US Army colonel turned free thinker, professor Andrew J. Bacevich writes, in this month's Harper's magazine, about the dangerous "Disneyfication" of the way Americans have come to understand their country and the world.

"The ;Disneyfication' of World War II... finds its counterpart in the Disneyfication of the Cold War, reduced in popular imagination and the halls of Congress to Ronald Reagan's demanding 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'   The Soviet leader meekly complied, and freedom erupted across Europe.   Facts that complicate this story... ultimately get filed under the heading of Things That Don't Really Matter.   The Ike Americans like even today is the one who kept the Soviets at bay while presiding over eight years of peace and prosperity.   The other Ike - the one who unleashed the CIA on Iran and Guatemala, refused to let the Vietnamese exercise their right to self-determination in 1956, and ignored the plight of Hungarians who, taking seriously Washington's rhetoric of liberation,rose up to throw off the yoke of Soviet power remains far less well known...

Self-serving mendacities - that the attacks of September 11, 2001, reprising those of December 7, 1949, 'came out of nowhere' to strike an innocent nation - don't enhance the safety and well being of the American people. To further indulge old illusions of the United States presiding over and directing the course of history will not only impede the ability of Americans to understand the world and themselves but may well pose a positive danger to both. ...Only by jettisoning the American Century and the illusions to which it gives rise will the self-knowledge and self-understanding that Americans urgently require become a possibility.   Whether Americans will grasp the opportunity that beckons is another matter."

Yet so many Americans remain in thrall to their fantasies. It's the capacity for delusion that fuels the successes of outrageous charlatans like Newt Gingrich.   Conditioning a people to embrace a powerfully manipulated and skewed perception of themselves and everyone else has been the stock in trade of every tyrant from Adolf Hitler on down.   It is the precursor to villanies.

What Did Steve Harper Just Say?

2012-01-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

The Grand Dissembler, Steve Harper, picks his words carefully. That's why it's often worthwhile to pay close attention to what comes out of his mouth. Take his remarks to a conference of First Nations chiefs in which he promised not to scrap the Indian Act:

"After 136 years, that tree [the Indian Act] has deep roots. Blowing up the stump would just leave a big hole."

Just what is Harper on about? In one breath he's talking about a grand old tree. In the next he's focusing on bad ways to get rid of the stump. Is that Harperspeak for "hold on to your hats 'cause I'm coming for you with a chain saw but don't you worry I won't blow up the stump"?

Wow. White man speaks with forked tongue.

F-35 Update

2012-01-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

F-35 Killer?

With Europe hovering on the brink of meltdown, with pipelines to stop, with the Republican presidential clown car careening through the Deep South, it's easy to lose sight of the F-35 controversy.

Fortunately there are some, like the Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese, who keep an eye on the difficult childbirth of Lockheed's mega-costly bomb truck.   Pugliese writes that the aircraft is making some progress in development but may be running into trouble in cash-strapped Europe. Italy may drop out all together and Denmark is now conducting a competitive fly-off to find the best bank for its buck.

What struck me as particularly interesting was a Pugliese piece yesterday on the unveiling of an updated version of an old Russian fighter, the Su-35S-3.   The Russkies say they've given it state of the art electronic systems, coated it with radar absorbing materials and tidied up all the exterior garbage that is a radar give-away.   But the important part is an obscure reference to the aircraft's new radar system.

"The special features of the aircraft include a new avionics suite based on digital information control system integrating onboard systems, a new phased antenna array radar with a long aerial target detection range and with an increased number of simultaneously tracked and engaged targets (30 aerial targets tracked and 8 targets engaged plus the tracking of 4 and engagement of 2 ground targets), and new enhanced vectored thrust engines."

The "long aerial" reference seems to indicate the new/old Russian fighter will be equipped with L-band radar as well as the X-band radar standard in modern fighter nose cones. L-band radar requires a long array or aerial which the Russians have decided to mount in the leading edge of their fighter's wings. So what? The stealth technology of the F-35 is designed to defeat X-band radars but is reported to be ineffective against L-band radar.

It seems the Russians are announcing they're about to churn out a fleet of low-cost F-35 killers. If they can detect and track the F-35 they've leveled the playing field years before we even get the damned things in Canadian hangars.   Without stealth it's mano a mano, hand to hand combat, and with its already identified speed, agility, payload and range deficiencies, that could just make the F-35 dead meat.

Think about it.   This is America's biggest defence project ever - ever.   Lockheed Martin's future hinges on the success of the F-35. That's Lockheed Martin as in America's pre-eminent defence contractor.   Render the F-35 obsolete before customers are safely in the corral and you've just struck a bodyblow to America's defence industry - all for the cost of churning out a fleet of budget, high-performance stealth killers.

It's our own damned fault and that of today's mediocre military leadership. We're gambling everything on a brittle technology and sacrificing every other quality that makes a great aircraft in the process.   That's an enormous Achilles' Heel and we'd be fools not to expect our potential adversaries to exploit that insane vulnerability.

The Integrity of Science

2012-01-24T07:31:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who is an ardent defender of the Athabasca Tar Sands. We get into friendly arguments by e-mail that can go for several days at a time.

The most recent topic has been the safety problems surrounding the TransCanada and Enbridge proposals to ship bitumen thousands of miles through pipelines. Bitumen is laced with abrasive, grit-like particles and corrosives, acids, that "eat" pipelines. In reply to these claims, my friend sent me a link to a press release from Alberta Innovates debunking the myths of dangerous bitumen.

Alberta Innovates said it, "sought an independent fact-based analysis to address the pipeline safety issues." It then commissioned a "corrosion specialist" to conduct the analysis. And who did they pick? Why Dr. Jeremy Beens, P.Eng., of - wait for it - Alberta Innovates - Technology Futures.

Can you hear the conversation now? "I know just the fellow to do this study - down the hall, on the right, two doors this side of the lunchroom."

But, remember folks, scientists are all liars except when they work for Alberta Innovates. Those guys always give us "independent, fact-based analysis."

Did Keystone Kill Off the Northern Gateway Pipeline?

2012-01-23T15:19:00.000-08:00

According to Andrew Nikiforuk, the Keystone XL pipeline may have only sustained a flesh wound but it was a killer blow to the Northern Gateway pipeline.

The best analysis of all things related to the Athabasca Tar Sands is plainly that of Andrew Nikiforuk. Formerly an author and freelancer, Nikiforuk now writes for The Tyee (www.thetyee.ca). In the latest Tyee Nikiforuk canvasses the setback sustained by Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal.

Keystone, Nikiforuk writes, may not be dead but it has ensured the Northern Gateway is going nowhere.

"In the end, water concerns legitimately and fairly killed the irresponsible route over the Ogallala aquifer just as water concerns have already killed the Gateway project.

"...TransCanada says it will apply again in 2013 with a different pipeline route. For oil-sand developers, Keystone XL still remains Plan A to get bitumen to foreign markets. It's not as cheap as moving bitumen to the Canada's West Coast but it comes with fewer risks.

"Most senior executives in the oil patch quietly admit that Enbridge Gateway project (Plan B) will never be built. The local opposition against this desperate pro-China folly is much stronger and just as committed as that against Keystone XL.

"In fact, the path closed long ago due to ineptness and hubris as well as a ruthless disregard for the power of salmon, whales and First Nations.

"It's deader than Keystone."

I so hope Nikiforuk has this one right. His article is well worth a read. One by one it debunks a lot of myths about these pipelines and exposes how reckless Harper is about properly managing Canadian resources for the benefit of Canadians.

I'm not as confident as Nikiforuk that Big Oil or Harper will give up on Northern Gateway that easily. Harper is a bully and his instincts will compel him to try to run roughshod over legitimate opposition to push this through, consequences be damned.

Carney Drops a Bombshell

2012-01-22T16:12:00.000-08:00

Kudos to Bank of Canada governor, Mark Carney, for coming right out and warning that the crippled U.S. economy is unlikely to ever fully recover.

“It’s going to take a number of years before they get back to the U.S. that we used to know — in fact, they are not, in our opinion, ultimately going to get back to the U.S. that we used to know,” he said.

Carney pointed to China as a market with great potential and as a place where Canada is currently under-represented, but cautioned it would take time to enhance trade between the two countries.

“It’s going to take multiple visits, multiple initiatives. Not, obviously, from the public sector alone, but clearly a focus from the private sector,” Carney said. “That is absolutely essential for developing our future and it’s a key element of our medium-term growth.”

Reagan and his contemporaries, Mulroney and Thatcher, set America's demise in motion with their delusional free trade notions. Reagan's apostles continued his work, gutting America's manufacturing base and, with it, displacing its once vibrant and robust middle class that manufacturing once anchored and nourished to make way for what became casino capitalism.

Yet a permanently degraded economy is but one wound America has suffered. There are others. These include the greatest levels of inequality in the developed world, class warfare, the strangling of social and economic mobility, and the evolution of the United States as the first true warfare state in modern history. All of these open wounds will continue to sap American strength. In America, as in Canada, the ability of the government to intervene to set these troubles right seems to have been lost. Now it will be up to the American people to compel change.

Can Someone Explain This to Me?

2012-01-22T16:03:00.000-08:00

At the heart of much of the opposition to the Athabasca Tar Sands is that it exports dangerous contaminants that put entire ecosystems at risk. We export a semi-refined product bearing significant quantities of abrasives, corrosives, heavy metals and other toxins.   We export this product to places where it is refined into synthetic crude. In other words, we export dangerous contaminants to distant places where they are removed.

Obama tossed out the Keystone XL pipeline proposal because of serious environmental risks it posed to Nebraska.   If the stuff is too dangerous for wide open Nebraska how could it possibly be safe to pump it across BC's mountainous and seismically active north?

What I don't understand and what nobody seems willing to discuss is why doesn't Harper want that product refined on site in Alberta? Why don't we remove the contaminants right there and simply export a clean synthetic crude product?

I suppose one reason this doesn't fly is because of the surplus refining capacity these days in Texas.   The same outfits that are extracting the bitumen are the outfits that own this refining capacity. They want to keep the whole thing "in house" and building new refineries in Alberta while their Texas operations sit idle isn't in their interest.   But what about China?

If we must export oil to China, why should that not be refined in Alberta before it's exported?   Why should coastal BC be exposed to a toxic, carcinogenic and virtually irreparable bitumen spill?   Isn't an ordinary, refined oil spill risk bad enough?

There's an answer to this somewhere. My guess is that the profit margins for the Tar Sands are already so minimal that incorporating the cost of complete refining into the price would sheer Alberta's and Ottawa's royalty revenues to the bone. Imagine the state of affairs that would result if Athabasca carbon emissions were properly priced, if Tar Sand operators were required to pay world price for the vast quantities of water they consume for nothing, if their operations weren't bolstered by tax write offs and subsidies, if they had to fund up front a programme for contamination clean up and site remediation.   All you would hear is a whooshing sound of Big Oil beating a quick retreat from Athabasca. And that's just sad.

The South Shall Rise Again

2012-01-22T09:29:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich swept back to prominence in the Republican ranks by a convincing win in South Carolina. Gingrich has been openly race-baiting and it seems the good folks of America's south like what they hear. Bill Moyers tells Bill Maher that the radical fringe now dominates the Republican party.

One scary feature of the radical Right is its utter rejection of science. They see the world not as it is but as they want to see it. They want the EPA defunded. Rick Perry even wanted it scrapped entirely. Can you think of any one that sort of thing appeals to in Canada?

Can the world really afford to be dominated by crazy people who happily ignore science and reality? Can America survive this degree of institutional derangement? The Republicans are doing what many crazy people do, they're destroying themselves and, in the process, their country.

Britain - Difficult Dry Days Ahead

2012-01-22T06:29:00.000-08:00

It's the 21st century's double-whammy - population growth coupled with global warming - and even soggy old Britain isn't immune.

Britain's Environment Agency has released a study on what lies in stores for rivers in England and Wales by 2050. It warns that some rivers could see summer river levels drop as much as 80%, transformed into "puddles of warm, stagnant mud."

The Guardian article cites a government White Paper, "Water for Life", that explores a wide range of possible actions, including some such as desalination plants and re-cycling of effluent water that would have seemed unimaginable for Britain only a decade ago.

The UN calculates that the absolute minimum daily requirement for clean, freshwater for drinking, cooking and hygiene is 20-litres per person. Britain's average consumption now stands at 160-litres per person per day. The government hopes to get that down to 130-litres per day. To give you an idea of what that means, in 2004 Canadian daily per capita freshwater consumption (residential) was 329 litres. Now imagine your water consumption cut by two-thirds.

Looney Lefties Call for End to Austerity

2012-01-19T22:49:00.000-08:00

Lefties - as in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization - have joined in a warning to western governments of the economic and social risks they're inviting through austerity budgeting.

"Expressing concern about the weakness of economic activity and rising unemployment, the IMF's Christine Lagarde, the World Bank's Robert Zoellick and the WTO's Pascal Lamy joined the heads of eight other multilateral and regional institutions in calling for policies to create jobs, tackle inequality and green the global economy.

"The world faces significant and urgent challenges that weigh heavily on prospects for future growth and on the cohesion of our societies," said the statement by the global issues group of the World Economic Forum. It was published ahead of the forum's annual meeting in Davos next week, amid concerns that 2012 will see the global economy flirt with recession as a result of the eurozone crisis.

"Our shared objective is the strengthening of growth, employment and the quality of life in every part of the world," said the statement.
"But entering 2012, we worry about: decelerating global growth and rising uncertainty; high unemployment, especially youth unemployment, with all its negative economic and social consequences; potential resort to inward-looking protectionist policies."

In addition to Lagarde, Zoellick and Lamy, the signatories were Mark Carney of the Financial Stability Board, Margaret Chan of the World Health Organization, Angel Gurría of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Donald Kaberuka of the African Development Bank, Haruhiko Kuroda of the Asian Development Bank, Luis Alberto Moreno of the Inter-American Development Bank, Josette Sheeran of the United Nations World Food Programme, and Juan Somavia of the International Labour Organisation. The forum said it was the first time the heads of the world's major institutions had come together in such a way.

If the first decade of this century has demonstrated anything, surely it must be that what passes for national leadership today is all but deaf to warnings such as this. For example, despite supposed-economist Harper's self-serving claim that no one saw the collapse of 2008 coming, there were plenty of voices sounding the alarm years in advance - people with names like Roubini, Krugman, Stiglitz. The only thing that kept Harper from heeding their clear warnings was his ego, his fundamentalist belief that he is the smartest guy in every room.

Has Harper's Buddy Bruce Carson Conveniently Fallen Between the Cracks?

2012-01-19T11:47:00.000-08:00

What happened to the RCMP investigation into Bruce Carson that Harper himself ordered, presumably to get his own lard arse off the hook?   Carson, you will recall, is the convicted fraud artist/disbarred lawyer/courtesan frequenting and purported influence peddling dirty old man who wangled his way into a fixer job in Harper's inner sanctum, the PMO.

It's not easy finding anything recent about Bruce Carson. He seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.   Last September, Aboriginal TV news tried to follow up with the RCMP and got the runaround. One RCMP spokesperson said the investigation had been concluded and found not to warrant charges.   That was followed up by another officer who said the matter is still before the Commercial Crime unit.   Yet another said the investigation ordered by the Prime Minister himself still hadn't been opened.

Has the investigation been quashed?   If so why, by whom, when? Surely this scandal, one that reaches right into Harper's office, warrants some explanation, some findings, a report.   Who let this guy in? Why? What did Carson do when he was there, what did he see or learn?   Was there any illegality in Carson's dealings?

Regardless of the conclusions, this is one of those cases where the RCMP needs to show it has done its job.   "Case closed" isn't good enough, not nearly good enough.

Did Bishop Mitt Coerce a Woman into a High-Risk Childbirth?

2012-01-19T09:15:00.000-08:00

A lot of people have been predicting that Mitt Romney's Mormon mishaps could undermine his presidential aspirations. Perhaps they're right.

"...the Republican presidential front-runner, has been accused in a new biography of forcing a female member of his Mormon church to risk death by giving birth despite complications with her pregnancy. Another woman has claimed that he threatened to expel her unless she gave up a child for adoption.

...As Boston ''stake president'', Mr Romney led a church region comparable to a Catholic diocese. The book claims that in 1990, he told a congregant with five children that she must not abort her sixth pregnancy even though doctors warned that a pelvic blood clot meant giving birth might kill her and the infant.

...As a ward bishop in 1983, Mr Romney allegedly also told Peggie Hayes, a pregnant 23-year-old single mother, to give up her second child for adoption because ''a successful marriage is unlikely''. He reportedly told her: ''You could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church.''

Don't Get Caught Holding the Bag on Fossil Fuels

2012-01-19T08:57:00.000-08:00

The expected global drive to curb carbon emissions could create a fossil fuel bubble collapse. A coalition of prominent UK investors, politicians and scientists has warned the Bank of England that massive reserves of coal, oil and gas could turn into sub-prime assets.

In an open letter on Thursday, they tell [Sir Mervyn] King that the global drive to reduce carbon emissions could mean billions of pounds of fossil fuel reserves will rapidly lose value and cause a "major problem" for institutional investors and pension funds.

At the most recent UN climate change summit in December, 194 of the world's nations agreed to enact legally binding curbs on greenhouse gas emissions within three years to limit global warming to 2C. But meeting this limit would mean just 20% of existing fossil fuel reserves could be burned, according to recent research.

"These high-carbon assets pose significant strategic challenges for the future prosperity of Britain that just can't be ignored," said investment manager James Cameron, who is a member of the prime minister's business advisory group. "Investors continue to pour cash into unsustainable assets without understanding the risks associated with these investments, such as climate change, local pollution, fossil fuel price volatility, political risk and catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon."

The letter is also signed by the government's former chief scientific adviser Sir David King, Zac Goldsmith MP, former environment minister John Gummer and 17 others. It urges action to investigate the risk of the "carbon bubble".

If they're right and we are headed for a "carbon bubble" what would that mean for the world's filthiest - and costliest - fossil fuel, Athabasca bitumen? Should our federal and provincial governments be pouring unknown billions of dollars in subsidies into potentially worthless, not to mention destructive, assets? Also, if Athabasca is poised to be one of the first fossil fuel ventures to fail in a carbon bubble collapse, how are we going to force Big Oil to live up to its promises to clean up its massive, highly toxic mess and restore the Tar Sands to their natural state?

And, with this warning of a carbon bubble on the horizon, what are Big Oil and the Harper government doing plotting to build the Northern Gateway pipeline?

If the market goes south on fossil fuels, if bitumen turns into the ultimate energy sub-prime asset, the Athabasca Tar Sands would probably be the first and hardest hit. It's always been an economic gamble envisioning a steadily increasing market price but the odds now seem to be worse than we'd counted on.

===

BTW, The Guardian has a very helpful look at energy subsidies today.

Mad as a Newt

2012-01-19T08:15:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich is going all out to snatch the Republican presidential nomination from the man nobody seemingly wants, Mitt Romney. And Newt figures the guy most Republicans are looking for, the man who'll keep them from voting Romney, is an outright lunatic.

He recently told a coven of South Carolinians that their native son, Andrew Jackson, knew how to deal with America's enemies, "kill them."

Newt knows a thing or two about the U.S. constitution or at least those parts he doesn't like. One of them is the "rule of law." According to Newt, if he becomes Imperatore or Godfather or the Big Cheese, he'll put himself above the law where he disagrees with it.

"I fully expect as president that there will be several occasions when we will collide. The first one, which is actually foreign policy, the Boumediene decision which extends American legal rights to enemy combatants on the battlefield is such an outrageous extension of the court in to the commander in chief's role.

"I will issue an instruction on the opening day, first day I'm sworn in, I will issue an executive order to the national security apparatus that it will not enforce Boumediene and it will regard it as null and void because it is an absurd extension of the supreme court in to the commander in chief's (authority)."

Gingrich has said before that he regards the president as above the court when the two branches have fundamentally differing views but he went further in committing himself to setting up a constitutional crisis on his first day in office.

...Gingrich's interpretations have previously been met with disdain. President George W Bush's attorney general, Michael Mukasey, has said that a president selectively ignoring supreme court decisions would turn the US in to a banana republic.

It turns out this very genuine contender for the Republican nomination is overstuffed with wacky notions.

"Newt has 10 ideas a day," former Republican Congressman and Gingrich supporter Scott Klug told the WSJ last week. "Two of them are good, six are weird and two very weird."

Why North Americans Don't Get Climate Change

2012-01-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

I was talking to a friend tonight about the studies and planning undertaken by the province and municipalities of the Lower Mainland of sea level rise projections. It's a complex issue comprising impacts such as salt water inundation of fresh groundwater stocks, the extension of brackish water zones in the Fraser and other rivers, land subsidence in low-lying coastal areas, dikes and dams, storm surges and flooding accompanied by an increase of severe storm events of greater intensity and frequency - on and on and on.

Study upon study upon study.   Yet, for all the studies, all the expensively researched knowledge, there's very little to show for it. Being based on the chronically understated IPCC evaluations, the home grown stuff is truly "best case" scenario thinking. It's also disturbingly distant in focus, looking at where our successors will be in 2100 instead of what's coming in 2020, 2030, 2050 and what we need to be doing about that right now.   It's a construct designed to simply kick the problems down the road.

That got me thinking about the approaches to global warming taken by the Brits, the Dutch and other coastal European states.   They're engaged in practical, "hands on" planning and adaptation measures. Their approach almost suggests that we North Americans are in denial. We do lots of studies, tuck them away in neatly indexed drawers and that's where it ends.

I've long wondered why we seem to be sitting on our hands.   The Americans, for example, are said to be facing a future wave of internally displaced citizens, something normally seen in war zones, forced by coastal inundations or sustained droughts to abandon those areas and to relocate elsewhere. In general terms it'll be people leaving the south and heading north. So why aren't the Americans doing anything about it?

I suspect what distinguishes our approach from the Europeans' is that we North Americans have no cultural or societal experience of this sort of upheaval.   Reality, for us, is a more or less stable continuum of the status quo.   The Euros, by contrast, are steeped in national catastrophes, usually at their own hands. To them this sort of potential cataclysm is very credible.   To us, living in pampered societies that have never gone through that experience once, much less on the regular basis of our European cousins, the magnitude of the problem seems too much to accept, unbelievable.   That sort of thing simply doesn't happen to us, thank you very much.

If we don't shake ourselves free of our cultural and societal stupor, others such as our children and grandchildren will pay for that very dearly in years to come.

If You've Got an Itchy Trigger Finger

2012-01-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

Snow On the Wet Coast

2012-01-15T10:12:00.000-08:00

Snow, what the hell?

Just Sayin'

2012-01-15T07:25:00.000-08:00

Now imagine this was a supertanker filled with bitumen.

Only imagine it's a supertanker full of diluted bitumen wrecked off the proposed tanker port of Kitimat. Okay, there are differences. This is a cruise ship, fairly benign as wrecks go. The supertanker would be disgorging tons of diluted bitumen, dilbit, full of acids, heavy metals and other toxins. Another difference is that you wouldn't see the supertanker, not for long, because the rocky bottom around the port site can lie 600 feet down where there'd be no effective means to clean up the disaster.

And then there's this observation from The Guardian about what may have happened to the cruise liner, Concordia:

Like all forms of modern mass transport, cruise liners are utterly dependent on complex electronic devices to steer them – and on electricity to run these systems. Without power, a ship is stricken and with reports suggesting that an explosion occurred in Concordia's engine room shortly before the ship ran aground, early analysis indicates power loss is likely to have been a key factor in the accident.

With Harper's Kitimat supertanker port it's not a matter of if, it's only a question of when.

Why No One Ever Wins in Afghanistan

2012-01-13T09:13:00.000-08:00

Afghanistan defines the notion of "wheels spinning within wheels." It is the very home of policy chaos where virtually every action invites blowback of one or more kinds, usually unforeseen. This brief paragraph from Asia Times aptly captures this quagmire factory:

"The [current] war in Afghanistan involves Pakistan against India, China against India, the Pashtun Afghans against the northern peoples, Saudi Arabia against Iran, and Russia against China. So arcane and intricate are these conflicts that the US is allied with enemies and at odds with allies."

The important question is not how this war, our war, ends but what will the next war look like? Who will be the players once we walk away from the table? It's entirely conceivable that the United States will want to keep playing. The Caspian Basin oil and gas riches are too hard to give up and now there is a lot of interest in developing oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.   When you've got strategic rivals like China and Russia also determined to control those very assets, you can't afford to sit out the next hand.

That's not to say that China and the U.S. or Russia will go to war with each other in South Asia.   Their participation is much more likely to be through surrogates or proxies.   The U.S., for example, knows the importance of Pakistan but risks being displaced by China which knows a direct land route to Iran when it sees one.

If China moves to give Pakistan what it most wants, powerful protection, that's bound to give India fits but it's unclear how the U.S. will be able to overwhelm Russia's decades-long support of India. That one is definitely up for grabs.

Then there's the looming water conflict that may drag India, China and even Pakistan into confrontation.

And, in Afghanistan itself, as in collapsing Iraq, the central government has failed to reconcile ethnic disparity and distrust. The peoples of the north - Tajik, Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen, Hazara and others have largely ruled the roost over the majority Pashtun of the south.   These northern tribes see the Pashtun as placeholders for the Taliban.   So post-U.S. Afghanistan, like post-U.S. Iraq, seems perfectly poised for a resumption of their unresolved civil war.

As Asia Times noted, it's hard to imagine winning anything when you find yourself allied with your enemies and at odds with your allies.

First They Battled Evolution, Now They're Fighting Climate Change

2012-01-13T08:39:00.000-08:00

There's a powerful conservative movement in America determined to purge unwanted subjects from their schools' curricula. For generations they've fought against teaching kids about the theory of evolution. Now that same group is adding climate change to their agenda.

The National Centre for Science Education (NCSE), which has worked for 30 years to keep evolution in the classroom, said it will begin offering teachers advice on how to deal with students, parents, and even school authorities demanding they drop classes on climate change.

"We have been getting anecdotal reports for a couple of years now of teachers getting hammered for teaching climate science – just like they did for teaching evolution," said Eugenie Scott, director of the centre.

The new initiative launches on 16 January – in the throes of a Republican primary contest in which candidates have fallen over each other to discredit climate change, or the link to human activity.

In the last two years, ...the NCSE has registered a crossover effect, with opponents of evolution also taking on climate science. "Evolution is still the big one, but climate change is catching up," Roberta Johnson, director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association (Nesta), told Science earlier this year.

A number of state legislatures have taken up bills that would limit teachers' ability to discuss topics such as evolution, climate change, and stem cells.

First It Was International Law. Now Israel's Supreme Court Trashes Human Rights.

2012-01-13T08:25:00.000-08:00

Israel's paper thin veneer of being a Western-style liberal democracy is being shredded. It's the inevitable result of Israel having to come to grips with issues it has for decades been able to duck. Issues such as breaching international law to enable Israeli companies to exploit Palestinian resources in the West Bank.

Now Israel's supreme court, to use the term very loosely, has ruled that thousands of Palestinians married to Israelis may be banned from living in Israel. The law has been denounced as racist. Really, ya think?

"Following a five-year legal battle, the court ruled the Palestinians could pose a security threat. 'Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide,' wrote Asher Grunis, one of the judges in the 6-5 majority ruling."

In Israel, it seems, international law and human rights are all well and good so long as they don't interfere with the government's wishes.

Mitt's Hot Potato

2012-01-13T08:14:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama seems to have found Mitt Romney's petard. Now if he can only light the fuze.

The petard, or bombshell, is the issue of income inequality in America.   While Harperland is doing its best to widen the gap between rich and poor, we still rank well behind our American cousins.   But a recent Pew poll found that nearly two out of three Americans have clued into the reality of the class war that has overtaken their country and that it's their side that's been taking fire.

And this is where Magic Undies Romney has left himself, er, exposed.    Confronted with the challenge of America's inequality crisis, the one that's fueling the Occupy movement, Romney scrambled to Republican safe ground with these politically-loaded gaffes:

"You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99 percent versus one percent, and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent, you have opened up a wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God."

And he didn't hesitate to put the other shoe in his mouth either:

"I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail."

"Quiet rooms"? Really? Americans and their leaders shouldn't be talking about inequality in public? And talking about inequality in wealth, income and opportunity constitutes class warfare?

Oh Mitt, you've identified the target - the One Per Cent - and you've put yourself firmly in their camp (which is where you actually are in terms of your own wealth).   Unfortunately that 1% doesn't yet have the political power to get you elected although they'll sure try.

Once again the Mittster reveals the political instincts of a boar hog. Public opinion on this issue seems to have already reached critical mass. It has traction. That suggests it could be a powerful theme on voters' minds come November. Oopsie!

And, Speaking of Afghanistan

2012-01-12T07:21:00.000-08:00

The War Without End drags on laboriously. The past few months saw a curious optimism about a political settlement between Kabul and the Taliban. That might have been premature.

A new American intelligence (I know, I know) assessment concludes the Taliban still pursue their goal of reclaiming power and restoring strict Islamic rule in Afghanistan. In other words, they're intent on going back to where things stood before the Americans intervened.

"The National Intelligence Estimate presented to President Barack Obama last month also concluded that security gains won since last year's 30,000-strong U.S. troop surge may be unsustainable, a finding that top U.S. commanders and the White House dispute, according to U.S. officials and people familiar with the report's findings."

And, as though that wasn't bad enough, a video has come out purporting to show four U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of three dead Afghans.

"In the 38-second video, which appeared on TMZ.com and other websites Wednesday afternoon, four men who appear to be Marines are shown standing over what look like the bodies of three Afghans, one with a bloody shirt. One man says, "Have a good day, buddy" as he urinates on one of the motionless men.

"Another says, 'Golden like a shower.' Someone else starts to say, 'The whole thing,' before the video cuts off. An overturned wheelbarrow lies next to the prone men but there's no sign of weapons."

Maybe the wisest observation ever to pass the lips of US General David Petraeus was that counter-insurgency forces (our side) have a very brief shelf life after which they go from liberator/defender to occupier/oppressor in the hearts and minds of the local civilian population - at which point your forces' chances of winning anything plummet.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/11/135585/video-of-troops-urinating-on-afghans.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/11/135574/intelligence-report-taliban-still.html#storylink=cpy

The Middle East, 2012 - All Embers and Kindling

2012-01-12T07:07:00.000-08:00

The Middle East is a smouldering mess that could erupt into a regional conflagration this year among Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as Israelis. That's the assessment of the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs.

The UN warns that 2012 could see an escalation of conflicts in Syria and Iraq that could spill over into Lebanon and even impact Iran. If Syrian dictator al Assad is toppled analysts believe it would weaken Hezbollah which might present Israel with an irresistible opportunity to take them out.

Iraq is heading back to where it was in the first years following the ouster of Saddam, namely civil war.   As discussed before the New Year, Iraqi Kurds could fuel the Arab Iraqi conflict in the south.

Food and water shortages are expected to worsen throughout the Middle East, a problem compounded by corrupt and incompetent governments.   With their economies still in tatters, the nations of the Arab Spring still have no solutions to that other flashpoint, youth unemployment and inequality, particularly among unemployed university graduates.

The best hopes for a spread of democracy throughout the Arab world may have passed.   This year could see counter-revolutions and the restoration of authoritarian governments, particularly in Egypt.

Americans Waking Up to Class Warfare, Find Themselves Under Attack

2012-01-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

This could just be what the corporatist Right fears most; the American public realizing there's a class war underway and they've been taking fire. If the American people get in a mood to counterattack, the forces of corporatism and their rightwing political minions could be in a very bad way.

A Pew Research Center study has found two-thirds of Americans now believe there are "very strong" or "strong" conflicts between rich and poor America. That's up almost 20% since just 2009.

"Not only have perceptions of class conflict grown more prevalent; so, too, has the belief that these disputes are intense. According to the new survey, three-in-ten Americans (30%) say there are “very strong conflicts” between poor people and rich people. That is double the proportion that offered a similar view in July 2009 and the largest share expressing this opinion since the question was first asked in 1987."

And the Pew study found the rich-poor divide had taken top spot among socially divisive issues plaguing America.

"As a result, in the public’s evaluations of divisions within American society, conflicts between rich and poor now rank ahead of three other potential sources of group tension—between immigrants and the native born; between blacks and whites; and between young and old."

"...While blacks are still more likely than whites see serious class conflicts, the share of whites who hold this view has increased by 22 percentage points, to 65%, since 2009. At the same time, the proportion of blacks (74%) and Hispanics (61%) sharing this judgment has grown by single digits (8 and 6 points, respectively).

"The biggest increases in perceptions of class conflicts occurred among political liberals and Americans who say they are not affiliated with either major party. In each group the proportion who say there are major disagreements between rich and poor Americans increased by more than 20 percentage points since 2009.

"These changes in attitudes over a relatively short period of time may reflect the income and wealth inequality message conveyed by Occupy Wall Street protesters across the country in late 2011 that led to a spike in media attention to the topic. But the changes also may also reflect a growing public awareness of underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society."

Where Is America's "Reset" Button?

2012-01-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

There's over the top and then there's "over the top" American style. Perhaps it's all just part of America's transformation into a full-blown warfare state but an article in today's Guardian reveals just how debased some parts of the US have become. The item chronicles the increasing number of American schools that have full time police officers patrolling their corridors charging kids criminally with misdemeanors for outrages such as swearing or even throwing paper airplanes.

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.'

"We've taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal," said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented Sarah Bustamantes. "They're kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in the US. I grew up in Australia and it's just rowdy there. I don't know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws."

Americans have always feared creeping socialism but perhaps they should be more concerned with creeping feudalism. Any society that doesn't see this sort of excess as abhorrent is embarking on a very dark path.

It's Romney In a Landslide

2012-01-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney can say all sorts of crazy stuff such as how much he likes to be able to fire people. It don't matter.   Short of getting caught in public soiling his magic Mormon undies, Mitt's next adversary will be Barack Obama.

What's the giveaway? That's easy.   When presidential nomination candidates from the most corporatist party in the most corporatist American government in a century start attacking the frontrunner for, well, practicing 21st century corporatism, they're all but formally admitting it's over.

In a sharp departure for a party known as friendly to business, Republicans seeking to slow Romney sounded more like populists as they bashed his work as a venture capitalist.

Former House Speaker Gingrich, brooding over negative attacks from Romney and his backers that knocked him out of the front-runner position, has launched the toughest onslaught.

"Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider," a video produced by a pro-Gingrich group said.

And that, in case you missed it, was the sound of pressurized gas escaping that grotesque windbag, Gingrich. Is it really too late for Sarah Palin to get behind the wheel of this clown car?

Will Britain's PM Energize Quebec Sovereigntists?

2012-01-09T10:53:00.000-08:00

British PM David Cameron is prepared to roll the dice. He'll tell the Scots this week they can hold a binding referendum on sovereignty provided, 1) that it be held in the next 18 months, and, 2) that if it fails any future referenda will be advisory only.

Cameron is also ruling out a third option, something akin to "sovereignty association." The referendum has to be a straight "yes/no" question. The Scots will have to decide they're either part of the UK or not.

The Scots won't be happy with Cameron's terms. They wanted the referendum in 2014, the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn. They're also chafing at the notion that London could frame the question to be put to the Scottish people. Sound familiar?

Will a Scottish vote in favour of independence be enough to stir restive sovereigntists in Quebec? It'll be something to keep an eye on.

Spain Pushes the Consumer "Reset" Button

2012-01-09T10:43:00.000-08:00

Spain, like Italy, and especially Greece and Ireland, is in the throes of an austerity purge. Some 64% of working Spaniards now take home about a thousand Euros per month. For a country that was riding high for the past two decades, that's a big hit.

Spanish consumers have responded by embracing what's called "low-cost shopping." And some observers claim that, if and when Spain's economy bounces back (don't count on it), the lessons being learned today will live on.

“Compulsive and disproportionate shopping is a pathological condition that we frequently encounter. On the other hand, saving, even in a compulsive way, doesn’t figure in any medical handbook,” says Guillermo Fouce, Doctor of Psychology and professor at the Universidad Carlos III (Madrid). No one is pathologically thrifty. This is not a trivial remark, since any pattern of consumption taken to the extreme can lead to problems.

No doubt, the consumer in the post low-cost shopping era will differ from the consumer of today. First, he will have learned some lessons. “The buyer is finding that low-cost shopping helps him purchase similar articles at lower prices. And anyone who wants to sell things more expensively these days may as well close up the shop,” declares Javier Vello, responsible for Distribution and Consumption at the PricewaterhouseCoopers. Secondly, “after the crisis the client will look more closely at their money and will be more aware of what is behind each item,” Vello anticipates.

Which will have consequences. Little by little, it will be harder to build up a profile of the consumer, and business strategies will be greatly influenced by the trend. Some consumers, for example, may buy cheaply for certain products, but when it comes to other products the very same people, with the same purchasing power, may go for the most expensive items.

Whether things work out this way remains to be seen, however. In the meantime, the low-cost concept is spreading fast and wide. “The consumer has gone from looking for what I call a 'superior functionality' to looking for the 'good enough functionality', which is cheaper. In other words, why should I buy a car with all the extras if I don't really need them?” asks Javier Rovira, a professor at the ESIC Business and Marketing School.

What I find interesting in this EuroPress report is that it reveals how adaptable Western consumers are in the face of necessity. Much of the suffering underway in Western Europe resulted in large part from governmental mismanagement but other forces will cause a much broader, perhaps even global, shrinkage in per capita production during this century. We're running out of stuff, especially food and water, and we face the sort of global stability threats that may disrupt supply lines that we're utterly dependent upon and so it's likely we may all be required to live smaller, more frugally. What the Spanish seem to be demonstrating is that it's not too hard to learn those habits and the market does respond.

Still Not Sure The World Has Gone Mad?

2012-01-09T10:23:00.000-08:00

Well then how 'bout this? Investors paying a premium to lend money to Germany. That's right, negative interest.

The auction of six-month German government bills on Monday produced a negative interest rate. Even the Federal Finance Agency, which manages Germany's debt, was astonished. "That has never happened before," said a spokesman.

The average rate amounted to minus 0.01 percent. The auction generated €3.9 billion ($4.9 billion). Demand for the securities was so high that the sale was 1.8 times oversubscribed.

In December, Germany had managed to place paper at a tiny interest rate of 0.001 percent in an auction that was 3.8 times oversubscribed. Germany isn't the first country to receive a premium from investors. Denmark too was recently able to auction bonds for which the government will have to pay back less than it borrowed.

Now, at minus 0.01%, you still have to hold on to that borrowed money a long, long time before you have to pay nothing back but in any circumstances you'll be paying back less than you borrowed.

The Hypocrisy of the Petro-State

2012-01-08T08:01:00.000-08:00

"It is a pitiless, one-sided, mechanical view of the world, which elevates the rights of property over everything else, meaning that those who possess the most property end up with great power over others. Dressed up as freedom, it is a formula for oppression and bondage. It does nothing to address inequality, hardship or social exclusion. A transparently self-serving vision, it seeks to justify the greedy and selfish behaviour of those with wealth and power."

That is The Guardian's George Monbiot's explanation for why Libertarians (along with leading Republicans, the Tea Party, and rightwing think tanks not to mention Alberta and Canadian legislators) are bound to reject meaningful climate change action.

But Monbiot cites a piece written by Matt Breuning that eviscerates the Right's hypocritical "do as I say, not as I do" arguments. Breuning writes:

Coming onto my property without my consent is a form of trespass under this picture. Doing anything to my property — whether it be painting it, dumping stuff on it, or causing some other harm to it — is totally off limits.

So environmentalists point out that carbon emissions are warming the planet, one consequence of which is that harm will be done to the property of others. Most environmentalists — being the leftists that they generally are — do not make too much of the property rights issues, but one certainly could. Coal plants release particulates into the air which land on other people’s property. But no permission is ever granted for that. Coal plants do not contract with every nearby property owner to allow for them to deposit small amounts of particulate matter on their neighbors’ land. They are guilty of a form of property trespass.

Beyond that, all sorts of industrial processes have environmental externalities that put things into the air or the water that ultimately makes its way into the bodies of others. This is a rights-infringing activity under the procedure-focused libertarian account. The act of some industry is causing pieces of matter to land on me and enter into my body. But I never contracted with them to allow them to do so.

... No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others. Those actions ultimately cause damage to surrounding property and people without getting any consent from those affected. They are the ethical equivalent — for honest libertarians — of punching someone in the face or breaking someone else’s window.

And this is particularly true for rash and hazardous, greed-fueled, environmental degradation of the Athabasca Tar Sands sort. What possible right do they and their sponsoring governments have to dump massive amounts of greenhouse gas into the air, to pour carcinogens into the local water, to leave in peril the MacKenzie River watershed, the world's third largest? By what right do they now threaten to threaten with devastation British Columbia's coastal waters?

Every argument they make is grounded, not in principled rights and fairness, but in hypocritical privilege. They demand that of which they would deprive others without their consent. It is their Big Money double standard that makes the Tar Sanders and every government and party that props them up, including Libs and NDP alike, a disgrace to our country and our people.

To the NDP and You Dippers. Thanks But No Thanks.

2012-01-06T10:28:00.000-08:00

The holiday spirits seem to have finally cleared our collective bloodstream and it's back to the old nonsense. Stuff like pathetic pleas from Dippers who can't think of anything else but for the Libs to admit they're whipped, fold their tent and submit themselves to their new masters, the New Democrats.

They may or may not believe it themselves but they argue that their modest 2nd place victory last year justifies Canada becoming a two-party state, the better to take down the Awful Harper.

Bollocks.

Now I know how riled up you Dippers can get if someone says anything ~~honest~~ critical about your late Saint Jack but that's just too bad.   Don't use the Awful Harper line when it was Jack who possibly did more than anyone else to get Harper into power, to keep him in power and to finally hand him his blessed majority. You'll say that's blasphemy. I don't care, it's true.

Jack knew everything he needed to about the Awful Harper well before the last election and, unless Jack was as dumb as horse dung, he also knew the danger a Harper majority would pose to Canada.

To Dippers, Jack is the Moses who led them out of the desert. To me, Jack is the jackal who smelled the scent of decay coming off the last Liberal leader, saw his opportunity, and pounced on the Libs to take their spot even if it meant a Harper majority. I know you don't like to hear that.   I don't care.   Not a bit.

Your problem is that your Prophet made it out of the desert only to die just as he reached the oasis.   The last election was Jack Layton's victory far more than it was the NDP's.    A lot of people voted NDP for two reasons - they were fed up and they were impressed enough by Jack's leadership in a miserable leadership vacuum.

Another problem, just one of several, is that the NDP's second-place finish was based on the transformation of the party into a Quebec-dominated caucus.   Your party achieved a breakthrough in Quebec where voters can be notoriously fickle.   You've got a long way to go before you can claim those seats will remain yours in the next election which, I suspect, is why you're focusing on siphoning off Liberal supporters today.

As Rick Salutin recently noted, the Left in Canada is dead.   The NDP has become the very thing they once reviled, a party of the centre.   They despised the Liberals so much they couldn't wait to become a liberal party the moment they got a faint whiff of power.   You not only gave Harper the leg up he needed to snatch his majority, you've also been immeasurably helpful in his prime quest to shift the political centre of Canada far to the Right.   The Liberals and the NDP, hand in hand, directly helped Harper move Canada to a place where the forces of corporatism run far more freely than ever.

Yet another problem is your party's underwhelming performance over the past six months. I spoke with an old Prog-Conservative buddy at Christmas, a veteran Ottawa backroom insider.   He's not particularly fond of Harper but he said the Awful Harper is acting like there's no opposition because there is none.   The Official Opposition, he noted, is a hopelessly amateurish farce.   From everything I've seen, he's totally right on that score.

So I'm sorry Dippers.   This time that scent of decay is coming off you and far faster than I would have imagined.   Does that mean I'm going back to the Libs? Hardly.   They've got a long way to go before I'll vote for them again.   What it means, for me, is that opposing the Awful Harper is something much too important to entrust to the opposition parties.   Harper is effectively unopposed within Parliament and that's not going to change for another four and a half years thanks to Jack.

Harper doesn't fear the opposition but he does fear the Canadian public and he does fear his own caucus should he run afoul of the voting public.   Harper doesn't govern by consensus, not even within his cabinet.   He governs like Julius Caesar and that creates as many enemies within as without.   But it's the enemies within that usually prove by far more dangerous.

So I'm not going to take the silly way out, the NDP "default option." It's an empty vessel, meaningless. I'll be content to do what I can to change as many minds as possible. If I succeed and that leads them to choose the NDP that's their business and if the Liberals choose to let that happen, well that's on them.

How Do You Save a Fish Worth $750,000?

2012-01-06T01:01:00.000-08:00

A prized bluefin tuna, all 269-kgs of it, fetched $746,000 Cdn. at the opening tuna auction in Tokyo. The price is said to be symbolic, the buyer paying a huge premium to snag the first prized specimen of the year.

Japan now dominates the tuna market, consuming about 80% of the Atlantic and Pacific bluefin catch.

The fish pictured here is another bluefin caught last March off North Carolina and weighing a record 805 pounds.

Is This Another Fine Mess We're Getting Into?

2012-01-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

Another ~~brilliant~~ dumb idea up in smoke. It's the "Just In Time" management concept designed to reduce overhead, and max out profits, by ordering supplies and material when they're immediately needed rather than maintain stockpiles or reserves.

Let's take a car plant, for example. Say at full production the plant would use 3,000 yellow, left-handed widgets per day. So, to shave costs to the bone, the plant places orders for the delivery of 3,000 yellow, left-handed widgets every day. Not 30,000 or 300,000 at a time but just 3,000 each and every day. That way the company isn't carrying the cost of all those surplus widgets stored for future use.

Makes perfect sense, right? Sure. But, like so many brilliant ideas, it makes perfect sense until something goes askew. It makes perfect sense until it doesn't and, when it doesn't, it wreaks disaster. At least that's the assessment of Britain's per-eminent think tank, Chatham House (that's the "Royal Institute" to the likes of you).

On a small scale, the Just in Time management concept isn't particularly worrisome. Even if some factory had to shut down or cut back for a few days it wouldn't disrupt the economy or society. But, when industry and governments embrace Just in Time management and they all get hit, say by some sort of natural disaster that disrupts communications, then the wonks predict society would have just days before it spiraled into chaos.

With public services and businesses being run as if constantly in crisis mode, even in normal circumstances, there is little flexibility when a real crisis strikes.

The problem is compounded as national and local governments are underprepared for disasters, despite a growing range of intensifying threats and recent experiences around the world, from the Icelandic ash cloud to the nuclear crisis in Japan.

"Slow-motion" crises such as water shortages, resource scarcity and the impact of climate change also present a range of new difficulties that will put added strain on the public and private sectors, they say.

Beyond a one-week disruption, "costs can escalate rapidly once transport networks (or major production centres) are disrupted for more than a few days", according to the report, entitled "Preparing for high-impact, low-probability events", from the Royal Institute of International Affairs. As the economic impact is felt, vital infrastructure, from food and water supplies to energy and communications network, could fall under threat, it says.

In effect, it's the societal equivalent of setting out to drive across the wilderness without a spare tire. If everything goes okay, it's no problem and you've saved the cost of that fifth wheel and tire. If you get a flat, you're completely buggered.

Montana Judges Stare Down Corporatist US Supreme Court, Reject "Citizens United."

2012-01-05T13:27:00.000-08:00

Judges of Montana's Supreme Court have defied the US Supreme Court and refused to apply the perverse Citizens United decision in their state. The court upheld Montana's right to regulate how corporations can raise and spend money for political purposes.

One judge dissented, Justice James Nelson, holding (properly) that Montana was obliged to follow the USSC precedent but left no doubt that the Citizens United decision was utterly rancid:

“While, as a member of this Court, I am bound to follow Citizens United, I do not have to agree with the [U.S.] Supreme Court’s decision. And, to be absolutely clear, I do not agree with it. For starters, the notion that corporations are disadvantaged in the political realm is unbelievable. Indeed, it has astounded most Americans. The truth is that corporations wield enormous power in Congress and in state legislatures. It is hard to tell where government ends and corporate America begins: the transition is seamless and overlapping.”

“It should be noted that the Montana Corrupt Practices Act was adopted in 1912 at a time when the country’s focus was on preventing political corruption, not on protecting corporate influence,” wrote Nelson, later in his dissent.

"...the [majority] ruling quoted a fund-raising brochure that said, “If you decide to support this program, no politician, no bureaucrat, and no radical environmentalist will ever know you made this program possible.” The group also is involved in a third suit challenging the state’s campaign spending disclosure law.

“'We take note that Western Tradition appears to be engaged in a multi-front attack on both contribution restrictions and the transparency that accompanies campaign disclosure requirements,' the Court said, adding in a footnote that the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices called the group a “sham” because it failed to register with the state, and refused to disclose the sources of its funds or its spending—as required by law."

The decision sets the stage for the US Supreme Court to stand its ground and reaffirm the establishment of corporatism as the dominant force in American politics. If it does it will also confirm that the US Supreme Court is itself rotten to the core.

For those blessedly spared the drudgery of corporate law, corporations were initially granted status as persons for specific purposes necessary for commerce. Their personhood was termed a "legal fiction." As notional persons they had capacity to hold property, enter into contracts, sue and be sued in courts of law. The rights granted corporations were inherently commercial, not political. Every starry-eyed law student understands this and so do all the judges on the United States Supreme Court. Their decision in Citizens United was intellectual dishonesty bordering on perfidy, a trampling of the rights of the American people in order to unjustifiably elevate the rights of American corporatism. As one of the Occupy Wall Street protesters observed, a corporation shouldn't be accepted as a person until Texas begins executing them.

In Israel, Even the Top Court is an Outlaw

2012-01-03T07:43:00.000-08:00

When Israel's top court runs headlong into international law it's an ugly day for the rule of law.

The Israeli Supreme Court had to decide whether Israeli companies can exploit resources in the Palestinian territory, the West Bank. International law forbids occupying powers from doing just that.

Faced with the clear prohibition of international law, the Israeli Supreme Court did what jumped up tribunals in other rogue nations do - it ruled that international law must be ~~perverted~~ adapted to the "reality on the ground" in the case of long-term occupation.

"...the court ruled last week that in a prolonged occupation the economic development of the occupied territory could not be frozen indefinitely. It added that the quarrying firms were not destroying the "capital" of the West Bank's natural resources, and were providing employment to Palestinians.

"Existing Israeli-owned quarries should be allowed to continue operating, but no new ones should open, the court ruled, reflecting the Israeli government's position."

Living in Wonderland 2012

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

What really makes my skin crawl about living in the world of the Far Right is how seamlessly, yet powerfully, fantasy is interwoven with reality.

Let's name it. How about hyperconservativopathy? Extreme conservatism taken to pathological levels.   We can even shorten it to an acronym, HCP disorder.

HCP is triggered by overexposure to facts corrupted by falsehoods. It's what the Far Right does, every day, and it's killing us.

We see it in the Far Right's approach to economics.   Like witch doctors they treat a problem with a mix of facts and delusion.   Government deficits can be cured by slashing government revenues through tax cuts.   By comparison, the Hopi Rain Dance seems quite logical.

We see it in Harper's approach to crime and punishment. He justifies his prison fetish by crafting delusions of rampant and runaway crime levels, even if they are only the "unreported" variety.   That's pure HCP.

And who could overlook how HCP shapes the Far Right's views of anthropogenic global warming, climate change and the host of associated environmental scourges setting in around the planet. Sure there's warming just like there was back in the days of Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone when man ~~walked with~~ drove dinosaurs. And to the south, where the HCP disorder was spawned, it's all just a hoax by all of the world's scientists, don't ya know?

It's enough to make you scream in outrage. Our world is confronted by a plethora of very real challenges, some of them outright threats, and the Far Rightists at the wheel nod off and veer toward the ditch.

Happy New Year and, let's hope, a 2012 far, far better than what we lived under in 2011.

Let's Hope She Takes Losing Well

2011-12-30T11:06:00.000-08:00

Michelle Bachmann, just one of the nutjobs running for the Republican presidential nomination, is reported to be in trouble. One of her Iowa campaign chiefs bolted to Ron Paul and another was sacked after contradicting Bachmann's claim the defector was paid to jump ship. It's looking like the Iowa primary may be her last gasp. Let's hope she takes losing well.

Meanwhile, the Ron Paul campaign, is working hard to assure Republican voters that Ron Paul "is not against war."

We Need to Talk

2011-12-29T14:47:00.000-08:00

In some ways my late dad was not a deep thinker.   Just crawling out from under the Great Depression and severe wounds from combat in WWII likely had more than a little to do with that. Yet, to his eternal credit, he made the most of the object lessons he received from those experiences.

One thing he did pass along was that much of history was the struggle of some people for rights and freedoms and the struggle of others to take them away. He told me that there wasn't a single right that hadn't been paid for, somewhere at some time, in blood and often more than once.   He also told me that we didn't have a single right that, if unexercised or taken for granted, couldn't, perhaps even wouldn't, be taken away.   For those rights, even if neglected by those who received them, all had real value especially to those who would take them away.

I sometimes wonder whether we haven't arrived at one of those eras of forfeiture of some, perhaps many of our hard won rights.   Try as I might I haven't persuaded my children of the critical importance of maintaining and defending their right of privacy which is ultimately what anchors the bulk of our other human and political rights.   To the contrary, they freely yield their privacy each and every day on Facebook and other social media sites.   They generously fill in the gaps that otherwise might remain from credit and bank card transactions, health records and the myriad other ways by which we are monitored and tracked.   I'm not even confident that either of them bothers to vote. Both of them strike me as easy meat for someone determined to relieve them of their freedom.

An article in today's Guardian concerning US voter suppression efforts in the runup to the 2012 elections piqued my concern.   This sort of stuff used to be the preserve of progressive media outlets like HuffPost.   Now it's appearing with some regularity in European papers.   American parties that seek to win the right to govern their state are perverting their own democratic process.   So where is the mass uprising, the outpouring of anger, the fierce defence of American democracy?   Why aren't Americans of all political stripes taking to the streets to defend their constitution?

Worse yet, what does it say for the health of American democracy and American society that these outright attacks on the country and its people are met with such complacency, even outright indifference? If nothing else it surely signifies a situation in which power will flow from the public to their masters in the public and private sectors.

A few moments ago I took a coffee break and flipped through the pages of the latest Vanity Fair. There I came across an article, One Nation Under Arms, about the demise of American democracy and, in its place, the rise of today's "national security state."   The author, Todd S. Purdom, worked his way through the 350-boxes containing the private papers of the late US diplomat and Cold War architect George F. Keenan (1904-2005).

Keenan wrote of what he called the "extreme militarization not only of our thought but of our lives."

"We could not now break ourselves of this habit without the most serious of withdrawal symptoms.   Millions of people, in addition to those other millions that are in uniform, have become accustomed to deriving their livelihood from the military-industrial complex. Thousands of firms have become dependent on it, not to mention labor unions and communities."

Purdom observes:

"...it is the twisting of national priorities that is the most pernicious ripple effect of this military spending. It has become all but impossible to close any military base ... and it is always a heavy lift to cancel any weapon system because some community (or memeber of Congress) depends on it, econo9mically or politically.   ...Great corporate engines once worked to build the US civilian economy and the infrastructure that underlay it; now they are at the service of military power and its projection abroad."

And then, in his letters, Keenan wrote this prescient warning:

"We must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society.   After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping."

More than 25-years ago, Keenan cautioned:

"There is much in our own life, here in this country, that needs containment. It could in fact be said that the first thing we Americans need to learn to contain is, in some ways, ourselves: our own environmental destructiveness, our tendency to live beyond our means and to borrow ourselves into disaster; our apparent inability to reduce a devastating budget deficit."

We are becoming what we once reviled just a few decades ago when we revered, venerated even our democratic society as "open" and free.   The very openness of our society was our bulwark against authoritarianism. It was also our strength.   Today the malignancy of authoritarianism has triumphed and not merely in the US.   Our own ruler, for all his claims to the contrary, despises openness and champions one-man rule.   Well-placed Conservative insiders tell us that, to Harper, his caucus is little more than an assembly of obedient votes and his cabinet ministers exist solely to implement his dictates.   This is not a man unduly burdened by worries about protecting your or my rights and freedoms.

How are we to reverse this otherwise terminal disease?   How do we banish authoritarianism from our legislatures? Perhaps it begins by openly acknowledging what has gone wrong.   It begins by talking about it and speaking out against it, loudly and clearly. It begins by those we chose to lead from the opposition benches denouncing authoritarianism and showing us a path to return to normalcy.   It begins by revisiting our individual and collective rights and freedoms and taking stock of the extent to which they lie damaged and in disarray.   It begins by imagining a strong and open society, the one we let slip through our fingers.

This One is for James Morton, Happy New Year James.

2011-12-26T06:33:00.000-08:00

I watched it, had to post it. Enjoy, James

Time to Break Our Growth Addiction

2011-12-24T11:06:00.000-08:00

Imagine being trapped in a society that considers heretical the notion of living within its finite means. That is very much the civilization within which you and I and the rest of humanity live.

Life on Earth, in all its many forms, lives within our biosphere which is today about the same size it was long before man as a species evolved.   Our unique traits allowed us to supposedly master and to manipulate our biosphere, to extract its riches and transform them to elevate our comfort and enjoyment. But, rather than revere this biosphere as the very source of so much good, we instead turned it into our midden, our cesspit.

Now we stand in numbers unimaginable just a century ago, each of us consuming the bounty of our biosphere at levels undreamed of a century ago.   Compared to the beginning of the last century, we have grown from barely two-billion to seven while increasing our consumption levels to the equivalent of twelve billion or more.

During the 20th Century our per capita energy consumption grew enormously. Buckminster Fuller created the concept of an "energy slave" to represent the output of a hard-working man that he figured at 150,000 foot pounds of work per day.   At the end of the century the average American had at his disposal the equivalent of 8,000 energy slaves.

"Moreover, Fuller pointed out, 'energy-slaves, although doing only the foot-pounds of humans, are enormously more effective, because they can work under conditions intolerable to man, e.g., 5000 F, no sleep, ten-thousandths of an inch tolerance, one million times magnification, 400,000 pounds per square inch pressure, 186,000 miles per second alacrity and so forth."

This cheap energy revolution also fueled enormous increases in America's population.   From barely 76-million in 1900 it closed the century at 275-million that has further swelled to 312-million in just the first decade of the 21st century.

Some, such as George W. Bush, lament that Americans have become "addicted to oil" when, in fact, oil dependence is a symptom, a manifestation of a much greater addiction - an addiction to growth. It is our abuse of growth that has become modern society's heroin.

"The short-term effects of heroin abuse appear soon after a single dose and disappear in a few hours. After an injection of heroin, the user reports feeling a surge of euphoria (“rush”) accompanied by a warm flushing of the skin, a dry mouth, and heavy extremities. Following this initial euphoria, the user goes “on the nod,” an alternately wakeful and drowsy state. Mental functioning becomes clouded due to the depression of the central nervous system."

Growth gives us comfort, a warm euphoria and sense of well-being. But it's illusory and short-lived. Before long we crave more growth. We must have more. It's how we live. It's a dysfunctional urge that turns increasingly ugly as our tolerance levels soar and our need for growth increases.

Hard core heroin addicts, especially the street variety, are known for resorting to all manner of anti-social and ultimately self-destructive behaviour to satisfy their addiction from prostitution to theft, sometimes even worse.

Our hard core growth addiction reveals itself in similar, dysfunctional behaviour.   We embrace a promiscuous convergence of actual needs and insatiable wants. We indulge wants to the point of overdose that eventually surfaces in garage sales, junkyards or landfills. We steal to feed our addiction.   We steal from other peoples in distant lands by stripping the oceans, destroying their forests or corrupting our shared atmosphere.   We steal from future generations, bequeathing them a much worse future to supposedly improve our present. We steal what we can, where we can, however and whenever we can.

We must steal if we are to feed our growth addiction because there's no other choice.   There is no other way.   There isn't enough to go around anymore. We're stealing from our biosphere and we're stealing from each other and we're even stealing from generations not yet born.   For example, we're emptying our oceans of essential food species, depleting them beyond their baseline reproduction stocks.   And, as we fish one to the verge of extinction, we move on to the next most desirable species and find ways to market that. We're draining our groundwater reserves to drive the hopelessly unsustainable Green Revolution and, in the process, subjecting farmland to massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides that speed its exhaustion and transform it into useless desert. With food scarcity already spreading through the world we're diverting vital farmland and increasingly scarce water to grow crops to make biofuels.

Yet we're beginning to hear voices calling for us to break our addiction to growth and end this madness. We hear people like British scientist James Lovelock imploring mankind, especially in the West, to embrace what he calls "sustainable retreat", to become smaller. Then there's former World Bank economist, Herman Daly, championing what he calls "steady state economics."

Daly's school of Ecological Economics departs from classical economics in rejecting the delusional assumption of infinite growth.   The theory of economics idiots like our prime minister operate under are slaved to growth which is why their efforts are increasingly failing.

Economists like Daly argue that the myth of perpetual economic growth and "the iron cage of consumerism" are the chief causes of world economic dysfunction and environmental crisis -- and the biggest obstacle to our very happiness.

The problem, says Daly, is that the economy, once an inconsequentially small part of the natural world, has become so supersized that -- sort of like an ingrown toenail or an evasive Japanese knotweed bush -- it's now growing into the remaining ecosphere and jeopardizing our ecological life supports: things like drinkable water, fresh air and a stable climate.

...Those ideas can be found influencing, among other things, the slow money movement, D.I.Y. culture, modern barter systems, car sharing, and corporate sustainability rhetoric. They are also reflected in the views of ecologists such as Lester Brown and Jeremy Rifkin, the author, pundit and adviser to the European Union, as well as entrepreneurs such as Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, which ran an advertisement this holiday season urging consumers not to buy the pictured jacket and to think twice about making any purchases they don't really need. Even Unilever, the consumer goods conglomerate, has embarked on a corporate social responsibility campaign pledging to "decouple" its growth from its ecological footprint.

Obviously the threat of global warming is a powerful influence on Daly's "degrowth" movement but so are other drivers including resource depletion, the freshwater crisis, species extinction and overpopulation, among others.

A good deal, perhaps even most, of what we thought we understood or took for granted in the last century may not survive very long into the 21st, at least not if we're to live in harmony with our planet and with each other. It is human nature to resist change, especially of this magnitude, but it's not a matter of choice and, from my own experience, I can vouch that getting smaller, doing with less, living more modestly, doesn't have to mean hardship.

Harper's Diabolical Christmas Gift to Big Oil - Selling Out Canadian Workers

2011-12-23T06:38:00.000-08:00

Any doubt that the federal government has turned Canada into a petro-state beholden to Big Oil can be put to rest by this chilling account from yesterday's G&M. The Alberta Oil Patch appears to have persuaded Ottawa to let them fill Tar Sands jobs with Third World labour.

Alberta is facing a shortage of 77,000 workers within the next 10 years, according to a recent report from Ernst & Young, which cited the provincial government. The oil sands’ projected growth is a key force behind the deficit, with bitumen production expected to double by 2020 as companies pour billions of dollars into their projects. While labourers enjoy higher wages as the employee pool dries up, rising salaries eat into corporate profits and put projects at risk of delay.

“There obviously is an increasing gap between what we think we need to deliver these sorts of growth projects and the available work force,” Mr. Collyer said in an interview on Thursday. “The industry and governments, frankly, need to get ourselves better organized to deal with those issues.”

...Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has been working with employer groups and unions to speed the entry of temporary foreign workers, where no Canadian is available to fill the job, and has vowed to make changes to the immigration system that place a premium value on attracting skilled tradespeople. A spokesman for Mr. Kenney declined to comment about the skilled-worker challenge on Thursday.

This is a shell game, a con being operated by the Harper regime and their Big Oil patrons. Paying Canadians to work in that hell hole is expensive, it eats away at Big Oil's bottom line. The solution is to price those jobs at Third World labour rates just as the Kuwaitis and Saudis do, hire impoverished workers in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka and make damned sure that "no Canadian is available to fill the job" at the meagre wages offered. Problem solved.

Not Your Standard Christmas List

2011-12-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

The High-Tech Priests at CNET have published an unusual, Top 10 List that they describe as the 10 technology trends that "keep us up at night."

Most of their tech worries concern technological destruction of personal privacy and the spread of the surveillance society including geo-tracking. Another was the development of an internet "kill switch" that would enable the White House to disable the internet during a national "cyber-emergency," the very sort of thing Hosni Mubarak attempted before his overthrow.

Autonomous killing technologies, "Terminator" style, are discussed. The final entry is the erosion of our attention spans due to being overwhelmed with everything from social media to online communication and, of course, multi-tasking that results in, "a condensed culture of half-finished books and almost executed actions, constantly anticipating what's next."

And, with that, Merry Christmas!

If You Want to Fight Climate Change (and Harper) Get Loud About It

2011-12-22T11:23:00.000-08:00

An interesting piece from Grist.org suggests that getting action on climate change is a noisy business. The trick, it claims, is to be outspoken and brutally honest about what's happening and what's coming because that's the only way to reach the magic, 10 per cent threshold.

"...there's a whole cottage industry devoted to urging climate hawks not to talk like this. What good can it do? Terrifying people just elicits all sorts of defense mechanisms -- denial, disengagement, apathy, system justification, what have you. The forces at work are so colossal, so utterly out of scale with what any individual or group can hope to tackle, that the logical conclusion seems to be, "we're f*cked." Our overwhelming instinct is to ... change the subject.

When people are confronted with a message of fear and crisis that sounds apocalyptic and outside the bounds of the status quo, they don't like it! And that's what they tell pollsters and survey takers. Lots of folks have concluded from this that they should avoid the language of fear and crisis.

...what's relevant is not merely how people react to an out-of-bounds message-of-alarm (I need a handy word for that) at a given point, but how such messages become accepted (or don't) over time. We need to look to more longitudinal studies, historical and anthropological studies, to understand the temporal dynamics of public opinion.

...what matters is not how such messages are received in isolation, but what role they can play in a larger communications strategy.

Scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute did a study on this recently -- "Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities" -- that attempted to determine "the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion."

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks."

In other words, if we're to have any chance of forcing meaningful climate change action from our government, we need to break through that 10% threshold. Who knows how close we may be already? All we need to realize is that it's worth turning off a great many people so long as we can reach and energize enough to get past that threshold.

So make yourself heard. Be clear. Be blunt. Don't be intimidated by those who'll call you alarmist for merely stating fact and science. There's nothing alarmist in yelling "fire" when you see smoke pouring out the windows. This is not an economic issue. It's not a political issue. It's a scientific issue. The science is in and more keeps flowing in week by week. There is a scientific consensus and it's overwhelming. Those who refuse to inform their opinion deserve to be called out and rejected.

That Was Fast. Iraq Stumbles Into Civil War.

2011-12-22T10:44:00.000-08:00

Iraqis knew they were getting something special for Christmas this year, the departure of American combat forces. And a good many Iraqis also knew that marked the time for settling old scores and balancing the books.

Power struggles are opening in Iraq, several of them.   That's largely because the central government of Nouri al-Maliki has failed over the past five years to consolidate power by integrating the Sunni and Kurdish minorities into the majority Shiite government.   Maliki himself threw in the towel within hours of the American departure by ordering Iraq's Kurdish vice-president arrested on terrorism charges. Maliki admits he's known about the veep's alleged terror activities for three years but didn't act to help maintain political harmony.   That Maliki would move so abruptly against Tariq al-Hashimi, a Kurd, but stand mute about Muqtada al Sadr speaks volumes about the prime minister's cynical outlook on Iraqi unity.

Meanwhile the Sunni minority is effectively boycotting Maliki's cabinet, causing the prime minister to threaten to simply replace any Sunni who remains absent. Sunni dissidents, thought to include al-Qaeda Iraq, are believed responsible for a wave of bombings yesterday in Baghdad that claimed 69-lives.

And, in the north, also known as the Kurdish Republic, Maliki's hapless and hopelessly corrupt government will probably spur the Kurds to solidify their claim to the oil-rich region of Kirkuk, something that has come so close to triggering Kurdish separation or factional civil war that a promised referendum to decide the area's fate has been repeatedly postponed by Baghdad.

If the Kurds were clever (and they are), they'll probably wait to see how the Iraqi Sunni versus Shiite tensions play out. In the meantime I expect the Kurds will be extending overtures to Istanbul about settling the seemingly intractable Turkish/Kurdish conflict.   Turkey would do well to have a friendly, oil-rich neighbour on its border and the Kurds would benefit from Turkish protection against the southern Arabs especially over the Kirkuk issue.

A deal between the Turks and Kurds would be a powerful incentive for a similar arrangement between Syria and an Iraqi Sunni state.   That, in turn, would be almost certain to forge a closer alliance between Iraq's Shiites in the south and Iran.

A 3-way breakup of Iraq could enhance the positions of Turkey, Syria and Iran but at great loss to Washington that would find its dominance in that part of the Middle East eroded if not extinguished. The ripple effect from relieving Iran of the American threat along its western border, the further isolation of Afghanistan and a reinforced Shiite challenge to the Saudis and Gulf States could further complicate the competition heating up between the Americans and the Chinese in that region. Interesting times, indeed.

WTF? China is Driving Canada's Purchase of the F-35?

2011-12-20T07:24:00.000-08:00

If you have any doubt about how feeble Canada's corporate media have become you need only read the PostMedia scribe Matthew Fisher's article proclaiming that "Canada will buy F-35 joint strike fighter, no matter the cost."

This joker has the critical thinking skills of a 6-year old at Christmas. Who is feeding Fisher information is unknown but his appetite for gullibility is plainly insatiable.

Fisher says that Japan's decision to buy the F-35 means everyone else will too.

There is no chance that Canada will cancel its order for about 65 F-35 joint strike fighters.

That fact was underlined again this week with reports from Japan that before Christmas, Tokyo will announce its intention to buy as many as 50 of the state-ofthe-art stealth warplanes.

Fisher assures Canadian readers that Japan even considered rival aircraft including the Eurofighter Typhoon and the F-18 Superhornet. In other words, Japan has done all the looking anyone needed. It didn't occur to the astonishingly simplistic Fisher that Japan would have considered the competition, even if superficially, according to Japanese requirements or that Japan's situation might be vastly different than Canada's. It's all one-size-fits-all for PostMediaBoy.

Hmm, now let me see. Just how big is Japan? How big is Canada? Who are its neighbours? What sorts of potential threats do they present? How does that compare with Canada? How much space does Japan have to defend? Canada? What other aircraft does Japan operate and how will they be used in conjunction with the F-35s if they ever materialize? What support aircraft - refueling tankers, airborne warning and control aircraft - does Japan operate? How many US military airbases are in Japan?

The point is, Japan is entirely different than Canada and so are its military needs. Only a buffoon would mask one with the other to blur the gaping differences. The man is a fool or, worse, a shill.

That he's more shill than fool comes through when Fisher spins this whopper:

"Australia has been so keen to acquire the F-35 that when its order for about 100 of the new aircraft was delayed, Canberra chose to purchase a small number of F-18 Super Hornets, which are largely based on 30-year-old technologies, as a stopgap measure until it can receive its joint strike fighters."

Australia, in fact, is one of the countries most apprehensive about the F-35's abilities, drawbacks and costs. Here, here and here and that's just for starters. It opted for the new generation F-18 SuperHornet specifically so that it could defer a decision on the F-35. The F-18 was how Australia bought breathing room. It was the Australian military that war gamed the F-35 and found it didn't survive the first engagement of an air war against numerically superior, older and cheaper Russian fighters.

Then Fisher explains why the West needs the F-35 - China.

"Despite its staggering cost, the jets' capabilities have appealed to western governments deeply concerned with how quickly China is acquiring aircraft carriers and expanding its blue water and sub-surface navy to project military power far out into the Pacific Ocean. Beijing is also building a fleet of icebreakers to operate in the Arctic Ocean."

Oopsie, say what? We're buying the F-35 in contemplation of fighting China? China is our potential adversary which must, somehow, explain why Stevie Harper says Canada doesn't need the Keystone XL pipeline, we'll just sell all the Athabasca bitumen to our potential enemy, China, instead.

"I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products off to Asia. I think we have to do that," Harper told broadcaster CTV in a year-end interview.

Isn't this Steve, "we'll stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies" Harper? Suddenly he's threatening his best ally, the US, with filling the fuel tanks of Chinese warships and jet fighters? Steve wants to ensure that China is awash in the one thing without which it can't go to war with all those countries lining up anxiously to get their hands on F-35s to fight it? Oh Canada.

Dear North Korea. Sorry For Your Loss. Maybe We Can Help.

2011-12-19T07:04:00.000-08:00

Our sincere condolences on your loss. A guy like Kim Jong-Il doesn't come along every day and he'll be hard to replace. Sure you've got his pork pie kid but he's untested, unproven and, let's face it, a bit of a long shot. What if he turns out to be a dud? What then? Why your whole country could fall apart!

Don't fret. There is a sure-fire, no-risk solution to your dilemma. Canada has just the guy to meet your every need. Say the word and he's yours.

Our guy has six years of on the job training in despotism. He's got everything you could dream of - in spades. He's grandiose. He is secretive and a born manipulator. He truly understands the power and majesty of fear. He's a thoroughly nasty shit with a volatile temper but he never shows a trace of that in public. He's power crazed and yearns to transform any nation in his own image. He's an ardent believer in absolute, one-man rule. He won't reform your economy. In fact he'll be too busy staring at himself in a mirror, arranging his hair that he won't even notice that your economy exists.

Best of all, our guy is, well, pudgy. Maybe not quite to the scale you're accustomed to but, don't fear, he can pork out in a heartbeat. And, well, perhaps he's a bit on the tall side compared to those he'd replace but we can assure you that, inside, he's really, really small. And did we mention shallow?

So think about that and get back to us. But wait, there's more. Order within the next 48-hours and the shipping's on us.

Future Thinking

2011-12-15T08:55:00.000-08:00

If our civilization is to have a future we're all going to have to change the way we think. We'll need a new way of seeing things, new values and principles - call it Future Thinking, thinking about what we need to do to ensure we can provide a future to our grandchildren and the generations to follow them. It can't be all about us anymore. Look around and see where that sort of thinking has brought us.

You need new ways of thinking when you run out of stuff and, like it or not, we're all running out of stuff. Future thinking is all about how we're going to get along in a world where there's not enough to go around, not enough of a lot of things, really important things.

Future thinking is going to be front and centre at next summer's "Rio + 20" UN conference on sustainable development in, you guessed it, Rio. It's being organized by the United Nations Environment Programme office whose mandate is to inspire, inform and assist "nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations." Okay, two things to note. This is about sustainable development, not necessarily sustainable growth. And it's also about how people can improve their quality of life but not at the cost of future generations. Oh boy, my favourite subject - Posterity.

UNEP chief, Achim Steiner spoke with The Guardian about the focus of Rio + 20.

In Rio, equity and sustainability will be central parameters of thinking about the future of our economies. That allows us to address some of the crises before this [current economic] crisis. Some of the problems we are facing did not begin with the banking, financial or debt crises; they were beginning to be visible and driving our economies and societies beforehand.

We have to make the link between the broader sustainable development agenda, which to some may seem a little bit abstract, and the very real crises of the moment but also not to simply get stuck in the symptoms.

Steiner says the world needs a new model of economics one that fully recognizes the value of natural wealth - freshwater, unlogged forests - in their own right, a Green GDP.

You might well say we have done rather well without that in the last 200 years or 1,000 years where we could always turn to the next forest, the next valley, the next river. But the world today with 7 billion people has run out of places to turn to and therefore it needs to start managing, the priority being on sustainability.

...On the natural resources front, supply chains are becoming more and more vulnerable. Risk is becoming more pronounced for many businesses. Food–price markets are fluctuating violently because of extreme weather events.

People recognise the risks of environmental degradation: climate change, loss of ecosystems, scarcity of water and land to produce food. These are all factors that are putting the economy on a more unstable path, and that is why businesses with a degree of longer–term vision and strategy are increasingly looking to governments to address those risks. And they can be addressed only through the kind of scalable responses, such as moving from fossil fuels to renewables, that no individual business actors can actually bring about.

A well–functioning market is actually a regulated market, funnily enough, and not a Milton Friedman notion of 30 years ago of the less government the better. That is definitely emerging.

...environmental policy will increasingly be viewed not as a constraint on development but really the enabling factor for future development and that when we talk about environmental standards, pollution standards, and efficiencies, that they will be appreciated for what they really are – a driver for greater economic efficiency, productivity, while creating fewer risks for society.

To some, Steiner's remarks may be troubling, especially those mired in Milton Friedmanland like Harper and most of his cabinet. Yet if we're to break free of that self-destructive pattern we're going to need a revitalized Left. This is the worst possible time for the Libs to turn Conservative-Lite and for the NDP to transform into Latter Day Liberals, wrapping themselves in the very principles they rebuked for generations. All the Libs and the NDP are doing is helping Harper cement Canada's political centre far to the right, in Friemanland. They're helping Harper fix Canada in the very place it least needs to be. We have to restore meaningful and effective progressivism in this country. We have to accept the UNEP mandate that our quality of life must be achieved without compromising that of our future generations.

The Reviews Are In. Canada Sucks.

2011-12-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe anyone was surprised that the Harper regime reneged on Canada's Kyoto Accord commitments. But even though they knew it was coming, at home and abroad people find Harper's actions repulsive. From The Guardian:

"I regret Canada's withdrawal and am surprised over its timing," said the UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. "Canada has a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort." China, which agreed for the first time to legal limits on its emissions at the summit in Durban, denounced Canada's decision as "preposterous" in its state media and called it "an excuse to shirk responsibility" in tackling global warming.

...China dismissed Kent's claim that emission cuts damage economies as a "fallacy". A UK government spokesman said: "It's true that taking action to reduce emissions requires substantial financial investment but it is far less expensive than the cost of inaction." Canada's decision was "deeply regrettable", he added.

Figueres said other Kyoto protocol members such as Australia and the EU had been investing in a green and sustainable future and Canada's rising carbon emissions put it in a "weaker position" to demand carbon limits on fast-growing countries such as China and India. In Durban all countries, including China, India, Canada and the US, agreed for the first time to be legally bound to cut carbon, although Canada was given the "colossal fossil" award by campaign groups in Durban for its "reckless arrogance".

..."The Harper government is more concerned about protecting polluters than people," said Greenpeace Canada's Mike Hudema. Pulling out of Kyoto was "a total abdication of our responsibilities", said Hannah McKinnon of Climate Action Network Canada. "Canada gave its word to the world and Canada broke its word," said the columnist John Ibbitson in Canada's Globa and Mail. "No one should feel anything other than ashamed."

Japan, which like Canada had said it would not sign up to an extension of the Kyoto protocol, still condemned Canada's withdrawal from the existing protocol as "disappointing". China's foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said: "It flies in the face of the efforts of the international community for Canada to leave the Kyoto protocol at a time when the Durban meeting made important progress by securing a second phase of commitment."

An official in India said Canada's decision could jeopardise any gains made at the Durban meeting. The climate official Ian Fry, from the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, one of those most at risk from rising sea levels, said: "It's an act of sabotage on our future, a reckless and totally irresponsible act."

And every petro-pol deviant on both sides of the floor of the House of Commons shares responsibility for the shame they've brought upon our nation and our people. Sure this was Harper's doing but no one truly had the courage to accept the political consequences of standing up to him.

It's Over. US Troops Leave Iraq.

2011-12-15T07:55:00.000-08:00

The United States military mission in Iraq is over, eight years, eight months and 26-days after American tanks first poured in from Kuwait. Some 4,500 US soldiers have died. No one can be sure how many Iraqi civilians were killed. The usual, obscene estimate is "more than 100,000."

The departure was marked by a flag ceremony at a corner of Baghdad airport. Seats were reserved on the reviewing stand for Iraqi prime minister Nouri al Maliki and president Jalal Talibani but they were "no shows."

Obama has declared the Iraq occupation a success. How can he know that when none of the truly important decisions has yet been taken.

Canada Needs Answers Or It Should Scrap the F-35 Deal

2011-12-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

The recent Iranian downing of America's latest, high-tech stealth drone, the RQ-170, raises a load of questions that nobody is asking.

Begin by asking just how Iran managed to down the thing in the first place.   This technology is supposed to be so stealthy the bad guys aren't even supposed to know it's around.

The Americans say it malfunctioned over Afghanistan and glided in for a crash landing inside Iran.   The Iranians claim they detected the drone in their airspace and overrode its guidance systems to bring it down for a safe landing and capture.

Okay, was Iran able to detect this super-stealthy drone?   If so, how? What stealth systems - structure, radar absorbent coatings, electronics - would they have to defeat in order to detect it?   What technology does Iran have that can defeat America's best stealth technology?

If the RQ-170 drone's stealth technology can be defeated what does that mean for the stealth technology in the F-35s we're planning to buy?   Will our potential adversaries have America's stealth secrets in their hands long before we even get delivery of Lockheed's uber-costly stealth fighters?

The F-35 is all about stealth.   Without its supposed radar invisibility it's a seriously flawed aircraft. It can't out-turn, out-climb, outrun or outgun even 4th generation Russian aircraft like the SU-30 fighter family.   The F-35 compromises virtually every quality that makes a top fighter for the sake of stealth cloaking. It gives up range, payload, agility, speed, twin-engine redundancy - the lot - for supposed radar invisibility. If its stealth cloaking can be defeated (even before it rolls off the assembly lines) it's an aerial white elephant.

The F-35 has always been a high-stakes gamble and now it may be a sucker's bet.   A sure bet would be that Iran won't be wasting any time parceling out samples of America's stealth technology to the Russians and the Chinese. They'll inspect and test it for a leg up in developing their own stealth and counter-stealth systems.

According to Navy Times, this is a giant problem for America's stealth programme:

...just an hour after Iranian state television aired images purporting to show off its prize, the Air Force’s top uniformed officer raised the specter of a foreign power copying the stealthy jet’s top-secret technology.

“There is the potential for reverse engineering, clearly,” said Air Force Chief Gen. Norton Schwartz. “Ideally, one would want to maintain the American advantage. That certainly is in our minds.”

If the jet “comes into the possession of a sophisticated adversary,” there’s not much the U.S. could do about it, Schwartz said Thursday during a taping of “This Week in Defense News.”

The Iranian broadcast showed apparent footage of a mostly intact RQ-170 put on public display. While the craft showed some damage, it seemed to be in remarkably good shape.

One source said the aircraft in the footage was definitely the Sentinel, a subsonic, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft built by Lockheed Martin. The aircraft appeared to have sustained damage consistent with a wheels-up landing, he said.

...The capture of a mostly intact RQ-170 by a hostile power like Iran is “the biggest Christmas present to our enemies in probably a decade, at least,” Goure said

The captured aircraft will help adversaries copy U.S. stealth design techniques, coating materials, engine technology, and UAV command-and-control systems, he said. It will also help them develop countermeasures against stealthy U.S. aircraft.

If the F-35's stealth secrets are out, there's no reason for Canada or anyone else to buy it. That's deeply unfortunate for Lockheed and the Pentagon but that is not Canada's problem.

Krugman Warns It's a Depression and Democracy Itself is at Risk

2011-12-12T12:44:00.000-08:00

New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman is now calling the developed world's meltdown a depression. And he's warning that we'd better wake up to the threat that poses to our democracy.

"True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

"On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

"...demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power.

"Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

"Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

"...Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it’s a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues."

Canadians have no reason to be complacent about the rise of authoritarian government in Europe, not while we have Stephen Harper's secretive, duplicitous and manipulative one-man rule. The man who came to power promising transparency and accountability has revealed himself, instead, a prince of democratic darkness. Harper's winning tactic is to devour Canadian democracy in little bites but his subtlety may mask a ravenous appetite.

Just Askin' That's All. Is the F-35 Still Stealthy?

2011-12-11T18:33:00.000-08:00

Early American stealth technology, the F-117 kind, relied heavily on angled plates and special paint to prevent radar waves from being returned to enemy receivers.   The current stealth technology relies on curved surfaces and anti-radar coatings to prevent radar waves from beaming back to enemy receivers.   This technology is used on everything from the B-2 bomber, the F-22 Raptor super-fighter, the F-35 poor cousin stealth fighter, and - wait for it - the RQ-170 stealth spy drone.

Now here's the problem.

Even the Pentagon admits that the Iranians now have one of those fancy RQ-170 drones.   The Americans think it crashed inside Iran.   The Iranians claim they managed to electronically hijack the drone and bring it down for a safe landing.

Whether the Iranians have an intact RQ-170 drone or merely the wreckage may not matter much.   Either way they now have the keys to the materials, design and electronic stealth secrets the Americans devised.   With that information in Iranian (not to mention Chinese and Russian) hands, some of it may be able to be copied by our potential adversaries.   Worse yet, the more technologically advanced countries may well be able to explore this technology to discern vulnerabilities, weaknesses and then devise defensive and offensive systems to overcome the stealth advantage the US and her allies are paying oh so very dearly for in the F-35.

The question then becomes what impact does Iran's RQ-170 have on the lifetime usefulness and value of the F-35?   Is the F-35 now a lame duck?