Let's Train'em, Declare Victory and Leave

Great progress being made in Afghanistan. Six years down the road and we're almost at the halfway point in the goal of building a 70,000-soldier strong Afghan army. Once we hit that magic number, so we're told anyway, it's all "Mission Accomplished" and we can move on. Just a few more years now - or maybe ten or twenty or...

The Afghanistan National Army is a bit of a novelty. The country has never really fielded a national army in recent history. Force has been structured by militias controlled by ethnic warlords - Pashtun, Baloch, Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara. The national army essentially takes that military control out of the hands of the warlords and there's the rub.

Where are those warlords today? Why, many of them are in key positions of power in the Karzai government. Some of those are also in the narcotics industry. Some have ties to the Taliban.

What then is holding the Afghan national army together as its rate of enlistment slowly comes to outpace its rate of desertions? Well the glue would be the US and NATO forces in that country. They provide the structure and, after this many years, they're actually getting fairly good at herding the cats.

The question is whether the western troops have become the indispensible spine of the Afghan National Army. What is there to replace them if we leave that country? What would be left save for a thoroughly corrupt and dysfunctional central government?

If the national government is too weak and corrupt to sustain the national army, what then? That may depend as much on the army's officer corps as the number and quality of soldiers we train for them. It is not inconceivable that it may take a military coup to prevent a post-NATO Afghanistan from sliding back into the abyss of warring fuedalism fueled by the spoils of a failed, narco-state.

Maybe the best we can do for Afghanistan is to help train an effective army with heavy emphasis on its officer corps so that we can leave the country in safe hands. Perhaps this is our only legitimate exit strategy. The quest to bring Western democracy to Afghanistan may be more than the US, NATO and Afghanistan can bear.

The True Conservative President

George Bush gets roundly attacked from within his party for abandoning true conservative principles. Some even argue that he's no Replublican at all. An interesting article in today's New York Times by Rutgers history professor David Greenberg claims that Bush is, if anything, the ultimate Republican conservative and that's what truly has his fellow party leaders worried:

"...Before Reagan, the so-called conservative movement had been an insurgent force within the Republican party. But starting in the 1980s, most of the liberals in the party left it, and for the last 10 or 20 years, the party and the movement have been more or less congruent. From 2002 to 2007, moreover, the G.O.P. controlled not just the White House but both houses of Congress, the federal judiciary and a majority of state governments, as well as more media outlets than ever before. They were thus able to impose a conservative agenda with little resistance.

"Indeed, so few were the obstacles that conservatism was able to run amok. The result — in the assessment of not just liberals but also other observers — has been disaster: a mess of a war, the failure to plan for Hurricane Katrina, the erosion of the church-state wall, widening inequality, the loss of civil liberties including habeas corpus, and scores of other ills that readers of this column can list as easily as I. This was the fruit of modern American conservatism.

"But now Republicans are deserting Bush. Businessmen and evangelicals, libertarians and social moderates are all astir. The reason isn’t that Bush failed to espouse their causes any more than Reagan did. From the Iraq War on down, after all, his policies have also been their policies — backed by their legislators, upheld by their judges, championed by their journalists.

"No, the reason so many are complaining about Bush or today’s G.O.P. is that their policies haven’t worked out very well. Since the 2004 election, majorities of Americans have turned against them. What conservatives like Chuck Hagel and Bush’s other right-wing detractors fear in their bones — and not without reason — is that majorities of Americans will soon also turn against the creed of conservatism itself."

It may be time for Harpo to take another look at those bones and entrails.

The Ploys of Christian Fundamentalism

With the passing of uber-evangelist Jerry Falwell this seemed a good time to let Chris Hedges be heard on the issue of fundamentalists and their compulsive belief in biblical inerrancy - that is to say that the notion that every word in the Bible is absolutely and completely true:

The four Gospels, we understood, were filled with factual contradictions, two Gospels saying Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, while Luke asserted that John was already in prison. Mark and John gave little importance to the birth of Jesus, while Matthew and Luke give differing accounts. There are three separate and different versions of the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20, Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 5). As for the question of God's true nature, there are many substantive contradictions. Is God a loving or a vengeful God? In some sections of the Bible, vicious acts of vengeance, including the genocidal extermination of opposing tribes and nations, appear to be blessed by God. God turns on the Egyptians and transforms the Nile into blood so the Egyptians will suffer from thirst - and then sends swarms of locusts and flies to torture them, along with hail, fire and thunder from the heavens to destroy all plants and trees. To liberate the children of Israel, God orders the firstborn in every Egyptian household killed so all will know "that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel " (Exodus 11.7). The killing does not cease until "there was not a house where one was not dead" (Exodus 12:30). Amid the carnage God orders Moses to loot all the clothing, jewelry, gold and silver from the Egyptian homes (Exodus 12:35-36). God looks at the devastation and says "I have made sport of the Egyptians" (Exodus 10:2). While the Exodus story fueled the hopes and dreams of oppressed Jews, and later African Americans in the bondage of slavery, it has also been used to foster religious chauvinism.

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

Hatred of Jews and other non-Christians pervades the Gospel of John (3:18-20). Jews, he wrote, are children of the devil, the father of lies (John 8:39-44). Jesus calls on his followers to love their enemies and to pray for their persecutors (Matthew 5:44), a radical concept in the day of the Roman Empire. He says we must never demean or insult our enemies. But then we read of Jesus calling his enemies "a brood of vipers" (Matthew 12:34).

The Book of Revelation, a crucial text for the radical Christian Right, appears to show Christ returning to earth at the head of an avenging army. It is one of the few places in the Bible where Christ is associated with violence. This bizarre book, omitted from some of the early canons and relegated to the back of the Bible by Martin Luther, may have been a way, as scholars contend, for the early Christians to cope with Roman persecution and their dreams of final triumph and glory. The book, however, paints a picture of a bloody battle between the forces of good and evil, Christ and the Antichrist, God and Satan, and the torment and utter destruction of those who do not follow the faith. In this vision, only the faithful will be allowed to enter the gates of the New Jerusalem. All others will disappear, cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14-15).

...There is enough hatred, bigotry and lust for violence in the pages of the Bible to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty and violence. Religion, as H. Richard Niebuhr said, is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people. And the Bible has long been used in the wrong hands - such as the antebellum slave owners in the American South who quoted from it to defend slavery - not to Christianize the culture, as those wielding it often claim, but to acculturate the Christian faith.

...These evangelicals and fundamentalists are, as the Reverend William Sloane Coffin wrote, not biblical literalists, as they claim, but "selective literalists," choosing the bits and pieces of the Bible that conform to their ideology and ignoring, distorting or inventing the rest. And the selective literalists cannot have it both ways. Either the Bible is literally true and all of its edicts must be obeyed, or it must be read in another way.

...Church leaders must denounce the biblical passages that champion apocalyptic violence and hateful political creeds. They must do so in the light of other biblical passages that teach a compassion and tolerance, often exemplified in the life of Christ, which stands opposed to bigotry and violence. Until this happens, until the Christian churches wade into the debate, these biblical passages will be used by bigots and despots to give sacred authority to their calls to subjugate or eradicate the enemies of god.

Chris Hedges, American Fascists

Fall Guy Found for Iraq War Debacle

President Bush has chosen Lt. General Douglas Lute, currently the Pentagon's director of operations, to oversee the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq as the President's "War Czar."

The position, created after those ordinarily responsible for such things took to the hills to distance themselves from the Iraq fiasco, is Lute's opportunity to end his career in total ignominy. General Lute, known for his skills in stenography and copy filing, has been promised he will be able to retain his parking spot at the Pentagon.

It is understood that the general will immediately begin preparing for the handover by practising falling on his sword.

Father and Son

In 1992, George H.W. Bush was President of the United States. In that year he signed into law

the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which was developed in response to energy dependence issues raised by the first Persian Gulf War. The law prescribed the replacement of 10 percent of petroleum motor-fuel consumption with alternative fuels by the year 2000 and 30 percent by 2010.

On Monday, GHW Bush's idiot son announced his green initiative, the "20-in-10" proposal to replace 20% of US gasoline consumption with alternative fuels by 2017.

The Bush 43 administration dragged its heels so badly on Bush 41's Energy Policy Act of 1992 that it had to be sued, successfully, three times and even now remains in violation of those requirements.

Bush 43 (Shrub to you) is happy to parrot his blatant retreat from his own father's standards as a great environmental breakthrough.

Saving Forests Begins at Home

Canada is being urged to protect our boreal forests. A meeting of 1,500 scientists gathered in Ottawa identified the global significance of Canada's forest lands. From Reuters:

"Canada's Boreal Forest, stretching from the Alaskan border and running north of the plains all the way to Newfoundland on the Atlantic, is one of largest intact forest-and-wetland ecosystems remaining on earth.

"The mainly coniferous forest is the single largest terrestrial carbon storehouse in the world, which helps stem the greenhouse effect. It supports 3 billion migratory songbirds, the world's largest caribou herds and large populations of bears, wolves, lynx and fish.

"University of Alberta ecologist David Schindler warned, 'Canada's Boreal Forest offers what may be our last, best chance to do things right, but only if our leaders act decisively and act now.'

"The scientists called for half of Canada's Boreal Forest to be protected, up from 10 percent now, and for development in the rest to be carefully managed, particularly in the face of pressure from logging, mining and oil and gas operations.

"For example, they said an area the size of Florida is slated to be used for the development of Canada's vast tar sands reserves."

Time Flies

Bennett, The Christian Science Monitor

Fallwell Fell Unwell - Now Dead

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for an American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, "you helped this happen."

The Reverend Jerry Falwell exposing the real villains responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

He's dead. Good riddance.

The Decency Deficit of George W. Harper

He's studied the Republican play book, memorized every paragraph in the section on slime and imported it directly into Canadian politics. Stephen Harper has shown that he can be just as morally bereft as his American Idol, the now thoroughly discredited George Bush.

One of the lessons Harpo has mastered is that war is good. Not for the troops, perhaps, and certainly not for civilians who happen to live within several hundred feet of the arrival of a 2,000 pound aerial bomb, but, damn, it can be real goooooood for a good old boy politician. Get yourself in trouble, botch everything up, to the point where there is no handy excuse or explanation - why then use the war, use the troops, use their sacrifice, exploit the hell out of all of that to smear your critics, turning your failures into an attack on their patriotism. This is pure Bush/Cheney 101. It has no place in decent society.

Bill Graham took this to the Tories yesterday in the House of Commons, "The consistent approach" of Harper and the government is "to stifle legitimate debate about this mission (and) impugn the motives of members of this House who are every bit as patriotic as the Prime Minister and every person sitting over there."

Which prompted Tory house leader Peter van Loan to roll himself in a fresh coat of swill and reply, ""When it comes to consistency, the people of Canada know where this government stands. We stand firmly, clearly behind our troops and behind their mission."

At the end of the day this is all about decency and a basic respect for all Canadians. Harper and his gaggle of sycophants just keep showing us they have no sense of either.

More Bush Fallout - Russian Paranoia

George W. Bush is undoubtedly the worst, stupidest and most inept president in the history of the United States. The man defines incompetence and arrogance. His visions are fueled by the heady elixer of hubris. He styles himself the instrument of God's will but surely the hand directing him is Loki's.

He came to the White House with the swagger of omnipotence. Here was the POTUS for the red meat crowd, personified by the neo-conservatives and their Project for the New American Century. Bush was to be the man to remake the world in America's image, to complete the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

George Bush was none of the things his movement expected. From global warming to global security he has failed his nation miserably. He ripped the veil off America's weaknesses and vulnerabilities while simultanousley emboldening her enemies and alienating her former friends. He brought war to Afghanistan and Iraq and lost both (at least by the objectives he announced when he began his adventures). He smothered the incomparable American military with wars it can neither win nor escape.

Not content with focusing on the challenges he was already incapable of tackling, Bush had to throw the rest of the world into turmoil with his pathetic Bush Doctrine, as bellicose and fascist a pronouncement as the western world has seen in almost 80-years. This president put every other nation and group of nations on notice that his America would use military force, if required, to pre-empt any other nation or group of nations from ever ascending to a point where it might rival the U.S. economically or militarily. The laws of war would no longer govern the United States which would act pre-emptively on the strength of its own perceptions.

The Bush Doctrine ought to have been met with angry protest and denouncement within the United States and among America's allies but that didn't happen. The Democrats, the American people and the rest of the west exemplified by NATO remained mute and complacent.

The Bush message was heard with alarm in some corners, notably Russia and China. The boom in world oil and gas prices has reinvigorated Russia's economic clout while that country is led by a shrewd, brutal and calculating president, himself an old Cold Warrior from the KGB.

Vladimir Putin has seen one provocation after another issue out of Washington. The United States has driven the expansion of NATO to Russia's very borders and has tried to supplant Russian influence with its southerly neighbours such as Kazhakstan and Turkmenistan. The US has shown Moscow that it is entirely willing to launch pre-emptive war on false pretences, something the Russians have experienced before in the 1940's. Now the Americans want to put anti-missile batteries right on Russia's doorstep. At the same time America has sparked arms races in China, India and Russia itself. This too is the Bush legacy.

Against this backdrop, Bush's Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, goes to Moscow today for meetings with President Putin. This is the woman who, just a few years ago, dismissed Russia as a "weak and incoherent country."

According to a report in this week's issue of The Economist, Rice will be met by a Russian leader heavy on suspicion and very light on goodwill toward her country's regime.

"RUSSIA is a strong, sovereign and prosperous country, surrounded by enemies and traitors who are bent on undermining its geopolitical power. Upstarts such as Estonia and Poland are trying to spoil Russia’s far more important relationships with proper European countries, such as Germany or France. The freshly-baked European Union (EU) members act on the instructions of America, a hypocritical and arrogant dictator of the world order, which pretends to be a democracy but in fact is closer to the Third Reich.

"This, in short and perhaps a bit exaggerated, is the view of Europe from behind the Kremlin wall, intensified by the state media, and shared by many Russians.

"Russia’s sense of power has been enhanced over the weekend by Mr Putin’s brinkmanship in central Asia. To the irritation of the White House, Russia has apparently persuaded Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to build a pipeline for the export of gas through, rather than around, Russia. If it actually goes ahead this would spoil American plans for a trans-Caspian pipeline which is seen as crucial for diversifying sources of energy to Europe.

"Russia’s rhetorical hostility towards America is reaching levels unseen since the cold war ended. Indeed, even in the late Soviet period anti-American propaganda was less emotional and certainly less sincere than it is today. The question now is whether the noisy words will be translated into action. That may become a bit clearer at the end of Ms Rice’s two-day long visit to Moscow."

It's unlikely that the Bush regime will try to defuse the tensions between Washington and Moscow. This is one president who has shown himself utterly incapable of correcting his mistakes. That means these problems will be left to simmer while the world awaits the next leaders who will take over from Bush and Putin. We can only live in hope.

Imagine the carbon footprint of 8-million people flying from London to New York.

According to a report in The Independent, that is the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atomsphere each and every day due to deforestation.

"The accelerating destruction of the rainforests that form a precious cooling band around the Earth's equator, is now being recognised as one of the main causes of climate change. Carbon emissions from deforestation far outstrip damage caused by planes and automobiles and factories.

"The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists.

"Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.

"Indonesia became the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world last week. Following close behind is Brazil. Neither nation has heavy industry on a comparable scale with the EU, India or Russia and yet they comfortably outstrip all other countries, except the United States and China.

"What both countries do have in common is tropical forest that is being cut and burned with staggering swiftness. Smoke stacks visible from space climb into the sky above both countries, while satellite images capture similar destruction from the Congo basin, across the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo.

"The remaining standing forest is calculated to contain 1,000 billion tons of carbon, or double what is already in the atmosphere.

As the GCP's report concludes: "If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change."

Are Canadians Finally Fed Up with This Joker?

A Billion Homeless?

A report by Christian Aid, a group representing churches in Britain and Ireland, forecasts that up to a billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2050 due to global warming and other developments.

The Christian Aid study is based on latest UN population and climate change figures. It says conflict, large-scale development projects and widespread environmental deterioration will combine to make life unsupportable for hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the Sahara belt, south Asia and the Middle East.

Western governments are increasingly aware of climate change as a security issue. Britain's foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, has highlighted the threat of climate change to the UN security council and last week said it was an underlying factor in the Darfur crisis with the potential to escalate many other existing conflicts. "In climate change we have a new and potentially disastrous dynamic," she said.

Over staunch Republican opposition, the US National Intelligence director has been given the go ahead to commence his own study of the looming environmental threats to US security.

Meanwhile, the C40, which represents leaders of the world's largest cities, begin their Large Cities Climate Summit in New York today. They contend that cities have a big role in combatting climate change as they contribute up to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Outsourcing Journalism - Maybe They'll Get It Now

Western reporters have been remarkably complacent about outsourcing in the era of globalization but that may be about to change. Now it's their jobs that could be next on the line.

A report in The Guardian tells of two reporters recently hired by PasadenaNow.com to cover city council meetings. The brace of scribes will probably never step foot inside the Pasadena city council chamber because they're based about 8,000 miles away in Mumbai and Bangalore, India.

The two reporters will watch council meetings on the internet and they'll work for spare change - one getting $12,000, the other a more modest $7,200.

The website's editor, James MacPherson, is a veteran at outsourcing from his experience in the clothing industry when he outsourced production to India and Vietnam.

Hooked on Firepower

In Afghanistan, US and NATO forces enjoy total air superiority and it may just cost them the war against the Taliban.

The New York Times reports that our dependence on air strikes has brought "the mission" to the brink of failure:

"Afghan, American and other foreign officials say they worry about the political toll the civilian deaths are exacting on President Hamid Karzai, who last week issued another harsh condemnation of the American and NATO tactics, and even of the entire international effort here.

"What angers Afghans are not just the bombings, but also the raids of homes, the shootings of civilians in the streets and at checkpoints, and the failure to address those issues over the five years of war. Afghan patience is wearing dangerously thin, officials warn.

"The civilian deaths are also exposing tensions between American commanders and commanders from other NATO countries, who have never fully agreed on the strategy to fight the war here, in a country where there are no clear battle lines between civilians and Taliban insurgents.

"But American officials say that they have been forced to use air power more intensively as they have spread their reach throughout Afghanistan, raiding Taliban strongholds that had gone untouched for six years. One senior NATO official said that “without air, we'd need hundreds of thousands of troops" in the country. They also contend that the key to reducing casualties is training more Afghan Army soldiers and police officers.

"The anger is visible here in this farming village in the largely peaceful western province of Herat, where American airstrikes left 57 villagers dead, nearly half of them women and children, on April 27 and 29. Even the accounts of villagers bore little resemblance to those of NATO and American officials — and suggested just how badly things could go astray in an unfamiliar land where cultural misunderstandings quickly turn violent.

"The United States military says it came under heavy fire from insurgents as it searched for a local tribal commander and weapons caches and called in airstrikes, killing 136 Taliban fighters.

"But the villagers denied that any Taliban were in the area. Instead, they said, they rose up and fought the Americans themselves, after the soldiers raided several houses, arrested two men and shot dead two old men on a village road.

"After burying the dead, the tribe’s elders met with their chief, Hajji Arbab Daulat Khan, and resolved to fight American forces if they returned. 'If they come again, we will stand against them, and we will raise the whole area against them,' he warned. Or in the words of one foreign official in Afghanistan, the Americans went after one guerrilla commander and created a hundred more."

A World in Flux

If you think it's becoming much harder to find stability in the world today, you're right.

For better - and for worse - the nation's of the world are in a state of turbulent transition. China, India and the Middle East come to mind but the west isn't spared either.

The undisputed leader of the western world, some would say of the world itself, the United States of America teeters precipitously on the brink of decline. This engine that drove the prosperity of the west for more than half a century is beginning to break down and weaken just as it needs even more strength to hold its position against emerging economies.

The looming decline of the American empire is examined carefully in American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, Ken Phillips, Viking, 2005.

Phillips is a fierce critic of the Reagan/Bush syndrome that is undermining his country. He's also a former Republican strategist. He's not running any Democratic agenda in this book.

Phillips analyzes how the United States is pursuing policies that closely mirror the practices that led to the demise of the previous empires, Dutch, Spanish and British, by turns. Here are some excerpts from the preface of American Theocracy:

...Reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money - debt, in its ballooning size and multiple domestic and international deficits - now constitute the three major perils to the United States of the twenty-first century.

[War and terror] both derive much of their current impetus from the incendiary backdrop of oil politics and religious fundamentalism, in Islam as well as the West. Despite pretensions to motivations such as liberty and freedom, petroleum and its geopolitics have dominated Anglo-American activity in the Middle East for a full century. On this, history could not be more clear.

The excesses of fundamentalism, in turn, are American and Israeli, as well as the all-too-obvious depredations of radical Islam. The rapture, end times, and Armageddon hucksters in the United States rank with any Shiite ayatollahs, and the last two presidential elections mark the transformation of the GOP into the first religious party in U.S. history.

The financialization of the United States economy over the last three decades - in the 1990s the finance, real estate and insurance sector overtook and then strongly passed manufacturing as a share of the U.S. gross domestic product - is an ill omen in its own right. ...Excessive debt in twenty fist century United States is on its way to becoming the global Fifth Horseman, riding close behind war, pestilence, famine and fire.

...A leading world power such as the United States, with almost three hundred million people and huge international responsibilities, goes about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it satisfies the unfortunate criteria on display in Washington circa 2005: an elected leader who believes himself in some way to speak for God, a ruling party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the churches, the conviction of many voters in that Republican party that government should be guided by religion, and on top of it all, White House implementation of domestic and international political agendas that seems to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews.

Over three decades of Bush presidencies, vice presidencies and CIA directorships, the Republican party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests - a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex.

Because the United States is beginning to run out of its own oil sources, a military solution to an energy crisis is hardly lunacy. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon would have flinched, and the temptation, at least, is understandable. What Caesar and Napoleon did not face, but less able American presidents do, is that bungled overseas military embroilment, unfortunate in its own right, could boomerang economically. The United States, some $4-trillion in hock internationally, has become the world's leading debtor, increasingly nagged by worry that some nations will sell dollars in their reserves and switch their holdings to rival currencies. Washington prints bonds and dollar-green IOUs, which European and Asian bankers accumulate until for some reason they lose patience. This is the debt Achilles' heel, which stands alongside the oil Achilles' heel.

Unfortunately, as much or more dynamite hides in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 per cent of the party electorate. Many, many millions believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the awaited second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil-price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis, and melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions, and the credit and financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voting patterns enable such policies - the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back - is depressing... .

...These developments have warped the Republican party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices, and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive, even a partial captive, of the sort of biblical inerrancy - backwater, not mainstream - that dismisses modern knowledge and science.

...Conservative true believers will scoff: the United States is sui generis, they say, a unique and chosen nation. What did or did not happen to Rome, Imperial Spain, the Dutch Republic and Britain is irrelevant. The catch here, alas, is that these nations also thought they were unique and that God was on their side. The revelation that He was apparently not added a further debilitating note to the later stages of each national decline.

...The concentration of wealth that developed in the United States in the long bull market of 1982-2000 was also a characteristic of the zeniths of the previous leading world economic powers as their elites pursued surfeit in Mediterranean villas or in the country-house splendor of Edwardian England.

...wealth and debt have often overextended together in the modern trajectories of leading world economic powers. In a nation's early years, debt is a vital and creative collaborator in economic expansion; in late stages, it becomes what Mr. Hyde was to Dr. Jekyll: an increasingly dominant mood and facial distortion.

..three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have been religious excess, an outdated or declining energy and industrial base, and financialization and debt (from foreign and military overstretch). ....The extent to which politics in the United States - and especially the governing Republican coalition - deserves much of the blame for this fatal convergence is not only the book's subject matter but its raison d'etre.

American Theocracy is a compelling read. It offers skilfully researched analyses of what may lie ahead for the US - and the rest of us - in the very near future. If nothing else it will greatly help you understand how the world has gotten where it is today and the perils that confront us.

Timetables - They're All the Rage

Here's a little fact that the buffoons who lead our western countries can't understand - Infidels have a very limited shelf life in the Middle East. We begin to go off after a few years and then the locals really don't like us any more.

The moral is that you only go there when it's absolutely necessary and, when you do, you go in with enough resources to get the job done right and then get out as quickly as possible.

We've ignored that fundamental rule in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We're still in both countries and we're still trying to figure out what to try next. Here's what we should try next - we should try to work out how to leave.

How do we leave? One way, maybe the only way, would be to find Arab forces to replace us. Locals, if at all possible, supplemented by Saudis, Jordanians, even Syrians - whatever it takes.

Why do we think that predominantly white, Christian, western, non-Arabic speaking troops are suitable for the long haul in Afghanistan or Iraq? Why do we think that neighbouring Arab states can't do our job much better?

But back to timetables. A majority of Iraq's lawmakers have endorsed a petition calling for a timetable for American troop withdrawal. The petition is now in the process of being transformed into a bill.

This week Afghanistan's parliamentarians have also called for a US and NATO ceasefire and negotiations with the Taliban. I guess that, after six years of western intervention, they've figured out that we're pretty useless in defeating the Taliban reality. The Afghans have realized that they're going to have to sort out their own problems all the way up to and including the Taliban.

Maybe we need to start looking at timetables for Afghanistan too. This White Man's Burden thing is wearing very thin.

Memorial to Iraq

This is how an anti-war group in Santa Barbara, California sees the Iraq war. A municipal ordinance requires the markers to be removed weekly. The group complies and simply replaces them again, along with new markers, for another week.

This Should Be Fascinating

Despite strong Republican opposition, America's Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, has endorsed the need for US spy agencies to assess the threat to America from global warming over the next three decades. The study will analyze political, social, economic and agricultural risks.

The US Congress just passed a record, $48-billion intelligence authorization which includes the global warming assessment. Republicans, true to form, shoved their heads in the sand in opposition, one dismissing the assessment as a "bugs and bunnies" issue.

Global warming is going to give rise to new and potentially very dangerous security threats. That question has already been the subject of studies by a number of agencies including the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence.

Billions in Iraqi Oil Missing

Well of course it's missing. Oil has been pumped into waiting tankers for years and the broken measuring gauges have been left unrepaired.

Read the item below, "A Plea from Baghdad", written by an Iraqi journalist. He laments how there's no oil to be had in the Iraqi capital yet it flows, apparently unregulated, through the pipelines to the port of Basra.

Today's New York Times cites a US government report that notes, "Between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq's declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling."

"'That's a staggering amount of oil to lose every month,' said Philip K. Verleger Jr., an independent economist and oil expert. 'But given everything else that's been written about Iraq, it's not a surprise.'

"Mr. Verleger added that if the oil was being smuggled out of Iraq, there would be a ready market for it, particularly in smaller refineries not controlled by large Western companies in places like China, the Caribbean and even small European countries.

A Lowlife Leader

Harpo is about as harcore Republican as it gets when it comes to manipulating patriotism to attack those who legitimately criticize his regime. The man is pure slime.

The Prime Monster donned his best red windbreaker in Petawawa today and exploited his audience of service members and their families to deride his critics attention to the detainee issue for somehow denying our "heroes" their proper recognition.

Let's see now. Harpo and O'Conner and McKay all spin fanciful tales that repeatedly turn out to be just stories, made up crap, and then he ties his own deceit and incompetence to the issue of honouring our soldiers. As though there was any doubt, Harper again shows himself to be a very low form of life.

In a Nutshell

David Brooks is a right-wing columnist who writes for The New York Times.

Today Brooks delivered his take on Tony Blair and I think he got it right:

"Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to be interdependent, and that the world will only flourish if the international community enforces shared, universal values."

There you have it. The key to globalization is premised on the international community (coalitions of the willing, etc.) enforcing "shared, universal values" that just happen to be our values.

A Report Card for Rick Hillier

Isn't it about time that someone came up with some meaningful way of assessing just what we're actually achieving with "the mission" to Afghanistan?

Perhaps we should break down the mission into its constituent elements: military, civilian aid and government support.

Let's face it, Afganistan is the mission with no end. It'll be over when we decide to leave, no sooner and no later. It's not like either of the Great Wars. There isn't going to be any capitulation, no surrender. Don't hold your breath waiting for any victory parades on Parliament Hill. It's not even like the Korean War - no armistice or truce, no ceasefire across some prescribed demilitarized zone.

If there's nothing for us to "win" maybe we should focus on what we have to lose. Truth be told, we're really not there fighting for the Afghans. If we were we'd be gone because they want us gone. No, we're there because we think it's in our interests to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda there so that we don't have to fight them in the streets of Toronto, right? Sure.

So, how are we doing with the fight? We (our side) has been at these guys for six years with everything short of nuclear weapons. Six years. That's more than enough time that we should at least expect our military leaders - such as Rick Hillier - to show us just how much progress we've really made in crippling the insurgents.

How's it going, Rick? Have you finally got the Taliban on the run? Just how much of Kandahar province do the insurgents really control? How much of 'our' turf did they control last year and the two years before that?

How are we doing at undermining the locals' support for the insurgents? This is all about 'hearts and minds' after all, isn't it? So, Rick, how are we doing on that score? Are we making a lot of friends with our tanks and artillery and air strikes or are we making new friends for the Taliban?

Now Rick, is marking time a good enough approach to waging the war you talked us into fighting? Is this really all about just putting in an appearance, letting your buddies know that we're there in the flesh?

So, Ricky boy, just how does this one end? How does "the mission" play out? How do we know if you're really Canada's Warrior in Chief or just a goof who likes to use words like "scumbag" and "pissed off"?

Don't mean to be critical Rick but it seems you've set the bar pretty low for yourself. There are no benchmarks, nothing for you to win or lose. The great generals of recorded history from the pharoahs to Caesar, Napoleon and Wellington to Patton, were all about winning and losing but mainly winning. All those generals had wars to win and so they always had the real risk of losing. Best of all, everyone could see whether they were winning or losing. That's not what we see when we look at you Rick.

I wish you could give us a handle on "the mission", Rick. Just what the hell is it anymore? What are we really trying to accomplish? How are going to meet those goals and when? How long is Canada going to be held captive to Afghanistan?

If we can't even define, with real clarity, what we're doing in Afghanistan, how we're going to succeed and when we're going to have that job finished, we're not supporting our troops but merely feeding them into a gaping maw of political posturing.

Is It Any Wonder Harpo Loves These Guys?

Horsey, Seattle P.I.

I Knew It, We All Did

Hurricane Katrina didn't just hit New Orleans. It ravaged Canadians as well, at least at the gas pump.

The Toronto Star reports on a study released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that found that, post-Katrina, pump prices jumped between 15 to 27 cents per litre beyond the industry's traditional cost and profit-margin pricing.

Of course you might cling to the notion that gasoline supply is a competitive industry and, therefore, any price is fair. That must explain why an increase in pump price at one station is automatically mirrored at all the others, right?

There are four principal suppliers of gasoline to the retail market and, by all appearances, they all work in lockstep. That's not quite a monopoly but the distinction is all but irrelevant.

Time for the government to intervene but then again we're talking Harpo and Big Oil. Forget I mentioned it.

Don't Look Down

Only in Japan.

That's where you'll find (obviously) the Japan Warm Water Bidet Council. The JWWBC, "... which represents nine bidet manufacturers, reported at least 105 cases of incidents involving flaming or smoking bidet toilets since 1984, the trade ministry has revealed. The council's website urged bidet users to be careful, saying units should be turned off immediately at any sign of overheating."

There you've been warned!

Lessons from the Past

In 1857, British colonial India suffered the massive, Sepoy Uprising. William Dalrwymple, writing in The Guardian, reveals there are important lessons from this insurgency the West would do well to revisit:

"...There is much about British imperial adventures in the east at this time, and the massive insurgency it provoked, which is uneasily familiar to us today. The British had been trading in India since the early 17th century. But the commercial relationship changed towards the end of the 18th, as a new group of conservatives came to power in London, determined to make Britain the sole global power. Lord Wellesley, the brother of the Duke of Wellington and governor general in India from 1798 to 1805, called his new approach the Forward Policy. But it was in effect a project for a new British century. Wellesley made it clear he would not tolerate any European rivals, especially the French, and planned to remove any hostile Muslim regimes that might presume to resist the west's growing might.

"The Forward Policy soon developed an evangelical flavour. The new conservatives wished to impose not only British laws but also western values on India. The country would be not only ruled but redeemed. Local laws which offended Christian sensibilities were abrogated - the burning of widows, for instance, was banned. One of the East India Company directors, Charles Grant, spoke for many when he wrote of how he believed providence had brought the British to India for a higher purpose: "Is it not necessary to conclude that our Asiatic territories were given to us, not merely that we draw a profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, the light of Truth?"

"The British progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers to annexing even the most pliant Islamic states. In February 1856 they marched into Avadh, also known by the British as Oudh. To support the annexation, a "dodgy dossier" was produced before parliament, so full of distortions and exaggerations that one British official who had been involved in the operation described the parliamentary blue book (or paper) on Oudh as "a fiction of official penmanship, [an] Oriental romance" that was refuted "by one simple and obstinate fact", that the conquered people of Avadh clearly "preferred the slandered regime" of the Nawab "to the grasping but rose-coloured government of the company".

"The reaction to this came with the great mutiny, or as it is called in India, the first war of independence. Though it reflected many deeply held political and economic grievances, particularly the feeling that the heathen foreigners were interfering with a part of the world to which they were alien, the uprising was consistently articulated as a defensive action against the inroads missionaries and their ideas were making in India, combined with a generalised fight for freedom from western occupation.

"Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, there are many echoes of the Islamic insurgencies the US fights today in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the resistance fighters described themselves as mujahideen or jihadis. There was even a regiment of "suicide ghazis" who vowed to fight until they met death.
Events reached a climax on September 14 1857, when British forces attacked the besieged city. They proceeded to massacre not only the rebel sepoys and jihadis, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. In one neighbourhood alone, Kucha Chelan, 1,400 unarmed citizens were cut down. Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a million souls, was left an empty ruin.

"The emperor was put on trial and charged, quite inaccurately, with being behind a Muslim conspiracy to subvert the empire stretching from Mecca and Iran to Delhi's Red Fort. Contrary to evidence that the uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, the prosecutor argued that "to Musalman intrigues and Mahommedan conspiracy we may mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of 1857". Like some of the ideas propelling recent adventures in the east, this was a ridiculous and bigoted oversimplification of a more complex reality. For, as today, western politicians found it easier to blame "Muslim fanaticism" for the bloodshed they had unleashed than to examine the effects of their own foreign policies. Western politicians were apt to cast their opponents in the role of "incarnate fiends", conflating armed resistance to invasion and occupation with "pure evil".

"Yet the lessons of 1857 are very clear. No one likes people of a different faith conquering tem, or force-feeding them improving ideas at the point of a bayonet. The British in 1857 discovered what the US and Israel are learning now, that nothing so easily radicalises a people against them, or so undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the east. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have, after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the others."

Putin Slams American Foreign Policy

According to Prince Vlad:

“We do not have the right to forget the causes of any war, which must be sought in the mistakes and errors of peacetime.

“Moreover, in our time, these threats are not diminishing. They are only transforming, changing their appearance. In these new threats, as during the time of the Third Reich, are the same contempt for human life and the same claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world.”

"The Mission" in Tatters

Well we finally did it. We, meaning NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, have finally killed enough innocent civilians that the Afghan government is crying "uncle" and not to the Taliban either.

Afghan MPs are demanding that we put away our toys, go back to our garrisons and stay put unless we're invited to come out and play by the Afghan army. Their demands follow word that US air strikes took out another 21-innocents yesterday, about par for the course given that we're only in mid-week.

The good news is that we don't have to pay no mind to no uppity Afghan legislators. Why only today NATO Secretary General, Jaap "The Hoop" Scheffer, while meeting with Mushie in Pakistan, said NATO had no plans to clear out of Afghanistan because it's there under a UN mandate. I guess that's Scheffer's way of telling Kabul that we'll damn well kill who we please, when we please for as long as we please, thank you very much.

They Arrested the Wrong Guy

An unidentified employee of EnviroCan has been nabbed by the Mounties for leaking information about the Harpo Tories scheme to pretend to tackle global warming. The Men in Red bravely pounced on the guy, threw him in irons and dragged him off to the gleeful chuckles of pretend EnviroMin John Baird.

The employee was arrested for breach of trust. Odd, doesn't that charge better suit Baird himself? That bellowing knuckle-dragger's campaign to stall on effective global warming measures is surely the truly egregious breach of trust in this case.

A Plea from Baghdad

This was posted at the McClatchey Baghdad Bureau's blog site. It is from an Iraqi. The site is where journalists, American and Iraqi, post their firsthand experiences:




Temperatures are rising above 40 degrees Celsius, with electricity supply provided for one whole hour every 72 hours!
WOW! Amazing how well the reconstruction efforts are going!
How many billions has America taken out of its pouch in the name of reconstruction in Iraq??
Where did the money go??
What are the priorities??
There is no national power supply to speak of.
There is no petrol to fuel our own tiny generators.
Why is there no petrol??
Iraq has no petrol for its own consumption?!
Don’t you find that a little hard to believe?
Did you know that the pipelines in Basra, (where Iraq’s very rich southern oil wells are located) are loading oil tankers under the protection of the Coalition forces for the benefit of – God knows who?? UNGAUGED!! (They shamelessly say the gauges aren’t working. It has been four years!)
Millions of barrels daily!!
What about us??
What about US??
When did we fall out of the equation?
Or is it that we were never in it?
We are going without sleep.
It’s too hot to sleep indoors.
Too dangerous to sleep outdoors.
My daughter and son dampen their clothes and lie down on the bare tiles of the floor.
I sit up all night with a meheffa (a hand-held fan) in my hand to stir the air about them so that they can sleep – even fitfully is good enough. Me – forget me.
Is this really the situation Mr. President aspired to?
I don’t have the stomach to speak of the darkness we live in, the cold water we bathe in …etc. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. Temperatures rise to above 55 degrees in July ….. in the shade ….

Desmond Tutu on Climate Change

The Great Debate over Global Warming is inevitably focused on how our GHG emissions will impact us and our future generations. Will we be 2 degrees warmer or 3 or perhaps 4? More sunscreen perhaps? Looser clothes? Decisions, decisions.

The enviro gargoyles like Bush and Harpo and Baird look straight ahead, rigid as stone. If they weren't they might have to look behind them and see what we've already done to the Third World and what we have lying in store for them in the future.

Desmond Tutu wrote eloquently of this recently in The Guardian. Here are some portions of his commentary:

"What if dealing with climate change meant more than a flick of a switch? Would our friends in the industrialised world think differently if the effects of climate change were worse than extended summer months and the arrival of exotic species? Cushioned and cosseted, they have had the luxury of closing their minds to the real impact of what is happening in the fragile and precious atmosphere that surrounds the planet we live on. Where climate change has occurred in the industrialised world, the effects have so far been relatively benign. With the exception of events such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the inhabitants of North America and Europe have felt just a gentle caress from the winds of change.

"I wonder how much more anxious they might be if they depended on the cycle of mother nature to feed their families. How much greater would their concerns be if they lived in slums and townships, in mud houses, or shelters made of plastic bags? In large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, this is a reality. The poor, the vulnerable and the hungry are exposed to the harsh edge of climate change every day of their lives.

"The melting of the snows on the peak of Kilimanjaro is a warning of the changes taking place in Africa. Across this beautiful but vulnerable continent, people are already feeling the change in the weather. But rain or drought, the result is the same: more hunger and more misery for millions of people living on the margins of global society. Even in places such as Darfur, climate change has played a role. In the semi-arid zones of the world, there is fierce competition for access to grazing lands and watering holes. Where water is scarce and populations are growing, conflict will never be far behind.

"Every child will remember the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. In the world we live in, the bad wolf of climate change has already ransacked the straw house and the house made of sticks, and the inhabitants of both are knocking on the door of the brick house where the people of the developed world live. Our friends there should think about this the next time they reach for the thermostat switch. They should realize that while the problems of the Mozambican farmer might seem far away, it may not be long before their troubles wash up on their shores."

Bennett, Christian Science Monitor

The None Too Friendly Skies

It's enough to make an environmentalist weep. In the wake of the latest IPCC report warning that we may have as little as 8-years left to get our GHG emissions under control if we're to avoid the worst impacts of Global Warming, this month is expected to set an all-time record for the commercial aviation industry. Take-offs are expected to break 2.5-million this month, a 5% rise over last year.

Two factors contributing to the problem are the growing popularity of low-cost airlines and the fast rising affluence of the Chinese.

Although aviation accounts for just 2% of GHG emissions the impact is much greater, 2.5 times in fact, because the pollution is released at high altitude. Total aircraft emissions are forecast to double by 2025.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials are warning that their nation's newfound prosperity is likely to trigger a significant rise in birth rates.

Zhang Weiqing, from the National Population and Family Planning Commission, told state media that newly rich couples can afford to pay fines to have more than one child, while rural couples are marrying earlier.

Deeply, Deeply Ashamed - Or Not

US and NATO forces in Afghanistan have to stop killing so damned many civilians.

A US Army Colonel did the latest mea culpa today, meeting with and apologizing to the families of 19-dead and 50-wounded Afghans mowed down when a force of Marines opened up on the locals in response to a suicide bomber.

These incidents are happening with such regularity that it's nearly impossible to keep track of them. There is, however, an ugly pattern to them. Word first leaks out from local Afghan officials angry at the needless deaths of innocent civilians. Our military then responds claiming the dead were Taliban but they'll investigate. Weeks or months later there's an admission that most of the dead were innocents who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time but, hey, don't worry - we gave their families $2,000 per corpse so everything's cool. We'll do better next time, for sure.

Afghan officials assert that, in an incident earlier this month, dozens of civilians were killed after a joint American and Afghan Army patrol was ambushed near Shindand and called in airstrikes. About 40 civilians, including women and children, were killed and 50 were wounded in the attacks, officials from Herat Province have told reporters.

Who's to blame? It's easy to condemn the soldiers in the field, much too easy in fact. They're not responsible for the decision to deploy them in such paltry numbers that they're constantly vulnerable to suicide bombers and ambushes. They're not responsible for being thrown into conditions where their very survival often depends on calling in artillery or air strikes on residential areas.

Lamentably, it's the soldiers who are "deeply, deeply ashamed" at this carnage, not the suits in Washington, London and Ottawa who are pulling the strings.

Let's see - we've got President Karzai pissed off, we've got the Afghan Senate pissed off, we've got the people thoroughly pissed off at us and at the government we're propping up. Guess who's not pissed off? That, of course, would be the Taliban.

Now What?

Let's see. According to Harpo and Hillier, Canada is in Afghanistan to save the country from the Taliban. Wouldn't it be great if the Afghan government we're supposedly defending agreed with us?

They don't. Afghan President Karzai has been trying to negotiate a deal with the Taliban for years. He knows what we won't admit - we don't have a snowball's chance of genuinely defeating the Taliban. At best we're swatting flies and, even then, we're wiping out a lot of innocents when we take out the bad guys.

If the civilian casualties were worth the results we're achieving, surely the Afghan government would be onside, eh? They're not. Time and again, Karzai has been calling these collateral deaths "unacceptable." He knows we're alienating the very people whose support his government desperately needs. He knows we're driving many of these folks straight into the arms of the Taliban.

Today, Afghanistan's senate has approved a motion calling for the government to conduct direct talks with the Taliban. The senate also called for US, NATO and Afghan forces to call off the hunt for Taliban fighters and other militants.

Karzai doesn't want us fighting this war the way we're fighting it and his senate doesn't want us fighting it at all. Discontent with our forces among the Afghan people is widespread and growing. We've been at this for six years and we're still treading water.

If the President and the government and the people of Afghanistan oppose what we're doing or at least how we're doing it, what gives us the right to just keep on doing what they oppose? If they want a deal with the Taliban, why are we wasting Canadian lives in a futile effort to protect them from the Taliban?

Canada's parliament held a faux debate on the Afghanistan mission but things have changed on the ground significantly since then. There's no better time for a thorough reassessment of this mess and a proper debate on what Canada's role should be in the months and years ahead.

The Measure of the Man

Odd how what goes around comes around. During the previous government, Stephen Harper derided Paul Martin, calling him "Mr. Dithers." Now that Canada appears to be facing the greatest challenge in the history of mankind the real Mr. Dithers is emerging and it's none other than Harpo himself.

Environmental degradation is an immediate, already enormous and steadily worsening threat to our very civilization. To that overstuffed suit, however, it's little more than an election issue. That's obvious from the way that Harpo is dithering about it and dithering he is.

On the Global Warming issue, Harpo is all form over substance. He says he gets it but is careful to avoid saying just what he gets. What does GW mean to this charlatan? Like pretty much everything he says, you would be foolish to judge him by his words.

The latest IPCC report warns that we may have as little as eight years in which to implement measures that could allow us to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. Eight years. That's precious little time. There is no time to waste, no time for dithering, no time for piecemeal measures and heel-dragging.

Harpo clearly isn't troubled by this warning. If he was, his government would be taking steps to ensure that our country was prepared for what is to come. He would be building concensus at all levels on the nature and scope of these problems and the options remaining to us to respond. Without such concensus there will be no significant action. Harper seems content to ensure that there is no such concensus.

Stephen Harper thinks Canada's government needs to be reformed, restructured. Well, here's his opportunity. Of course the type of restructuring nation's need in periods of dangerous challenges isn't quite what Harpo has in mind.

Harper wants a decentralized Canada in which many federal powers are transferred to the provinces. He would be happy to Balkanize our country. Such an arrangement, however, would make it vastly more difficult, if not impossible, to effectively respond to these looming environmental threats.

If anything, federal powers need to be consolidated and strengthened to help Canada meet the challenges of global warming, at home and internationally. Harpo has no intention of doing that.

It's clear that we must move away from our carbon-based economy. Harper plainly rejects that notion, clinging to his vision of Canada as an "energy superpower" rising to global prominence thanks to the tar sands, our country's top GHG emitter.

Harper is supposed to serve Canada, not Alberta. He is supposed to serve the Canadian people, not Big Oil.

There's a void in Canada's leadership and it is Stephen Harper. At this critical moment we are led by the real Mr. Dithers, a man so wedded to his ideology that he is incapable of discharging his responsibilities to the country and to all of us. Stephen Harper's vision is from a different time and has been overtaken by events that have rendered it irrelevant. Like all ideologues he came to office with an A game and that's all.

Eight years. If that assessment is right, we haven't got a moment to lose in getting rid of this government.

If George and Tony had fought WWII

Go back to the dark days when Hitler's armies ravaged Europe and the Rising Sun blazed a path across the Pacific. Imagine, no Roosevelt, no Churchill, their places instead held by George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Imagine the fate of Western democracy in the bumbling fingers of these two "leaders."

Bush's grand adventure in Iraq, his grandiose "war on terror", has run considerably longer than the American involvement in WWII. Unlike FDR's war, GWB's war was one largely of choice ill-conceived, cloaked in lies and incompetently executed.

America, like Britain, began WWII ill-prepared and both nations sustained a series of defeats and setbacks before the tide gradually turned in favour of the Allies. Roosevelt and Churchill didn't exaggerate the threats facing their people but bolstered their courage and calmed their fears.

The War on Terror actually began with stunning victories - the rout of the Taliban and the toppling of Saddam but again the tide turned, this time not in Blair or Bush's favour. Blair and Bush, unlike FDR and WSC, preyed upon their own people - manipulating them with lies and fear and crushing those who might speak truth by impugning their patriotism.

Had we been left to rely on these two incompetents and their sycophants such as Howard and Harper, we'd have been in big trouble indeed.

The Bush/Blair syndrome demonstrates that weak, ideologically-perverted political leadership can undermine, even negate, massive advantages in superior technology and firepower. Once the initial combat is won, all that remains is a void of incompetence in which the bad guys are able to rally, regroup and retake the field in a form that is vastly more difficult to contro and from which there is neither victory nor honour to be claimed.

In war, bad political leadership can be as fatal as bad intelligence, incompetent generals, insufficient troops or defective weapons. This is nothing new. Our history books are full of examples - Hitler, Stalin, Lyndon Johnson, Kaiser Wilhelm and on and on.

It is folly bordering on dereliction for a smaller nation's leadership to cast their country's lot in with that of an incompetent such as George Bush. Canadians should thank their Supreme Being of choice that Stephen Harper wasn't in power in time to commit our soldiers to the quagmire that continues to flourish in Iraq.

Tony Blair will soon be gone and time is all too slowly running out for George Bush. However the conflicts and instability they did so much to fuel will continue and new leaders, especially in Washington, will emerge to take their turn as leaders of the free world. All we can hope for is that our nation, by then, has new leadership that can put Canada's interests first in meeting these ongoing challenges.

Bennett, Christian Science Monitor

The Greater Scheme of Things

Okay we're really beginning to get the Global Warming thing. Even Harpo can now say it without noticeably wincing too much. So, if GW has reached the political "tipping point" at which Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Right, and the looney denialists are at last defanged, neutered and put back in their cages atop a bed of fresh newspaper, the solutions should be just around the corner, right? We've come to our senses in time to save mankind, right? Well don't count on it.

Stopping the slide before the earth heats up another 2 degrees celsius is the key to avoiding the worst impacts that could be wrought by global warming. If we could achieve that, and that's still a huge "if", we won't be able to actually reverse global warming if only because "we" will be long gone and pretty much forgotten by the time any reversal can be achieved.

Human experience teaches us to think in terms of our children, grandchildren, perhaps even great-grandchildren. Beyond that third generation it really becomes hypothetical and obscure. And yet it will fall to these generations beyond our contemplation to finally undo the damage we and the handful of generations that preceded us have visited upon our planet.

The challenge isn't merely generational, it's almost millenial in scope. Now think about that for a minute. It means that mankind is going to have to achieve a common purpose that prevails across ethnic, cultural, religious, political, geographic and economic lines that is sustained on a scale of many centuries at least. This question is for the patio furniture and the Reno holiday package: When in the course of recorded history has mankind pulled off such a feat?

Full points if you guessed "never." Our planet has never witnessed this measure of co-operative cohesiveness, if only because mankind has never faced such a universal and gargantuan peril.

The good news is that we have conceived objectives that will arrest the slide, more or less. However that is the easy part. The hard part is going to be implementing these policies on a global scale.

What do we do with China and India, both of which seem determined to re-enact the coal-fueled, Industrial Revolution of two centuries past that led to the dillema we face at this moment? Both of these states must be made to understand that the window of opportunity for this type of industrialization is now closed. They missed out, too bad. Can't be helped. Sorry, so very sorry but that's life.

That's a hard line to pitch and, if we're going to attempt it, we absolutely have to show ourselves repentent for our own sins, the very ones that have created the mess that means countries like India and China simply can't follow suit. "Do as I say, not as I do," won't cut it. At the very least we'll have to be able to argue, "Do as I say, not as I did." We can't keep doing and not expect them to do also. To some extent, we have to atone.

We're going to have to devise new models - political, social and economic - that are robust enough to weather the strains and challenges they'll have to endure and that can be universally accepted. It would take a Supreme Deity to conjure up anything genuinely uniform to meet these needs. Ain't gonna happen. The best we can hope for is a basic structure of agreed, binding and enforceable, core principles to enable all nations and all peoples to co-operate while retaining as much of their individuality as possible.

Maybe we'll need to devise a new set of Commandments, this time for world leaders:

Thou shalt not foul the air
Thou shalt not corrupt the water or lay barren the earth
Thou shalt not inflict environmental degradation on others
Thou shalt not shirk responsibility for injuries caused others
Thou shalt not take so much as to deprive others of the essentials of life
In all things between and among states, all shall act equitably

This sounds fantastic and it is or would be if such a thing could be achieved. Is it unrealistic? It certainly seems so but what is the alternative?

Spies, spies - Everywhere!

A few months back there was a story about Canadian "spy" coins that were somehow slipped into the pockets of American defence contractors. Someone finally got to the bottom of this murky business. Here's a picture of the actual, secret agent:

Yes, that's right, it was the Remembrance Day commemorative quarter that sent US military contractors running for the protection of the Pentagon. According to The Guardian:

"The harmless ``poppy coin'' was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as ``anomalous'' and ``filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,'' according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

"The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"'It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source,'' wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. 'Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.'"

Okay, I give, just what is the damned frequency, Kenneth?

Me Again

The fishing was great. Actually it wasn't really great or, if it was, I didn't know that because I wasn't fishing. Truth be told, I jumped on my bike and rode Baja. Does wonders to clear the mind. I actually forgot all about Stephen Harper and all the little Harpies that scurry throughout our country.

Anyway, time to get this blog up and running again.