While Trudeau Fiddles, The Arctic Melts

Across the Arctic, the permafrost is thawing and, like everything else up there, it's happening faster than we had ever foreseen.

CBC News reports on Inuvik where the town's buildings are sinking, settling into what once was their frozen terra firma. Foundations are so compromised that buildings are being demolished.

Half of Canada is blanketed in some form of permafrost, including patches in the northern reaches of Ontario and the Prairie provinces.

But in many places, including around Inuvik, NWT, as much as 90 per cent of this "ground" is actually frozen water. (The rest is dirt, rocks and decomposed organic material that was once trees, shrubs, even animals.)

For years now, buildings in Inuvik have been gradually sinking into the ground as it softens. Others are so unstable, they are literally sliding off their foundations.

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Scientists in the Northwest Territories, Alaska and Siberia are now realizing that as the ground under them melts, it will not only make life harder for the people living in the Arctic, but will in fact speed up climate change around the globe.

The World Meteorological Organisation says the globe is now in uncharted territory, with temperatures in 2016 the hottest ever recorded.

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Above the Arctic Circle, the permafrost hasn't melted since at least the last Ice Age, more than 10,000 years ago.

No one knows exactly what it will unleash when it melts. But no one thinks it will be good.

At the very least, it's changing the landscape. The Mackenzie Delta is a maze of small lakes and broad hillsides. People who live in Inuvik say they don't have to travel far from town in the summer to see craters that formed when the surface layer of land simply collapsed.

And then, with the drying of the tundra and thawing of the permafrost comes the methane, for hundreds of thousands of years safely sequestered in the icy permafrost.

"It scares me," said Kumari Karunaratne, a permafrost expert who works for the Northwest Territories Geological Survey. "This methane that's being released is being released over huge areas across the north. And it's continually seeping out."

So, what is our federal government doing about this. Is it riding to the rescue of this region in distress? Hardly, it - the government of Justin Trudeau - is ramping up bitumen production and export. Justin Trudeau is intent on making the plight of the far north worse, much worse. Judging by the Trudeau government's policies, he can't make it worse enough, fast enough. Put that in your smug Liberal pipe and smoke it.

The Emperor Has No Clothes, The Emperor Has No Clothes, The Emperor Has No...

A tough day for the Dauphin.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Justin Trudeau is being called out for who he is, not what he appears to be. In fact, the Canadian prime minister is compared to Donald Trump and found far more similar than different.

Slate.com points out the obvious, Justin Trudeau isn't really standing up to Trump.

Trudeau isn’t Canada’s answer to Trump. He’s Canada’s answer to Barack Obama. Our habit isn’t to reject America. It’s to imitate you, a few years later and a few degrees milder. Just like you, we replaced a divisive old conservative (Stephen Harper) with a young, feel-good centrist in progressive clothing. Unlike you, we played it safe and went with a name-brand candidate—only in Canada could the son of a former prime minister be considered a transformational leader.

More ominously, the article suggests our "bargain basement Obama" could deliver our next prime minister - Kevin O'Leary.

Canadians tend to demand emulation, and if our copycat trend continues, the electorate will eventually choose a Canadian Trump, just as it elected a Canadian Obama. It’s a plan well underway.

Leading the polls in the current leadership race for Canada’s Conservative Party is a reality television star who cultivates the persona of an obnoxious rich businessman. Sound familiar?

Americans may know Kevin O’Leary from ABC’s Shark Tank. Canadians have a decent chance of knowing him as our next prime minister.

On the far side of the Atlantic, The Guardian is running a piece by Bill McKibben who writes, "Donald Trump is a creep and unpleasant to look at, but at least he's not a stunning hypocrite when it comes to climate change."

...when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in DC.

Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialize in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing. He’s hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta’s tarsands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet.

The truth is there isn't much in either article that hasn't been expressed on plenty of blogs, this one included. It's just that those observations and sentiments have gone on into the big time.

Trudeau is all show, no go; all hat, no cattle; all Margaret, no Pierre. When the going gets tough, you'll always find him on his knees, ducking.

[EnviroMin, Dame Cathy] McKenna, confronted by Canada’s veteran environmentalist David Suzuki, said tartly “we have an incredible climate change plan that includes putting a price on carbon pollution, also investing in clean innovation. But we also know we need to get our natural resources to market and we’re doing both”. Right.

But doing the second negates the first – in fact, it completely overwhelms it. If Canada is busy shipping carbon all over the world, it doesn’t matter all that much if every Tim Horton’s stopped selling donuts and started peddling solar panels instead.

As the Donald would put it: weak, failing. so sad.

That Swamp, the One Trump Promised to Drain? Well, Think Again.

By now Hillary was supposed to be behind bars, those currency manipulating Chinese were supposed to be reeling and begging for mercy, NATO would be taken down a notch or two, the United States and its people would be luxuriating in the blessings of America First, and "the Swamp," backroom Washington, would be madly draining away.

Only not so much. Trump has surrounded himself with some curious populist reformers. They're in camps. There are the generals, arguably the sane bunch of Trump's cabinet. Then there is Team Goldman Sachs, swamp drainers extraordinaire. Then there's the Billionaire Boys' (and Girls') Club. Finally there's the High Priests of the Trump administration also known as Donald's kids, Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

To Trump, Washington was the temple and he was going to drive out the money-changers. Only, like pretty much everything else he promised, that was electioneering bullshit.

It seems Trump has wasted no time in expanding "regulatory capture" of the federal government. If you're not familiar with the term it describes the situation where membership in government regulatory boards and tribunals is stacked with representatives of the very industries being regulated.


President Trump is populating the White House and federal agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who in many cases are helping to craft new policies for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck.

In at least two cases, the appointments may have already led to violations of the administration’s own ethics rules. But evaluating if and when such violations have occurred has become almost impossible because the Trump administration is secretly issuing waivers to the rules.

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This revolving door of lobbyists and government officials is not new in Washington. Both parties make a habit of it.

But the Trump administration is more vulnerable to conflicts than the prior administration, particularly after the president eliminated an ethics provision that prohibits lobbyists from joining agencies they lobbied in the prior two years. The White House also announced on Friday that it would keep its visitors’ logs secret, discontinuing the release of information on corporate executives, lobbyists and others who enter the complex, often to try to influence federal policy. The changes have drawn intense criticism from government ethics advocates across the city.

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The president has vowed to unwind some of the Obama administration’s signature regulatory initiatives, from Wall Street rules to environmental regulations, and he has installed a class of former corporate influencers to lead the push. Administration supporters argue that appointees with corporate ties can inject a new level of sophistication into the federal bureaucracy and help the economy grow. And efforts to trim regulations in some areas have attracted bipartisan support.

But in several cases, officials in the Trump administration now hold the exact jobs they targeted as lobbyists or lawyers in the past two years.

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Mr. Trump’s own ethics executive order in late January eliminated a requirement, first adopted by President Barack Obama, that executive branch appointees not accept jobs in agencies they recently lobbied. That weakened standards applying to approximately 4,000 executive branch hires.

Mr. Trump also made it easier for former lobbyists in the government to get waivers that would let them take up matters that could benefit former clients.

During the Obama administration, these waivers were given only under a narrow set of circumstances, and had to be filed and explained in an annual report for public inspection, Mr. Shaub said. The waivers were also previously posted on the Government Ethics website. None have been posted since Mr. Trump became president, as sharing them is no longer required.

The Gullibillies who put Trump in office were often heard to say they expected him to bring a business approach to government and that's precisely what they got. Trump is treating the government of the United States as a private enterprise, property of his, his family's and the wealthiest and most powerful people in the USA. The Trump government is now controlled by and in service to a select few and they're bound to jury rig it to their own advantage. Now, how about another tax cut for the richest of the rich. I know, we'll do it in the guise of health care reform.

MOAB - Less and More Than Meets the Eye

A grand furore ensued following the use of a U.S. mega-bomb called MOAB against what was said to be an ISIS gathering point in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. MOAB, an acronym for Mother of All Bombs/Massive Ordinance Air Blast, is really just a huge firecracker with a twist.

MOAB is thermobaric. Think of it as "blast plus." These weapons don't carry their own oxidizer. They're all explosive, often very fine aluminum dust particles, that disperse into a cloud where they mix with oxygen. Then they explode, creating a massive overpressurization capable of killing within a one mile radius. The wicked part is what happens next. The bomb creates a powerful vacuum that tends to draw innards out. No point getting into the minutiae of that.

The US military has used MOAB exactly once. Because of the state of the corpses you don't want to use it where photographers might show up. Another problem is the delivery system. MOAB is dropped out of the cargo bay of a C-130 Hercules transport. You don't want to go trolling a C-130 anywhere there might be hostile fighters or surface to air batteries. You don't want your MOAB and your Hercules finding terra firma at the same time.

It's now estimated that Trump's MOAB killed 94 ISIS fighters. That's the story anyway. Hard to have much sympathy for ISIS types. But maybe ISIS wasn't the real target.

MOAB might have been intended to deliver a message to Pyongyang and Beijing that Trump won't hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction, next time perhaps nuclear. It was also a big hit with America's "red meat" brigade.



There are concerns that Trump has taken America to a "near-nuclear" threshold just in time for Easter. Meanwhile peace talks are underway today, Good Friday, in Moscow. Everybody who's anybody is there, including the Taliban. Well, not quite everybody. The United States wasn't invited nor any of the NATO/ISAF partners. That leaves just the Talibs, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Pakistan, four of the other "stans," China and Russia sitting at the table.

Another One Gone - CanProg

Canadian Progressive Voices, aka CanProg, is gone. Lauralee and her partners concluded it was no longer economic to continue. There were a few important bloggers who had become CanProg affiliates. Hope they'll migrate over to ProgBlog.

Meanwhile in Other News From the Slave States

I can't summarize this. You're going to have to read it for yourself.

What's on offer? A North Carolina Republican who compares Lincoln to Hitler. North Carolina, the State that forgot who lost the Civil War, declares the US Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage "null and void" within the precincts of the Tar Heel State. Yeah, right.

Next up is South Dakota where shoving catheters up suspects' dicks is all the rage.

Tell me again that normalizing torture overseas doesn't have a corrosive effect at home. They put a bag over a guy's head and stick a tube up his dick. How is this not torture?

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A three-year-old, forced against his will into a painful medical procedure so as to gather evidence against his mother's boyfriend? There are too goddamn many places in this country where the Constitution doesn't reach because the people who swear to uphold it don't give a damn about it.

Then there's that beacon of enlightenment, Oklahoma, where a gang of white men have decided to prohibit abortion even for severe birth defects and with no exceptions for health of the mother, rape or incest. The explanation? "Well, it's an act of sin. We live in a sinful world. Men and women do horrible things, but God can bring beauty out of ashes."

Esquire's Charlie Pierce sums it up this way:

These really are the fcking mole people.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Trump Cannot Turn the Page

So let's get this straight. The CIA and the FBI weren't conspiring to surveil Donald Trump and his campaign advisors.

European intelligence agencies - British, Dutch, Estonian and Polish in particular - twigged to a spate of meetings between Trump campaign aides and Russian spy types in the course of regular surveillance of their Russian counterparts. It got to the point where they began feeding their intelligence to Washington.

The Brits amassed so much sensitive intelligence on Trump & Company that they didn't go through the usual channels. Instead the director of Britain's MI6 flew to Washington to deliver their information by hand to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Director to director, by hand. The director of the CIA then went to the House and the Senate intelligence committees and briefed them about at least some part of what the Brits had conveyed. Whatever Brennan told the senators and representatives, the election proceeded uninterrupted.

Several members of Team Trump in addition to the Trump family have been identified as deeply tied to all things Putin - Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, among them.

Now attention is on former Merrill Lynch flunkie, Carter Page.  Relatively unknown until Trump introduced him as a senior campaign advisor, Page has spent decades pushing a pro-Kremlin line. Even Russian spies, however, thought him something of an idiot.

Carter Page, who was reportedly being monitored by the FBI last summer because of suspicions about his ties to Russia, was hired in 1998 by the Eurasia Group, a major US consulting firm that advises banks and multinational corporations, but left the firm shortly thereafter.

The account of Page’s abrupt departure from the Eurasia Group suggests that concerns about Page and questions about his links to Russia were known in some professional circles for nearly two decades and long before Page joined Trump’s successful presidential campaign.

The former Merrill Lynch banker, who was relatively unknown in politics before he was touted as being a foreign policy adviser in the Trump campaign, has steadfastly declined to comment on how he got involved in the Republican campaign. He told ABC News on Thursday that he would not disclose the name of the person who recruited him into the campaign because it would fuel conspiracy theories and have their “lives disrupted”.

Ian Bremmer, the influential president of the Eurasia Group, on Thursday used Twitter to call Page the “most wackadoodle” alumni of the firm in history.

Talking Points Memo has a neat summary of how Page keeps giving the media contradictory or inconsistent accounts of his dealings with the Russians.

While just what Carter Page did for whom and when remains an enigma, at least to the public, Foreign Policy notes that an American citizen doesn't get hit with a FISA warrant unless the court is persuaded by evidence adduced that you could be an agent of a foreign power.

If the Post report is correct, U.S. officials convinced a FISA court judge during the presidential campaign that there is probable cause that Page was “knowingly” working as an agent of a foreign government while advising Trump.

Page has denounced any surveillance directed against him as politically motivated, even while Washington has in recent months been thick with rumors about who among Trump’s inner circle may have been targeted for surveillance under FISA. Thinly sourced reports have claimed that the government sought and received FISA orders targeting Russian banks who may have been laundering money — which could have ensnared U.S. citizens.

Now Vanity Fair is wading into the Carter Page scandal, asking why Page keeps shooting himself in the foot:

Page, who his own would-be spy recruiter concluded was “an idiot,” decided to go on television Wednesday to clear up the matter. Instead, he made it far worse—at least for himself.

When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper during an interview if he ever “conveyed to anyone in Russia” that “President Trump might have been more willing to get rid of the sanctions,” Page—a vocal critic of the sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea—responded that he “never had any direct conversations such as that.” When pressed by the CNN host as to what he meant by “direct conversations,” Page denied having discussed the sanctions. “Well, I’m just saying no—that was never—I’ve never said, no,” he replied.

With that, Page then went on to say that he might have touched on the sanctions issue, he doesn't remember.

Meanwhile, Esquire's Charles Pierce concludes the Page/FISA leak "feels like a warning shot."

...unless you're living fulltime in Alex Jonestown, the fact that the FBI got this warrant, and then got it extended, means that there was something very hinky about Page's relationship with the blinis-and-bullets crowd in Moscow.

But more significant to me, anyway, is the fact that all of this leaked—the warrant and the specific individual against whom it was filed. This just doesn't happen. This can't be anything but a warning shot from the intelligence community.

Carter Page seems to be the biggest nobody everybody is zeroed in on. He may not be very bright but he might be an excellent window.

Where Democracy Goes to Die

It's NATO's only Muslim member state. It's the only non-European prospect for membership in the European Union. It's been democracy's toe hold in the Muslim world. All of that may be about to change.

Turkey stages a constitutional referendum on the 16th, one that could hand Erdogan Recep quasi-dictatorial powers. The Economist says the deck is already stacked.


In the campaign for Turkey’s constitutional referendum ...the Yes side has harnessed the power of the state to crush the Noes. Selahattin Demirtas, co-leader of a pro-Kurdish party, was poised to become one of the main No voices but has ended up behind bars on trumped-up terror charges. He faces 142 years in prison. A Kurdish-language song calling for No has been banned. A study of 168.5 hours of campaign coverage on 17 national television channels at the start of March showed that Yes supporters got 90% of the airtime. The route from Sabiha Gokcen airport, outside Istanbul, has more than a dozen building-sized banners with an image of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or his prime minister extolling a Yes vote. Giant No banners are nowhere to be seen.

Stacked as it is, the ballot could not be more consequential. Voters must decide whether to abandon a parliamentary system in favour of an executive presidency that would give the head of state complete power over the budget and the executive, and huge sway over the judiciary. MPs would have minimal powers of scrutiny.

The result will help determine the fate of Mr Erdogan, who has governed since 2003—first as a reforming prime minister, but lately as a strongman president who has come to treat all opposition as a form of treason.
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Early in Mr Erdogan’s rule, Turkey made great progress towards democracy. But Turks who can remember the detentions and torture after the military coup in 1980 say that today’s are a throwback to those dark times. Workers inform on their colleagues, students on their professors, husbands on their wives.

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Getting the Trains to Run On Time

It is easy to forget how abysmal the economy was in 2003 when Mr Erdogan came to power. The crisis of 2000-01, the third in a decade, caused collapses in the currency and GDP and led to the intervention of the IMF. Under the stewardship of the fund and with encouragement from the EU, Mr Erdogan’s government brought down inflation, which had briefly exceeded 100% in the early 1990s, and rescued the banks. Foreign investment soared. The country became Europe’s workshop. Thanks to their newfound stability, Turkish entrepreneurs grew rich.

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France and the United States have powerful presidents, too. But under the new constitution, unlike the Assemblée Nationale and Congress, the Turkish parliament will not control the details of spending or have a say over presidential appointments. Neither will it be able to subject the cabinet to questions, except in writing. Besides, in France and America the independence of the media and the courts is well-established. In Turkey Mr Erdogan has spent recent years turning them into his fiefs.

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After Germany and the Netherlands refused to accept government ministers campaigning for a Yes among Turks in their countries, Mr Erdogan accused them of “Nazi practices”. The Dutch, he said, had murdered Muslims in Srebrenica during the Balkan wars. No matter that they were in fact UN peacekeepers who killed nobody. Mr Erdogan is calculating that, when Europeans hit back, patriotic Turks will rally to the flag.

Moscow On The Bosphorus

Erdogan is signalling that he is prepared to shift towards Russia. This may be a ploy to provoke the EU. But it also reflects how the army and the bureaucracy are increasingly in thrall to a “Eurasian” faction whose leaders spurn NATO and the West and look to a Turkish version of the nationalism that has served Vladimir Putin. Although Turkey shot down a Russian warplane on the Syrian border and Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was assassinated last year, military and intelligence co-operation between the two countries has never been so close.

NATO is worried. So is the EU, which has struck a deal with Turkey over Syrian migrants and is mired in increasingly futile talks over Turkish membership. Under Mr Erdogan, an essential ally in a troubled region is drifting away.

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Whatever the result on April 16th, Turkey has entered a dark period. A vote for Yes would saddle the country with an elected dictator. A No would not save Turkish democracy. But it would let it live to fight another day.

That United Airlines Video is Bad for the Airline. It's Worse, Much Worse for America.

The video of hired muscle dragging a terrified Chinese American guy off a United Airlines jetliner in Chicago has raised quite a stir but America being America it'll be down the Memory Hole in a day or two - at least in the United States. Foreign Policy's James Palmer writes that for the Boys from Beijing, the video and the racist overtones it carries are manna from Heaven.

For the last decade, the Chinese internet has been wracked by civil war over America, with one side increasingly aided by the heavy artillery of censorship. To listen to one side, the United States is the home of all things good: freedom, clean air, a welfare state (Europeans may boggle a little bit at this thought, but in comparison with China, the United States is a paragon of Scandinavian generosity to its needy), and pornography on tap.

To listen to the other, the United States is hypocritical, torn by racial and political strife, crime-ridden, and, on top of all that, far too expensive. In both cases, the real subject under discussion is often the Chinese government and how inferior or superior it is to the U.S. system. After reading a few thousand of these comments, I am always inclined to proclaim the virtues of, say, Belgium.

It’s against this backdrop that the video took on its ideological power. The arbitrary use of force is common in China, particularly in the countryside and among the poor. The police themselves are rarely the main instigators; instead, the brunt of everyday thuggery is done by the chengguan — urban militia tasked with cleaning up the streets, whose job regularly brings them into conflict with small traders and stall owners. In this recent video, for instance, a chengguan is casually smashing up people’s property.

Apart from the chengguan, private security forces, or bao’an, do their share of thuggery. Videos showing uniformed brutes kicking some poor peddler’s teeth in regularly flare online — inevitably accompanied by comments that this wouldn’t happen in the United States.

For the anti-Americans, therefore, the United video was a gift. See, they proclaimed gleefully, America isn’t the great home of democracy and human rights! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Washington fans! Imagine the delight of Democrats when a Republican politician is caught soliciting sex acts in a public bathroom; the smug delight in the other side’s hypocrisy exposed.

This might all seem inconsequential squabbling, but it’s taken very seriously by the Chinese Communist Party. Belief in the American way — however naïve — is one of the only remaining forces that can unite large swaths of Chinese across the nation against the party line. The authorities can crush churches, block environmental groups, and imprison lawyers, but they can’t end the cultural hold of America over the mind of a huge number of Chinese.

Thus, the two narratives around the United video come together neatly to serve the authorities’ ends. Not only is America hypocritical and violent, but it will never treat Chinese with the respect they deserve. Hence the video will, inevitably, be backed up by newspaper editorials proclaiming this line until the whole affair is forgotten by the weekend after next — but leaving, thankfully for the government, another trace of animus in the recesses of the public mind.

The United video with its racist overtones also plays directly into China's powerful and lasting "Century of Humiliation" meme. Relatively obscure to most Westerners, the Century of Humiliation is deeply embedded in China's rulers, particularly its military caste. Or, if pdf reports aren't your thing, you can watch a short, two-part documentary on the subject here and here.

In America, the United Airlines incident may just be another bit of sensational controversy with the lifespan of a fruit fly. In China it may leave scars.

Spicer's Folly - "Even Hitler Didn't Use Chemical Weapons"

Trump's gaffe-prone press secretary, Sean "Sphincter" Spicer, has soiled himself again.

"We didn't use chemical weapons in World War II," Spicer said when discussing alleged Russian complicity with the Assad regime's assault last week. "You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons. So you have to, if you're Russia, ask yourself if this is a country and a regime that you want to align yourself with."

I guess Sean never heard of Zyklon B or how the Nazis used it to exterminate millions of Jews and political prisoners at Hitler's concentration camps.

Spicey then scrambled to get back on his feet.

"When you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing," Spicer said of Hitler. "He brought them into 'the Holocaust center' and I understand that. But I'm saying in the way Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped them down."

He (Hitler) brought them into the 'Holocaust center'? Oh, that Holocaust Center, of course. And they didn't 'drop them down.' Those chemical weapons were piped in through shower heads. Of course, all the difference in the world.

Compounding the 'his own people' theme, Spicer added, "I was trying to draw a contrast of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on innocent people," he said in a written statement.

The Guardian adds this:

The statement came on the first day of Passover, the Jewish holiday which commemorates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. The holiday is one of the holiest days in Judaism and has been used a metaphor for the oppression that Jews faced throughout history, including under Nazi Germany.

Spicer is simply out of his league. Think of White House press secretaries of the past - Pierre Salinger, Bill Moyers, Ron Ziegler, Marlon Fitzwater, Dee Dee Meyers, Mike McCurry, Joe Lockhart, Ari Fleischer, Robert Gibbs, Josh Earnest and others. And then - Spicer.

Could This Be It? Are China, S. Korea and the U.S. Coming for Kim Jong-un?

For the past couple of days there have been reports of a US Navy carrier battle group steaming for North Korea. The formation is now said to be off the Korean coast. At the same time secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, announced that Washington and Beijing have reached some pact on dealing with the errant tyro, Kim Jong-un.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Chinese troops are massing on the North Korean border.

China and South Korea have agreed to take new measures against North Korea if the rogue state conducts another nuclear or intercontinental missile test, Chinese media has reported.

As concern mounts that North Korea will use a national commemoration on Saturday to conduct its sixth nuclear test, claims the Chinese army has amassed 150,000 troops including medical teams on the border with North Korea have been repeated on the front page of China's state-owned Global Times newspaper.

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South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported the two sides had agreed that if North Korea conducts another nuclear test or missile launch, China and South Korea will carry out any future United Nations Security Council resolutions that are passed.

China's Foreign Ministry declined to comment. On Friday the Chinese government ordered Chinese trading companies to return North Korean coal cargos, to comply with UN sanctions.

Meanwhile, some 50 miles from North Korea, the US Air Force base at Osan is on high alert.

What is often overlooked is that when sizeable military forces reach a certain level of readiness and deployment, it's often an indication that the decision to act has already been taken.

Do We Really Need Another Reason to Despise Our Airlines?

It's easy to hate airlines which, for Canadians, means Air Canada in particular. Or at least for Canadians who find themselves having to fly "Cattle Class."

My last - last ever - Air Canada ordeal was a trip from Vancouver to Toronto for a family funeral. Air Canada, in its corporate wisdom, had decided to configure its cabin in sardine mode. It was fully booked and, being a short notice passenger, I was paying full freight which, within Canada, usually requires a second mortgage on the hacienda. What made the journey so miserable was that Air Canada had reduced the seat pitch, the distance between seats, so severely that, when I sat and buckled in, that steel bar beneath the seat tray dug in deep just below my knee caps. Don't ever tell the CIA how painful that is. Long story short they couldn't find me a better seat and so I stood at the back of the aircraft for almost the entire flight. Up yours, Air Canada.

Airlines today are garbage haulers. They certainly treat their passengers like human garbage. Anyone who flew with them in the 60s and 70s will understand. Back then flying was an elegant experience. I flew back from London in one of the very first Air Canada 747s. It was so novel our pilot did a low-level fly past at the Canadian National Exhibition. Then there was Max Ward's outfit, WardAir, where they served meals with crisp cloth napkins, real silverware and china dishes. And it's all been downhill ever since.

As if we needed a reminder of the debasement of commercial aviation, United Airlines has answered the call. It involved a fairly short hop from Chicago to Louisville, a full cabin, and an already boarded passenger who refused to give up his seat for the convenience of a United crew who needed to get to the same destination. The passenger was told to clear out, he refused and three goons came aboard to drag him out of his seat, down the aisle and off the plane, cutting his lip in the process. Apparently it didn't dawn on the United Airlines crew that a plane full of passengers is full of smart phones and that smart phones have some pretty good camera technology and that everything would be almost instantly spreading across YouTube, Facebook and other sites.

Badly handled. Total mess. A pre-flight fiasco. And then the airline management decided to see if they could make it just that much worse.

The furore was followed by perhaps the most half-assed sorry-not-sorry in the history of corporate apologies, with United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz expressing regret for “having to re-accommodate these customers”. Yes, that’s right, they translated “dragged a man out of a plane screaming” into “re-accommodate”.

United's new CEO, Munoz, didn't do himself any favours either when he sent an email to the airline's employees defending what happened and blaming the entire mess on the passenger. Oscar, you moron, did you think that email would not be leaked?

Of course to add gasoline to the fire, the manhandled passenger was Asian-American. That's revived the whole people of colour versus white American authorities issue. This screen capture of the bloodied passenger hasn't done the airline any favours either, especially not in the competitive Asian market.

Video of Sunday night’s violent incident on a United Airlines plane in Chicago has sparked outrage in China after a witness reported that the elderly man who was dragged off the aircraft may have been targeted because he was Chinese. Images of the blood-soaked passenger from cellphone footage were circulated on China's microblogging service Weibo and have now been viewed upward of 190 330 million times. The perceived prejudice against the man—and United’s lackluster response—drew condemnation and calls for a boycott of the airline, the Associated Press reports.

Jimmy Kimmel gave the airline a big, "F--k You."

CBC News reports that United shares have fallen 4% this morning, trimming about a billion dollars off the company's value. It'll be a while before United finds out what the Asian flying market will cost the airline.

The backlash in Asia is a problem for the company, as the continent is a key growth area for many U.S. carriers.

United operates more non-stop flights from the U.S. to more cities in China than any other airline. The company got about 14 per cent of its 2016 revenue from flying Pacific routes.

Somewhere Max Ward is probably looking down, shaking his head at what once was and is no more, possibly shedding a tear.

Want to See Climate Change? Go to Your Grocery Store, Produce Aisle.

Even in Canada, California supplies a good bit of our fruits and vegetables, especially in the off season.

We feared for supply - and cost - while California farmers endured six years of severe drought. You may have heard that California's drought has recently been declared over, the result of torrential winter rains that hit the state this year.

About those rains. They are directly linked to climate change and in more than one way. Now we're getting an object lesson that too much rain can be almost as bad as none at all when it comes to the food supply.

January's monster storms and flooding in California inundated farmlands up and down the state, dealing a blow to crops of vegetables, citrus and nuts.

While the series of tropical storms benefited some drought-stricken areas of the state, the heavy rains brought flooding to vineyards in Northern California and harvest delays further south for vegetable growers. Some citrus and nut growers were hurt too, including the loss of trees during strong winds.

"For many of our farmers, it's difficult to get in to plant or they have crops in the ground that are hard to harvest because the fields are muddy," said Tom Nassif, president and CEO of Western Growers, a California-based trade group representing farmers and their workers who grow about half of the nation's fresh fruits, vegetables and tree nuts.

Here in Canada, the California deluge is reflected in soaring prices for lettuce and other leafy green produce if you can find them at all.

It reminds me of an account I read a few years ago about a semi-nomadic herdsman, a pastoralist, in the sub-Saharan Sahel of Africa. Many generations of his family had made their living in that ancient way. Then, in the span of just two years, that all came to an end. Flash floods claimed half his herd the first year. Severe and sustained drought took the remainder the following year. The herdsman was left with no option but to gather up his family, leave the land, and to try to eke out some subsistence living in the city.

Stealth Over Syria or When You Put It That Way

America's F-22 Raptor stealth fighter is reportedly being flown in Syrian airspace. That could bring America's top stealth warplane into dangerous proximity to Russia's "stealth killer" air defence missiles, the S400 and S300V4 surface to air batteries.

Like the American mongoose to Russia's cobra, the F-22 pilots contend that if the US does start a campaign against Assad's forces, the Raptor pilots first job would be to take out those Russian missiles, supposedly the very best in the world.  Best in the world stealth fighter versus best in the world surface to air missiles.

The stealthy supersonically cruising air superiority fighters are the only fighters in the U.S. inventory that can safely fly within the engagement envelope of Russian S-400 and S300V4 surface-to-air missiles defense while the Pentagon ascertains how the Kremlin will respond to the American cruise missile attack on Syria last week. Indeed, the stealthy fighters would likely play an outsized role in suppressing those Russian missile batteries if the White House chooses to expand its campaign against the Syrian regime led by Bashar al-Assad which can operate in airspace where older conventional jets can’t.
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But while F-22 pilots are confident about the Raptor’s ability to defeat the S-300V4 and the S-400, the Air Force official acknowledged that the stealthy fifth-generation aircraft has never faced off against these next-generation Russian air defenses in actual combat before. The Air Force is not 100 percent sure if the Russians have the capability to attack the Raptor or F-35—as the Russians have often claimed.
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It would be a pretty gutsy call to challenge the Russian missile batteries with American stealth fighters. What if the Russians are right? What if their missiles can down the best stealth technology America has on offer? The F-35 isn't nearly as stealthy as the F-22 and it follows that, if the Russians can shoot down the F-22, that huge stealth advantage that Lockheed relies on to market the F-35 could take a big hit with the Pentagon and with foreign buyers. Which may be why others are saying the way to deal with the Russian defences is with cruise missiles. 

Airpower analysts too agreed that the Russian air defenses would be a serious problem during the early stages of any air campaign. “Initially, they would be a significant problem. If airstrikes launched on Syrian forces—which is still a big if—their air defenses would be among the first targets attacked,” Mark Gunzinger, a former B-52 pilot and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments told The National Interest shortly before last week’s cruise missile strike. “Cruise missiles such as Tomahawks and JASSMs would probably be used to surprise S-400s and S-300V4s. There may be little need to use manned aircraft them against these threats, especially when other options exist to suppress them. I also suggest that an initial wave of standoff strikes would be launched by U.S. bombers operating from CONUS bases. That would reduce the likelihood—however remote—of counterstrikes against regional airbases used by U.S. forces, plus it would reduce political friction with regional partners hosting US air forces who would have to grant permission for offensive operations against Syria's military. Of course, F-22s and B-2s would have significant roles to play, especially if an operation was intended to be more than a short, sharp, shock.”

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Meanwhile, the Russians have long claimed that they can detect, track and engage stealth aircraft such as the F-22 and F-35. However, it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of the Russian claims. “I do not know what will be the exact performance of the Russian SAM systems in this particular situation—I think it is hard to tell now,” Russian defense and foreign policy expert Vasily Kashin, a professor at Moscow's Higher School of Economics (HSE) told The National Interest. “Russians claim that the long-range SAM can shoot down stealth planes, although the range could be reduced. Pantsir systems are primarily against missiles and bombs not the planes carrying them and they will act as the second line of defense. But this is a minor issue. In this case we will have a war and there will be cruise missile attacks against the U.S. forces across the Middle East and then it will escalate to a full scale war.”

There are potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in Lockheed sales at stake in a showdown between the F-22 and the S400.  America has been reaping the stealth dividend for years, claiming that it alone can assert air superiority in any corner of the world. So why would it risk a high stakes, winner take all, contest in the skies over Syria especially when ground hugging American cruise missiles can probably do the job at much less cost and infinitely less risk. Then again, if the Pentagon uses old technology cruise missiles for the job instead of its state of the art, supposedly invincible, stealth fighter it could encourage Lockheed customers to question why they shouldn't just buy cruise missiles and pocket the change.

While We're All Worked Up About Chemical Weapons and Innocent Babies

Maybe Donald Trump can spare a thought of two for all the innocent babies who continue to fall victim to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, American forces doused wide tracts of Vietnam's countryside with the carcinogenic defoliant that is as persistent as it is destructive. In fact the experts best guess is that America's Agent Orange will be causing horrible birth defects, premature deaths and more for generations, possibly centuries.

Ghomeshi's Back

Jian Ghomeshi is trying to stage a comeback in the form of a pretentious podcast he's calling The Ideation Project.

Ghomeshi 2.0 - the Ideation Project.

The Anthropocene Equation

This may be a bit difficult to get your head around but a pair of scientists have worked out a new equation to gauge how quickly we - you and I, mankind - are destroying the planet. It's being called the Anthropocene Equation.  It describes the situation where astronomical and physical forcing have come to be eclipsed by man made forcing.

Here's an explanation of the Anthropocene Equation for lay people:

Named the Anthropocene equation, the formula was created by Will Steffen, a climate research professor at the Australian National University, and Owen Gaffney, a science journalist and communications consultant at the sustainability research firm Future Earth. According to their formula, recently published in The Anthropocene Review, human activity is altering the environment 170 times faster than under normal circumstances.

What do the authors mean by normal circumstances? Up until the Anthropocene age—our current geological age, during which human activity has exerted a dominant influence on the planetary ecosystem—Earth’s environment was shaped by three main determinants: astronomical forces (A), which affect insolation and mostly relate to the “gravitational effects of the sun and other planets”; geophysical forces (G), which include “volcanic activity, weathering and tectonic movement”; and internal dynamics (I), which pertain to the natural course of biological activity taking place on the planet.

But within the last century, the authors argue, these forces have largely paled in comparison to the overwhelming effects of human activity (H). Given this fact, Steffen and Gaffney were able to model their equation, which essentially suggests that due to massive population growth, consumption and technology, the (H) factor has become the sole force shaping the trajectory of Earth’s environmental system.  

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Gaffney explained to New Scientis that “far from living on a deeply resilient planet, we live on a planet with hair triggers.” The problem is that we have been “lulled into a false sense of security by the deceptive stability of the Holocene”—the previous geological era that spanned the last 11,700 years.

“Remarkably and accidentally,” Gaffney continued, “we have ejected the Earth system from the interglacial envelope and are heading into uncharted waters.”

Humanity has reached a tipping point. How our leaders decide to act now and in the next decade will drastically determine what direction our future takes. The authors themselves described their study as “an unequivocal statement of the risks industrialised societies are taking at a time when action is vital.”

If no drastic changes takes place, it could “trigger societal collapse.”

We face two very distinct possible realities. In one future, thanks to the greed of a small handful of global elites, humans will become extinct.

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Enter the second possible future, forged through global unity, instead of division. It’s difficult to picture what form such unity should take, which makes it a challenge. What we do know, as the New Scientist article points out, is that instead of our current “dominant neoliberal economic systems [which] still assume Holocene-like boundary conditions,” what we need is “a ‘biosphere positive’ Anthropocene economics.”

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and author of the book Sapiens, which provides a sprawling and incisive historical account of our species. His new book, Homo Deus, offers a similar expansive view of our future.

"The old 20th-century political model of left versus right is now largely irrelevant,” Harari said. “The real divide today is between global and national, global or local.” He noted that we now have a global ecology and economy, but a national politics, which makes our “current political system ineffective, because it has no control over the forces that shape our life.”

Like our two possible futures, Harari believes human society has two possible solutions: “Either de-globalize the economy and turn it back into a national economy, or globalize the political system.” The latter suggestion might sound a bit unrealistic at the present moment, but if humanity wants to avoid near-certain doom, it is probably the direction we will need to take.

We remain ensnarled in the neoliberal quagmire that is based on the stable conditions of the now departed Holocene. We're stuck with a political economic model, neoliberalism, that no longer works and yet our leadership, Canada included, is intent on perpetuating it until it is finally pried from our "cold, dead fingers."

There is little, make that zero, prospect of globalizing the political system. That would demand a great leveling that the peoples of the advanced nations would not abide. We will not give up our political domination, our standards of living and our levels of consumption. There's not a single politician in any major party or any major country who would suggest such a thing even couched in the most hypothetical language.

We are at a tipping point. Time is not on our side. We have a dozen years, probably less, to decide the fate of our species.

I'm Sure He's Packing His Bags Right Now

Don't push your luck, Bashar al Assad. Justin Trudeau has said there's no place for you any longer in Syria.

Now Assad, and this goes for you too Putin, you're risking the fearsome wrath of Justin on this one. Why Justin says he's even open to upping Canadian sanctions against Russia.

"I think Russia needs to be made aware of its responsibility in the bloody actions last week by the Assad regime," Trudeau said at the end of his trip to France marking the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

"And therefore, we are always open to working with our friends, allies and partners to send messages through sanctions and other means to Russia."

If Justin keeps this up there might just be a round of golf at Mar a Lago coming his way. 

No, New Brunswick, Don't. Just Don't.

I read it in The Guardian so it must be true. "Canadian province gambles future on marijuana's 'extreme growth potential.'"

Some 100,000 Canadians currently use medical marijuana – and the number is growing by 10% each month, according to the Canadian National Medical Marijuana Association.

The industry’s potential growth spurt comes just as New Brunswick stares down a fast-approaching perfect storm of an ageing demographic and economic decline. “We’re desperate for growth,” said Moncton-based economist Richard Saillant.

In some ways New Brunswick has more in common with countries, such as Greece or Portugal, than with other regions of Canada, said Saillant. “We share the same characteristics as those countries to the extent that they’re slow-growing peripheral economies that are fast aging and that are facing major financial stress.”

Home to some 750,000 people, the province is the only one in Canada with a shrinking population, as deaths outnumber births and younger residents head west for jobs. In their wake they leave an unemployment rate that hovers around 10% – one of the highest in Canada.

Please, New Brunswick, don't do it. Think of the last time some genius imagined an agricultural salvation for a Maritime province. Think "Pecker." Think Newfoundland and Labrador. Think Brian Peckford. Think cucumbers.

When the Sprung cucumber adventure blew up in his face, Pecker hightailed it out of Newfoundland - about as far away as he could get and still be in Canada. He's still there, just down the road from me in Qualicum Beach where he continues to dabble in rightwing provincial politics, this time British Columbia's.

So, New Brunswick, we've done our share. No more. If that marijuana venture goes up in smoke, we don't want any more failed politicians from that end of the country.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

This republic:

The sixth and final missive on Donald Trump from the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times was entitled "California fights back."

The board urges cautious determination to push back the excesses of the Trump regime.

California needs to be clear-eyed about the challenges it faces and strategic about how it responds. An all-out war with the federal government is neither sustainable nor wise. The state will have to choose its battles.

For starters, California should continue to pursue its agenda on human and civil rights, on clean air, water and climate change, and on equality. Trump can dismantle the federal Clean Power Plan, but he can’t stop the state from moving toward its renewable energy goal of 50% by 2030 as laid out in SB 350 two years ago. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can reduce national fuel efficiency standards, but if it seeks to revoke California’s waiver that lets the state set its own, tougher rules, state lawmakers should fight back, including taking the agency to court if necessary. Trump can continue his counterproductive and mean-spirited efforts to deport non-criminal immigrants living in the country illegally, but the state’s local law enforcement agencies are not legally required to do the feds’ job for them; they should not.
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Many Californians are extremely — and rationally — pessimistic about the next few years under President Trump. But here’s another hard truth: If and when there are opportunities for reasonable collaboration with the new administration, the state must be prepared to take them. California relies on the federal government for $105 billion in aid each year, money it badly needs. [The state sends $350 billion a year to Washington.] Total noncooperation is not an option. Besides, Sacramento and Washington, D.C., have certain mutual interests: If the president wants shovel-ready infrastructure projects to fund, we have plenty.
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In the days ahead, we Californians must stand up to protect our nation and defend our state. We must read, write and protest. Attend meetings and speak out honestly to those in power. We must vote. Not just for president, but for school board as well. Stand up for the rule of law and the democratic process while also opposing the dangerous policies of America’s new leader.

For the next four years, we must cooperate when it is possible, but fight back when it is necessary in the interests of our state and the union to which it belongs.