It's Raining Freedom in Libya

If your idea of freedom is a 500 kg. bomb, then it is indeed raining freedom in Libya. Without so much as a by your leave from the UN Security Council, American jets have opened a new chapter in "Air War ISIS" by bombing Islamist targets in Libya.

A US military spokesman said the attacks targeted a senior Tunisian militant linked to attacks in Tunisia last year. Sabratha's mayor Hussein al-Thwadi told Reuters the planes struck at 3.30am local time, hitting a building in the Qasr Talil district in which foreign workers were living. He said 41 people had been killed and six wounded. The death toll could not immediately be confirmed with other officials.

Sabratha lies about 50 miles west of Tripoli near the Tunisian border, and is one of the areas where Western officials say Islamic State (IS) militants had some presence as part of their expansion in the North African state.

Vice News reports it has received a leaked document indicating that EU ground forces may soon be dispatched to Libya. 

The European Union is planning an extension of its military operation against human traffickers, known as Sophia, which could eventually include sending ground troops to war-torn Libya. According to a confidential document shared with VICE Alps and with Wikileaksby a highly-placed source in a EU member nation, who requested anonymity, the Sophia mission is ready to move into Libyan territorial waters to stop people smugglers there, but it will not do so until it is invited by Libyan authorities.

Canadian defmin, Harjit Sajjan, recently hinted that Canada is considering joining the fight to drive ISIS out of Libya, perhaps even North Africa.

Neighbouring Tunisia, meanwhile, has dug a 200 km. long security canal to stop Islamists who may flee Western ground forces entering Libya.

How extensive is the Islamic State presence in Libya and how much of  threat does it really pose. Those questions are addressed by Issandr el Amrani in the latest edition of Foreign Policy. You might find it helpful to have a little background on the situation in Libya and the perils and pitfalls that could befall our efforts before Canadian troops become involved.

 

Please, Let's Never Allow This to Happen Again. Oh Canada.

Australian artist, Missy Higgins, was nursing her newborn son when she saw the photograph of Aylan Kurdi's lifeless body being carried off a beach by a Turkish soldier. We all saw it and it was an image that left scars.

“It took a while to sort through all the emotions it brought up – including anger – and realise that I wanted to write about it,” Higgins tells Guardian Australia. “I tried not to take the moral high ground or point the finger at anyone, but rather tell the story as it happened. That [story] in itself, I think, is powerful and devastating enough.”

Produced by stark raving productions, the film clip – which features drawings by children affected by the crisis in the Middle East, accompanied by picture-book-like animation narrating the story of the Kurdi family – was created by animation director Nicholas Kallincos and award-winning director Natasha Pincus. Pincus was also responsible for the clip for Gotye and Kimbra’s 2011 collaborationSomebody That I Used To Know, which has clocked up 740m views on Youtube since being released.

She spent weeks planning the clip, and at one point was working on three different ideas for it. “But when I discovered drawings online that had been made by refugee children as part of rehabilitation programs around the world, I knew I had stumbled on the concept I needed to focus on.”

Access to the drawings was facilitated by Caritas and World Vision, who help children affected by the Middle East crisis through rehabilitation programs that, among other things, encourage them to draw. “Within a few weeks my inbox was full of hundreds of children’s drawings depicting the horrors of their experiences ... Their images haunt me still,” Pincus says.

These pictures are incorporated into an animation that has a handmade, child-like naivety to it: “It was important to me that it have texture, human touch, that still frames of it could almost be illustrations from a children’s story book. It should feel simple, beautiful and dark – like the imagination of a child.”

“There is something about the innocence and similarity of young children’s drawings from all across the world. They all draw houses and people in the same rudimentary way.

“Except these drawings were different: there were guns in the hands of the people, fighter planes in the air and blood flooding the streets. It was just devastating to see. And Nicholas Kallincos did the most incredible job at merging these drawings in with his child-like animations. All the characters have fingerprints for faces, which I think is beautiful. There is a nightmarish, fairytale feeling to it. I cry every single time I watch it.”

Journalists - a Pack of Freebooters

In case you're not familiar with it, a "freebooter" is a pirate or a lawless adventurer. It's a term that seems fitting to describe those who sail the high seas of modern journalism.

The CBC's Neil Macdonald looks back on the pissing contest between Alberta premier Rachel Notley and bottom-feeder Ezra Levant to explore what it doesn't mean to be called a "journalist."

Journalists entertain all sorts of self-aggrandizing notions about what we do.

The big one is that we are a profession, which we pretty clearly are not. We don't even really qualify as a trade.

Professions generally have minimum qualifications. You need a degree in accounting to be an accountant, for example.

And a tradesman, like a mechanic, or a furnace installer, requires a licence — something to prove you can actually do the job.

Not a journalist. Journalists don't even have to finish high school.

...Professions also tend to regulate themselves.

If lawyers or doctors or pharmacists breach the clear ethical rules governing them, they can be formally charged and punished by their peers.

The car mechanic or furnace installer can lose his licence.

But regulating journalism? Out of the question, for the sake of democracy itself, my peers would argue.

There are no national journalistic standards, and no way to enforce them if they existed.

Journalists can root through people's garbage, mislead interview subjects to gain their confidence, appoint themselves arbiters of people's privacy, and decide whose story is worth public consideration, and whose isn't — the only people we answer to are our bosses.

Macdonald nails it. Journalism is no profession. It never was. At best it's a trade of sorts as readily adept at misleading as informing the public. While there are journalists of integrity, that virtue is not inherent in journalism at large. I did it because it seemed to be a way to earn a modest but satisfactory income without ever working particularly hard. Some things, I suspect, don't change.

Who Is Not a Christian? Donald Trump. Says Who? Pope Francis.

Ya wanna be the president of the United States? Ya betta be a Christian. Sorry Bernie. Every president of them United States of America has proclaimed himself Christian, even if they really weren't. Abe Lincoln later confessed he wasn't really Christian until he had to gaze on the mayhem and carnage of the Gettysburg battlefield. However he was an avowed Christian on voting day.

Republican presidential nomination frontrunner Donald Trump has gone out of his way to proclaim his own Christianity. That flies in the face of a lifetime of less than Christian living but, hey...

Now Donaldo's Christianity has been questioned by none other than than the Holy Father, Pope Francis.

Pope Francis said "a person who thinks only about building walls... and not of building bridges, is not Christian".

The New York businessman supports deporting nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Calling himself a "proud Christian", Mr Trump blamed Mexico for the Pope's remarks, calling them "disgraceful".

Seems Donnie doesn't want to take on Francis directly so he's going to blame Mexico instead. Why not? The feeble-minded who have made Trump the Republican frontrunner by a huge margin have shown themselves ready to swallow just about any kind of horseshit he feeds them.

The Whole Neighbourhood is Getting Spruced Up for Our Arrival

Libya's neighbours are getting prepared for a Western invasion of their failed state next door. A few days ago Canada's defmin, Harjit Sajjan, let slip that Canada has been in talks with Italy about a military operation (a.k.a. a "war") to clean house in Libya and restore order to the place. It seems they got the word in Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria.

Italy's defense minister has said the West can not afford to let spring come and go without intervening, though most officials say they are pushing for a united Libya government first to ask for help on the ground.

North African officials back international attempts to bring Libya's factions together, but they worry they will pay the price in instability, refugees and militant counter attacks if an intervention happens without a government on the ground.

Along the Libyan frontier, Tunisian authorities have built a 200-km (125 mile) barrier. Hospitals in Gafsa, Tataouine, Mednine and Gabes are prepared to receive wounded, and authorities have stockpiled supplies, officials say.

"These Tunisian fighters left here illegally and they know ways to cross back," a Tunisian security source said. "We are vigilant for when they try to escape here if the coalition attacks on Islamic State start."

Egypt has long urged the international community to help fight Islamist militancy in Libya. But Cairo has also been more circumspect about a full-blown Western military intervention.

Over the past 18 months, Egypt has ramped up border security and aerial surveillance and also carried out air strikes itself on Libyan militants. It has also relied on Bedouins whose familial links allow them to act lookouts on the border.

I Think This is What Made the Guillotine So Popular

San Francisco has changed. The once beautiful, laid back people place has been overrun with the wealthy of Silicon Valley who even have their own armada of commuter buses that shuttle them to and from work.

Their wealth has transformed San Francisco, the gentrification story on steroids. They've caused deep resentment among many working and poor residents who are finding themselves displaced.

But who are these newcomers? Well, some of the nouveau riche are real buggers. Guys like Justin Keller, an entrepreneur and founder of startup Commando.io. He moved to San Fran 3-years ago and now he's up in arms about those nasty poor people and especially the homeless. Keller's so frustrated he wrote an open letter to the mayor:

I am writing today, to voice my concern and outrage over the increasing homeless and drug problem that the city is faced with. I’ve been living in SF for over three years, and without a doubt it is the worst it has ever been. Every day, on my way to, and from work, I see people sprawled across the sidewalk, tent cities, human feces, and the faces of addiction. The city is becoming a shanty town … Worst of all, it is unsafe.

The residents of this amazing city no longer feel safe. I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience, and enjoy this special place.

People like Keller have exploded the myth of these high techies being laid back progressives. They're as swinish as they come, at least a lot of them are. Oh well, change is coming. 

Grand Opening... ISIS in Egypt..!

They were ready for the raid by Egyptian cops last month. As the police stormed the apartment building in Cairo's Ahman slum they were met by a series of IEDs. Six officers and three civilians died.

They call themselves "Misr" and they're the local Egyptian chapter of the Islamic State. The worst part is that the brutal military government of Fattah al-Sisi may be driving recruits into Misr's arms.

The Misr network is an ominously peculiar militant creation. It is not designated as an official “province,” an Islamic State-controlled territory, or wilaya, like the group’s Sinai and Libyan counterparts. Yet Misr’s name and the ability of its cells to regroup after being hit hard by police suggest that this offshoot of the world’s most powerful jihadist group is out to threaten stability in Egypt’s heartland. If ignored, it may well achieve it.

Meanwhile, the Sisi regime is continuing its relentless purges of any traces of the once influential Muslim Brotherhood. Like the Cairo police raid, however, the repercussions of the government’s actions could be far worse than expected. Because President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi might ultimately deliver thousands of disillusioned Islamists into the toxic ideological embrace of Islamic State’s “caliphate.”

al Sisi may have overplayed his hand:

In the five years since Arab Spring protests ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Sisi’s crackdown has virtually demolished the marketplace for dissenting political activism. It has created a dangerous ideological vacuum that Islamic State now threatens to fill.

The disorganized liberal youth groups that spearheaded the 2011 revolution have failed to find a political voice in a society polarized over demands for security and stability. Meanwhile, the once well-oiled Muslim Brotherhood social and political machine is in shambles. The group’s leaders are either exiled, jailed or dead, and its grass-roots support base left fractured, disenchanted with democracy and on the verge of radicalization.

ISIS may be consolidating its hold across North Africa:

Misr is emerging as the most active and capable militant group in the Cairo area; it has claimed the majority of attacks during the revolution-anniversary period. By attacking police, the group seeks to outbid other antigovernment Islamists and capitalize on discontent fueled by increasing police brutality and enforced disappearances under Sisi’s rule.

Unlike their local competition, Misr cells have physical connections with well-armed and well-funded Islamic State wilayas, or branches, in neighboring Libya. The Sinai province, with the help of Palestinian groups in Gaza, has proven its ability to keep the Egyptian military bogged down and away from the Libyan border, Cairo and Egypt’s industrial heartland in the Nile Delta. Most important, Islamic State continues to hedge its bets that Sisi’s government will fail in its efforts to provide a positive economic and political future for Egyptian youth. This would yield a virtually bottomless pool of potential recruits for attacks at home or abroad.

No one has come out and said as much but the instability in Egypt may underlie Italy's and Canada's recent talk about driving ISIS out of Libya. It's too bad that Harper and his buddies were so instrumental at letting them get a toehold in North Africa.

Some Days This is Exactly How I Feel

And, when I do, I think of this scene and it makes me smile.




 Maybe it would be a better place if we all just said "no" a lot more often.

Migrants? Wait Till They're Your Neighbours.

The exodus of Syrian refugees has us thinking of migrants as strangers from distant lands with foreign cultures and languages. We don't think of migrants as our fellow countrymen. That's going to change.

It was the UN that coined the term "IDP" or internally displaced population. We are about to get a whole lot of IDP. It's not a matter of if but when and how many.

A report published in Nature Climate Change reveals what percentage of each nation's population currently lives in areas that will be inundated by sea level rise. Canada is in the 5-10% category meaning we could have between 2 and 4-million Canadians to relocate.

The United States is in the 10-25% category which means a population equivalent to one or two Canadas. Remember that's from sea level rise alone. America has other climate crises, especially fresh water depletion, that are expected to drive many millions more out of the southern states. Europe, India and China are in the same category. With three billion among them, that's an enormous level of displacement.

Pity poor Australia. They're in the next bracket up, 25-50% displacement. Most of Southeast Asia is in the same boat along with Japan and most of Ireland.

Worst off are Egypt and Libya where the populations are very coastal. They're predicted to experience 50 to 75% migration.

Even Bernie Can't Fix What Ails America

My American son-in-law is a fierce supporter of Bernie Sanders. Like many young, educated Americans he sees Sanders as a "last chance"hope for reform. Chris Hedges doesn't see it their way.

No movement or political revolution will ever be built within the confines of the Democratic Party. And the repeated failure of the American left to grasp the duplicitous game being played by the political elites has effectively neutered it as a political force. History, after all, should count for something.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no interest in genuine reform. They are wedded to corporate power. They are about appearance, not substance. They speak in the language of democracy, even liberal reform and populism, but doggedly block campaign finance reform and promote an array of policies, including new trade agreements, that disempower workers. They rig the elections, not only with money but also with so-called superdelegates—more than 700 delegates who are unbound among a total of more than 4,700 at the Democratic convention. Sanders may have received 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, but he came away with fewer of the state’s delegates than Clinton. This is a harbinger of the campaign to come.

The Democratic Party is a full partner in the corporate state. Yet Sanders, while critical of Hillary Clinton’s exorbitant speaking fees from firms such as Goldman Sachs, refuses to call out the party and—as Robert Scheer pointed out in a column in October—the Clintons for their role as handmaidens of Wall Street. For Sanders, it is a lie of omission, which is still a lie. And it is a lie that makes the Vermont senator complicit in the con game being played on the American electorate by the Democratic Party establishment.

Do Sanders’ supporters believe they can wrest power from the Democratic establishment and transform the party? Do they think the forces where real power lies—the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, corporations, the security and surveillance state—can be toppled by a Sanders campaign? Do they think the Democratic Party will allow itself to be ruled by democratic procedures? Do they not accept that with the destruction of organized labor and anti-war, civil rights and progressive movements—a destruction often orchestrated by security organs such as the FBI—the party has lurched so far to the right that it has remade itself into the old Republican Party?

Just How Many Wars Do We Have Going On in Syria?

Sometimes it's hard to tell how many wars are being waged in Syria. Some of them seem to blur together and then part again. Sometimes the results are counter-intuitive. Sometimes supposed allies aren't really allied at all. It can be like not one but six knife fights underway at the same time in the same phone booth.

There's one war being waged by two nations that aren't even directly engaged in Syria - Saudi Arabia and Iran. That's a theological civil war being waged between Sunni Muslims, the Saudis, and Shia Muslims, Iran. The Sunni/Shia conflict is being played out at varying levels of intensity in different places usually as some sort of proxy war akin to what the Soviets and the West used to do during the Cold War.

When it comes to Iran and the West, they're our informal allies in the battle against ISIS, a decidedly Sunni bunch. Iran is helping Baghdad try to drive ISIS out of Iraq. We don't bomb the Iranians.

When it comes to Saudi Arabia and the West, they're our formal allies because they've got oodles of oil that we want to control, sort of, and we have this murky idea that the Saudis defend us from Iran which we believe is a state sponsor of terrorism even though that's actually the Saudis. We don't bomb the Saudis but we've been wrong before.

On the sidelines but making noise about jumping into the fray are the Turks. They do attack Kurdish forces in Syria. They have given aid and comfort to ISIS forces. They're widely suspected of buying oil from the Islamists. They also can't stand Assad and would like to see the Shia driven out of Syria. The Turks are our allies, NATO says so. We don't bomb the Turks but we might want to rethink that at some point.

The there's the Kurds, a bunch that cross a lot of borders from Iraq to Syria to Turkey. We really like the Kurds but not enough to keep anyone from beating them up. The Kurds want their own country, their old country, back. They want to add their territory in Syria to their territory in Iraq and maybe someday even get their territory in Turkey. We don't bomb the Kurds.

At the heart of it all is Syria. They're not our allies. We wish Assad would leave, just go. We have this belief that would bring peace and joy to Syria. If only. Syria is fighting its homegrown, mainly Sunni rebels. Syria is also fighting Sunni Islamists who call themselves al Nusra or ISIS. Syria is on the verge of a shooting war with Turkey. The Saudis want to fight Syria if they can ever figure out which end the bullets come out of. Russia has come to Syria's aid with the plausible argument that, should Assad fall, the place will go all to hell as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya also known as just about everything we, the West, touch. We don't bomb Syria. The Russians might intervene.

Let's not forget Hezbollah, the bunch from Lebanon. They're pro-Assad Syria, pro-Iran and anti-Sunni. So far they haven't really factored into any of our wars. So far. We currently don't bomb Hezbollah.

Then there's the Islamists, al Nusra and ISIS. Like al Qaeda they're believed to have gotten their start with funds from various Saudi princes and Gulf State sheikhs and emirs. Thank you, allies. They fight just about everybody including Assad's forces, the Syrian rebels and the Kurds. They're threatening to bite the Turkish hand that once helped feed them. Their leadership is rooted in Saddam's old Baathist state which is why they know about things like taking over oil fields and selling the stuff to finance their operations. We do bomb ISIS, at least in Syria and Iraq when we can find something worth hitting.

As mentioned earlier, we also have something of a relationship with Russia which is supposed to be bombing ISIS but mainly seems to bomb the Syrian rebels and their neighbourhoods. Not clear where that is going. We don't bomb the Russians, not yet. They don't shoot down our planes with their magnificent S-400 missile batteries, not yet. Stay tuned.

Oh yeah, true to form for this sort of "new war" fiasco, there are also a variety of quasi-state and non-state actors on the government side including militias and criminal gangs. It just wouldn't be a "new war" without them.

Allow Me to Introduce You to World War Three

I suppose Syria is just down the road from Armageddon. I guess that'll have to do.

Let's see, we've got so many players - Syria, of course, and then there's the Syrian rebels (of sorts), Syrian Kurds, the Islamists (al Nusra, al Qaeda, ISIS), the Western Meddlers (US, Britain, France, Canada, Australia and various others), oh yeah, Russia, Iran although they're pretty much in Iraq, and of course there's Turkey although it's not sure from one day to the next whose side they're on. That's a full load by any description.

Now we've got a new player, Saudi Arabia, and the Sauds, unlike the West, are taking their fight right to Assad. This is where things could spiral out of control really fast.

The Sauds are massing ground and air force units in Turkey and, no, they're not going after ISIS. From The Independent:

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will be removed by force if the Syrian peace process fails, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister has said.

"Bashar al-Assad will leave - have no doubt about it" Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told CNN. "He will either leave by a political process or he will be removed by force."

Saudi Arabia has sent troops and fighter jets to a Turkish military base ahead of a possible ground invasion of Syria.

Mr Jubeir said Saudi Arabia is prepared to contribute ground troops to the fight in Syria, but only as part of a US-led coalition.

He added: "We will push as much as we can to ensure that the political process works. But if that doesn't work, it will be because of the obstinance of the Syrian regime and that of its allies.

"And should that prove to be the case, then it becomes clear that there is no option to remove Bashar al-Assad except by force."

The Saudi foreign minister says Russia won't be able to save Assad. That's pretty big talk from a guy whose country has had to appeal to Israel for help crushing the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Why do they need Israel's help. Because the Houthi are kicking Saudi ass. al-Jubeir let slip that the Houthis have already shot down 28 Saudi F-15s with basic, shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. Wow, that's getting costly.

al-Jubeir may be crazy enough to believe Putin will fold and withdraw his forces if Saudi troops invade Syria to topple Assad.

Does the Fate of the World Hang on the November Presidential Election?

Last week the United States Supreme Court kicked Obama's emissions reduction policy to the curb. That was one of the final decisions taken by justice Antonin Scalia.

The US Supreme Court is deeply politicized. That is a form of corruption, plain and simple. Law is supposed to be above politics not in thrall to it. When courts serve political interests they cannot serve their people and their nation. Perhaps nothing illustrates that better than the court's decision in Citizens United in which it held corporations had political rights and were free to throw money into buying elections.

Until yesterday the court was split, 5-4. The political Right was faithfully represented by Chief Justice Roberts, and justices Antonin Scalia, Sammy Alito, "Silent Clarence" Thomas and the sometimes unreliable Anthony Kennedy. That gang has been opposed by Democratic appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Now with Scalia gone the court would appear deadlocked. Presumably the Right will dig their feet in as long as they can.

Congressional Republicans intend to prevent Obama from appointing Scalia's replacement and they might prevail. That means the next president may have to reformulate the US Supreme Court. Breyer and Bader Ginsburg have said they have no intention of retiring but, like Scalia, they're at that age where the decision won't necessarily be their own.

I think the point is that if the world is to have much chance at all of addressing global warming it's going to need the full commitment of the United States, something that's in real doubt if the country remains under the thumb of a partisan, ideological court in the coming years.

The fate of the world shouldn't hinge on who wins the White House in November. It shouldn't but it does.

Scalia, Dead at 79

The voice of the fringe right on the US Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, is dead. Plenty of time for Obama to appoint a replacement.

"..To the Shores of Tripoli"

Is it time to shoot-up Libya? DefMin Harjit Sajjan hints that Canada may be looking for a new shooting war assisting Italian forces to fight ISIS militias in Libya.

Perhaps it's a matter of never leaving bad enough alone. You may recall way back in 2011 when Canada and our NATO buddies got together for an aerial frat party/bombing campaign against Gaddafi forces in Libya.  We liked it so much we banged away on that drum of eight full months (plus one day), plenty long enough to let Islamist extremists meet their pledge to use the chaos to get established in North Africa. Harper was so pleased with his handiwork, his "mission accomplished" moment that he even staged a victory flypast over Parliament Hill. Here's a picture of the trained seals celebrating the event.

Of course the mission was never accomplished and Libya went straight into failed-state mode. It's still there today.

Joining the Italians and others to drive ISIS out of North Africa could be more productive than our hapless efforts to expel the Taliban from Afghanistan or more bombing of pickup trucks in the deserts of Iraq and Syria. There's no reason Egypt, which shares a common border with Libya couldn't and shouldn't lend plenty of help.

The only thing is we can't do much with penny packets of jets or with token garrison forces of the sort we had in Afghanistan.

This time let's not go in unless we know we have the means and the will to prevail.

Sorry Liberals. Sorry New Dems. Sorry Conservatives. Even Thomas Friedman has Thrown In the Towel on Israel.

It's called reality and it's the rarest of commodities when Canada's political leadership addresses the subject of Israel.  Mention Israel and they become so gushing that I sometimes fear one of them might drown. It's the perpetuation of myth at its very worst and they're all bleating from the same page. Sheep.

Maybe they should take their cue from the New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman. He's written what should be a real wake-up call for Mona and Tommy and Justin - Israel has already imposed its own one-state solution. It's over.

Whoever becomes the next president will have to deal with a totally different Middle East.

It will be a Middle East shaped by struggle over a one-state solution, a no-state solution, a non-state solution and a rogue-state solution.

That is, a one-state solution in Israel, a no-state solution in Syria, Yemen and Libya, a non-state solution offered by the Islamic caliphate and a rogue-state solution offered by Iran.

Start with Israel. The peace process is dead. It’s over, folks, so please stop sending the New York Times Op-Ed page editor your proposals for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. The next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.

 Friedman notes that there's plenty of blame to go around and that Hamas fullsomely deserves its share.

They all killed the two-state solution. Let the one-state era begin. It will involve a steady low-grade civil war between Palestinians and Israelis and a growing Israeli isolation in Europe and on college campuses that the next U.S. president will have to navigate.

...So my advice to all the candidates is: Keep talking about the fantasy Middle East. I can always use a good bedtime story to fall asleep. But get ready for the real thing. This is not your grandfather’s Israel anymore, it’s not your oil company’s Saudi Arabia anymore, it’s not your NATO’s Turkey anymore, it’s not your cabdriver’s Iran anymore and it’s not your radical chic college professor’s Palestine anymore. It’s a wholly different beast now, slouching toward Bethlehem.

If you're expecting any of Canada's political leaders to have the sand to recognize the obvious, don't hold your breath. Immediately you treat Israel and the Palestinian territories as a one-nation state, you have to explain your tolerance for the enslavement of the Palestinian people in their own homeland. Maybe we'll just turn our back on them as we've done to so many others in so many places.

Will 2017 Be the Year of the Great Global Migration?

It's going to happen and, when it does, it will eclipse anything we experienced in 2015. "It" refers to the first of what is predicted to become a constant wave of migrants seeking to move to safety ever further poleward.

Why 2017? Because you can't live forever in a place without water. A report yesterday in The Guardian dealt with new findings that more than 4-billion of us now experience severe water shortage for at least one month per year. As you can see in the graphic below, a good many of them endure several months of severe water scarcity every year. The kicker is that this is a situation that's only going to continue to worsen.

Africanews.com reports that severe drought triggered by the latest El Nino is expected to persist across parts of Africa, Central America and Asia into 2017.

Agence France Presse warns that severe, extended drought is threatening food security across southern Africa.

Toward the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia is enduring its worst drought in 50-years and is expected to need tens, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in food aid this year. Is that the same Ethiopia that regularly needs famine relief? Why yes. The same Ethiopia where foreign nations have been snatching up the best farmland for years, displacing locals from their historic plots? Indeed, one and the same. Odd that you would notice given that this is becoming standard practice among the poorest, most food insecure nations of the world. They're impoverished, damn it. Poor people are the easiest to throw off their ancestral lands. Don't get too worked up about it, though. The countries who most often take advantage of the little folks are in many cases nations we consider our friends and trading partners.

Imagine If You Were Like Most People on Earth

Thank your lucky stars you're not. You're Canadian which is another way of saying very, very fortunate.

A new study finds that almost two-thirds of mankind endures a severe water shortage for at least one month in any year. Some places experience near constant water insecurity. It's bad and it's going to get worse.

“If you look at environmental problems, [water scarcity] is certainly the top problem,” said Prof Arjen Hoekstra, at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and who led the new research. “One place where it is very, very acute is in Yemen.”

Yemen could run out of water within a few years, but many other places are living on borrowed time as aquifers are continuously depleted, including Pakistan, Iran, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia.

Hoekstra also highlights the Murray-Darling basin in Australia and the midwest of the US. “There you have the huge Ogallala acquifer, which is being depleted.” He said even rich cities like London in the UK were living unsustainably: “You don’t have the water in the surrounding area to sustain the water flows” to London in the long term.

Big Fossil's Achilles' Heel

You don't often come across a vulnerability this huge. The fossil energy companies, virtually the lot of them, have a ginormous problem. Their commercial viability is dependent on maintaining a lie of colossal proportions.

To put it simply, when you look at their balance sheet, the asset column is chock full of worthless junk carried at insane values. These companies purport to have trillions of dollars of assets that are really worth maybe, maybe 20 cents on the dollar of the values claimed.

How can that be? Easy. Our planet now has a "carbon budget." That's the remaining amount of greenhouse gases we can emit if life on Earth is to have a chance, a decent chance of survival. From that we know how many more gigatonnes of fossil fuels we can burn and, from the energy companies' financial statements, we know that limit stands at about 20 per cent of their listed proven reserves.

20 per cent, no more. That means that 80 per cent of the energy giants' listed proven reserves will have to be left in the ground, unburned. 80 per cent of the value listed on that asset sheet is simply wiped out.

Now, if I got you to invest in my company because you believed me when I said I had a million dollars in inventory but then you discover I really only have 20 per cent of that amount you would probably be pissed.

The New York State attorney general has launched an enquiry into whether Big Fossil has done a snake oil salesman act on the New York Stock Exchange. He wants to know if those companies have been truthful with their shareholders and investors. If they haven't, somebody could be headed for the Greybar Hotel where at least they'll be safe from the stampede of investors.

Now it's the European Union's turn.

The EU’s financial watchdog has called for governments to consider imposing asset disclosures on industry and stress tests on banks as a guard against the economic crisis that could be caused by an emergency switchover to clean energy.

The European Systemic Risk Board – set up by the EU in the wake of the 2008 crash to monitor risks to financial markets – has warned in a new report of economic “contagion” if moves to a low carbon economy happen too late and abruptly.

A scramble to take fossil fuels offline could reduce energy supplies, while increasing their cost and exposing investors to the worst effects of ‘stranded assets’, or fossil fuel holdings that may never be recouped without causing climate disaster.

Isn't it great that the State of New York and the European Union are taking steps to protect their institutions and their people from the economic devastation that stranded carbon assets would trigger? Isn't it great that Canada's not in that awful situation? Wait, what's that, we are? Bitumen, really? But aren't the federal and provincial governments doubling down on the bitumen business, racing to build pipelines to get that sludge to "tidewater"? 

At some point you have to ask yourself whose side our federal and provincial politicians are on. Here's a hint - it's not yours.

Cultivated Ignorance

If American students are told much at all about climate change, there's a good chance what they're being told isn't true much less informative.

In the first national survey of classroom science teachers, researchers found there was short shrift given to the teaching of climate change in public middle and high schools in all 50 states.

The survey of 1,500 teachers, published inScience on Thursday, found most pupils spend only an hour or two in the course of an academic year learning about climate change in middle and high school – and much of what they are taught is confusing or simply wrong.

Only 38% of American schoolchildren were taught lessons that adhere to the scientific consensus that climate change is largely the result of the burning of fossil fuels, the researchers from Pennsylvania State University and the National Centre for Science Education found.

Some 30% of teachers spent less than an hour on climate change during the last academic year, the researchers found. In higher grades, much of that time was spent going over old material without introducing more advanced material.

The blind leading the blind.

Only 30% of middle school teachers and 45% of high school teachers said that human activity was the main driver of climate change, the researchers found.