Look At It This Way - A Billion Dollars is...

I was wondering how to visualize a billion dollars, nearly the amount Harper is planning to spend on three days of summit meetings in Toronto. Look what I found at http://www.wallstats.com/.

A billion dollars is:

Now ask yourself this. How can three days of diplomatic chin wagging in Toronto exceed what it cost the Americans in 2007 to wage two active wars for two days fighting Baathists, al Qaeda and the Taliban? We're talking tanks and bombers and artillery and hundreds of thousands of troops and contractors, all running around and blowing up shit. I mean, really, how?

BP Goes Judge Shopping

It's not unknown for some litigants to go "judge shopping" - trying to get their cases heard before a judge known to have, shall we say "helpful" leanings. Usually it's something they try to keep quiet. Not British Petroleum. They're judge shopping and they know just who they want - US District Judge Lynn Hughes.

With more than a hundred suits already brought against BP arising out of the Deepwater Horizon spill, BP has asked that all pre-trial motions in all suits be heard by Judge Hughes. McClatchey Newspapers explains why that might be:

That judge, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, has traveled the world giving lectures on ethics for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, a professional association and research group that works with BP and other oil companies. The organization pays his travel expenses.
Hughes has also collected royalties from several energy companies, including ConocoPhillips and Devon Energy, from investments in mineral rights, his financial disclosure forms show.

Hughes, appointed to the bench in 1985 by then-President Ronald Reagan, declined to comment for this report.

Legal experts say the request for a single judge, while not unprecedented, is unusual, and they surmise BP is seeking rulings from a judge well-versed in the company's issues.

Edward Sherman, a law professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who has closely followed the BP legal maneuvers, said BP probably studied Hughes' past rulings and his caseload before suggesting he take the cases.

"Probably studied Hughes' past rulings"? Gee, I guess that's possible. Sure, BP's lawyers probably studied Hughes decisions just like the sun will probably come up again tomorrow morning.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/26/94887/bp-wants-houston-judge-with-oil.html#ixzz0p8vUHxD6

Obama Gets It. Will Premier Campbell?

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill fallout is reverberating throughout Washington. It has even driven president Obama to suspend exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean offshore of Alaska.

The move will stop Shell from drilling five wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off northern Alaska weeks before it had hoped to start work, an administration official told McClatchy Newspapers.

The move will stop for now a controversial expansion of oil drilling in a part of the world that could hold vast stores of oil and natural gas, but which environmentalists warn would come at great risk.

"He is suspending proposed exploratory drilling in the Arctic," an administration official said on condition of anonymity to talk before [Interior Secretary] Salazar's report is officially released Thursday. "He will not consider applications for permits to drill in the Arctic until 2011 because of the need for further information-gathering, evaluation of proposed drilling technology, and evaluation of oil-spill response capabilities for Arctic waters."

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/27/94885/citing-gulf-oil-spill-obama-to.html#ixzz0p8sf1WKr

Now if only BC Premier Gordo Campbell would step back and re-examine offshore oil and gas exploration along the seismically active BC coast. When the government keeps warning us this mega-earthquake could hit any day, will probably hit some time in the coming century, this might not be the era for offshore oil wells in British Columbia waters.

Troops Not Militarizing Mexico Border. Really?

The US ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, says the 1,200 National Guard troops president Obama has ordered to bolster security along the US-Mexico border is not a militarization of the frontier. From Reuters:

"This isn't a militarization of the border. In fact the overall share of the military is still relatively small," Pascual told correspondents at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. He said with the 300 National Guard troops already stationed at the border, the total number would not surpass 1,500.

"I think it is important that we continue to reinforce in our strategy that we are putting civilian law enforcement agencies out front and that they have the lead," he said.

The troops, rather than carrying out operations to dismantle drug cartels or human smuggling rings, will be working in back offices helping intelligence officials process information, or be posted as lookouts between ports of entry.

Border experts and human rights workers say the border is already militarized with parallel steel fences backed up by sensors and patrolled by helicopters and armed border agents."

I suppose the argument can be made today that 1,200 Guardsmen does not a militarized border make. However there are a lot of people, including some senior folks in the Pentagon, who can easily foresee the day when the military presence grows vastly bigger as America is compelled to rely on force to thwart climage migration out of Central America.

Makes the Sponsorship Scandal Look Like Chump Change

Sorry, Libs, to open up old wounds but when I was trying to choke down the billion dollar plus bill for Harper's Toronto summits, I started thinking about this mega-boondoggle in the context of the tens of millions of dollars misappropriated in the "sponsorship scandal."

Hmm... a billion. That's like a THOUSAND million, isn't it? Just who does Steve think is out to get him? Me? Probably not. You? I can't be quite so sure.

Come to think of it, I'm sure the Toronto summits would be even safer if they anchored their security out here on mid-Vancouver Island. That way they could button down Canada from coast to coast for those three critical days. I am available Steve and all I want is just one of those millions.

Saddam's Gay Sex Tape?

Figured that'd get your attention. Some at the CIA were even counting on that. The Guardian reports that the CIA entertained the idea of staging a gay sex tape involving a Saddam impersonator and a teenage boy but top officials never gave the final go ahead:

...in a scenario more the preserve of careless Hollywood starlets such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, the CIA appears to have plotted to undermine Saddam Hussein with a gay sex tape.

According to the Washington Post's security blog, some of America's spooks believed that shooting a fake video of Saddam cavorting with a teenage boy might destabilise his regime in the runup to the US-led invasion in 2003. "It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera. Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session," the Washington Post quoted one former CIA official as saying.

Nor was the Saddam sex tape the only idea floating around the more bizarre corners of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group. Other ploys involved interrupting Iraqi television with a false newsflash that would announce Saddam was handing over power to his hated and feared son Uday. The presumed idea was to shock the Iraqi people into rising up against their leaders and thus make the invasion a lot easier.

Perhaps thankfully, the tape and fake news broadcast were never made and the Post reported that top CIA brass repeatedly rejected the ideas.

But that did not stop a CIA video being shot of a fake Osama bin Laden sitting around a camp fire, drinking booze and boasting of his own gay conquests.

The video apparently used some of the CIA's "darker skinned" employees as extras playing the terror chief's henchmen. It does not seem to have been released.

Hey, wait a second! How about a Steve Harper gay sex tape? Anybody got the number for those CIA guys?

BP Has Stopped the Spill?

According to the LA Times, British Petroleum's "top kill" gambit has succeeded in staunching the Deepwater Horizon seabed oil leak.

"U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the paper said that the “top kill” procedure has blocked oil and gas from the well. Once the pressure has fallen to zero, engineers will pump cement into the hole to “entomb” the well."

Keep your fingers crossed. I'll bet that's what they're doing at BP's head office right about now.

Update - Just checked out BP's live video link. It's down.

Rolling the Dice in the Gulf of Mexico

Game's On. British Petroleum has decided to gamble with a "top kill" procedure to stem the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The risky procedure was started shortly after noon today. The idea is to pump masses of heavy liquids into the ruptured pipe in hope that will be enough to seal it off which would then allow BP to cement it over. Will it work? Nobody knows because the technique has never been attempted underwater. Some observers warn it's a gamble that carries the risk of making the spill much worse if it fails.

Nobody knows the odds but what we do know is that the "kill shot" wasn't BP's first choice. In fact they've tried a few other options before coming to this and only now, after 33-days of failure, are they taking this gamble.

You can watch BP's live video stream of the site here.

The Green Hypocrisy

Perhaps the toughest thing about committing to a green lifestyle is, well it's the hypocrisy. It's common for me to have great discussions with fellow environmentalists who often seem to want to squeeze in a few comments about their latest foreign holiday. Ouch.


We're all sinners.


In today's Canada, it's damned hard to reduce one's carbon footprint. A big part of that is because our nation was built on ready access to cheap fossil fuels. We live in a society where we go to the things we want. We may work downtown but to get the McMansion we desire (and can afford), we have to commute to the suburbs, even the exurbs. It seems only the rich and the poor get to live near where they work. Many of us think nothing of driving 20-miles or more for shopping. We put gas in the tank, get in the car, and off we go. Because we're so spread out, it's prohibitively costly to offer European-style mass transit.


We're also creatures of a consumer economy. We like to own stuff and, for quite a few of us, the more stuff you own the better a person you are. Think that's not true? Wander over to your local marina or count the big SUVs in your grocery store parking lot. Check out how much the "average" home has grown over the past half century.


We can try to go green. I moved into a much smaller house, a really comfortable little bungalow. I upgraded the place with a high-efficiency wood stove/fireplace for heating and I get my wood supply from a guy who's licensed to collect the leftovers from nearby logging operations that would otherwise be heaped into a pile and burned on site. Put in new windows that allow super ventilation on hot summer days and greatly reduce heat loss when it's cold. Got a small, economy car that I drive when I have a bunch of errands to run, usually about once a week. It's already 11-years old and I expect to get several more out of it while I'm waiting for that great technology breakthrough we're told is just around the corner. I've given up on taking holidays abroad but, then again, I had my full share of foreign travel back well before we knew about carbon emissions.


The point I'm trying to make is that I'm doing a lot to reduce my carbon emissions but I'm not even close to where I should be. I recently went over to www.wattzon.com for a check-up. There was good news and bad news. My individual carbon footprint is somewhat more than a third of the average American's. That said it's nearly double where it ought to be. While I was digesting that information, the MIT brats who created wattzon.com included one additional, inconvenient truth - the per capita carbon emissions government puts out on our behalf. I guess you really do burn up a mountain of fossil fuels waging war.

What does it all come down to, moral relativism? I may be dirty but I'm less dirty than you are? I'm poisoning the environment much more slowly than you are? Oh how I'd like to give myself a big pat on the back, a hearty "well done" but I can't. Everything I've listed here is good but that's not the issue. What matters is if it's good enough and I know that it's far off that mark. It's naive and foolish of me to believe that I can find the answers because it's going to take, if not all of us, most of us to forge solutions and we don't seem to have the collective will for that.

Madam Justice Blatchford Weighs in on Bryant Case

Oh to be Christie Blatchford or at least to have her uncommon, unquestioning, even unyielding belief in her own brilliance. Rarely has that been more powerfully displayed than when she gave her "two cents worth" on the criminal negligence and dangerous driving causing death charges against former Ontario AG Michael Bryant.

Bryant, claims Blatchford, got "special" treatment which she implies was a curious sort of favouritism that spared him the courtroom trial any average Joe would have faced in this situation:

...Everyone agreed the charges were appropriate when they were laid, but that now, after all that had been learned since, withdrawing them was also the right thing.

Here’s what usually happens: the Crown gets the case if not the night before at best a couple of weeks before, has a quick read, and it goes to a preliminary hearing. There, the evidence is called, although not nearly as thoroughly as it was here, and the Crown might conclude, correctly, that it’s a weak case, but odds are he’d let it go to trial. At trial, the average guy probably would be acquitted
.
Mr. Bryant said at a press conference later Tuesday that, “Nobody is above the law. But no one’s below the law, either.”

He didn’t add that some folks get the old beater version, and some the Saab: T’was ever thus."

Sorry, Christie, but once again you're abusing the privilege of stupidity. Bryant got the full treatment. Every aspect of this awful incident was scrutinized. I've known Richard Peck and bringing him in to prosecute was no demonstration of favouritism toward Bryant. Peck was there to ensure that the Crown case was above reproach. The "old beater version" of prosecution never would have been enough. If the sort of prosecutor she or I would face was given the Bryant case there'd be a howl of outrage.

Bryant was a noted public figure, a former Attorney-General. When a person of that stature gets mixed up in an incident like this, the public expects safeguards to ensure that any crimes that were committed are prosecuted and punished. That wasn't done for Mr. Bryant's benefit and its disingenuous, dishonest even, to imply otherwise.

This case, however, does illustrate one enormous failing in our legal system. To put it crudely, you get as much law as you can afford. Money gets you the best lawyers, the most thorough investigators and so on. Money can greatly improve one's chances of a successful outcome before the Courts. Bryant went into this case with those advantages. It's hard to fault the "system" for levelling the playing field by bringing in a big gun like Richard Peck.

Even the Toronto Star Gets It - Ignatieff is Failing Canada

Columnist Thomas Walkom isn't mincing any words - Michael Ignatieff's Liberals are failing the country and those who elected them to become the official opposition. The proof, he says, is in the IgLibs' spineless refusal to oppose Harper's Bill C-9:

All three opposition parties say that to package so many disparate things in one bill is an outrageous abuse.

But the Liberals, desperate to avoid an election they believe they can’t yet win, are letting the bill move ahead anyway.

Most recently, the Liberals kept one of their MPs away from the Commons finance committee to make sure that Bill C-9 could get through that stage without their having to explicitly support it.

On Tuesday, Liberal MP and finance critic Bob Rae was on CBC Radio suggesting that the unelected Senate might be better positioned than the elected Commons to give Bill C-9 the scrutiny it deserves.

That’s an argument that doesn’t make sense (the unelected Senate is always loath to defeat a Commons money bill). But to be fair to Rae, it’s all he could say given the refusal of Liberal MPs to undertake the job they were elected to fill — that of official opposition.

The essential problem is that the Liberals don’t take the role of opposition seriously. Desperate for power, they are unwilling to do anything to spark an election until they are reasonably sure of winning it.

Yet given the current configuration of political forces in Canada — and their current leader — they cannot be certain of winning more seats than Harper’s Conservatives in the next election.
So they do nothing. They hem; they haw; they occasionally threaten. But in the end they back off, waiting for that elusive better chance.

That may be fine for them. But it’s not for us. The country didn’t elect 77 Liberal MPs so that they could sit on their hands waiting for the moment to regain power. We elected them — and the Bloc Québécois and the New Democrats — to rein in a minority Conservative government that most of us don’t trust.

There are a lot of Liberals who tolerate the Ignatieff malaise as a matter of loyalty. But, as Walkom points out, loyalty to whom? Does loyalty to their party always have to trump loyalty to their country?

I'll bet that many of the diehard Liberal faithful harbour a pretty good hunch that Ignatieff is never going to become prime minister, at least not without eating humble pie to court the support of the other opposition parties, just as they realize that the current leader of the opposition has done squat for this country. Coming in the wake of the failure he deposed, the inept and hapless leadership of the successor who was supposed to make everything right has to be an enormous and bitter disappointment.

These hard core Libs need to take stock of the situation before them. They need to accept that the brand alone isn't enough to get Canadian voters to restore their party to power. How many more times are they going to beat their heads on that wall?

Read Walkom's column here.

Hurricane Season Just Five Days Away

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has managed to dump hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil into the water just in time for the arrival of hurricane season.

The season officially begins on June 1st, next Tuesday, and scientists are predicting a very active year for major storms. From McClatchey Newspapers:

...William M. Gray and Philip J. Klotzbach, forecasters at Colorado State University, predict 15 named storms, while Ken Reeves, senior meteorologist and director of forecasting operations for AccuWeather.com , predicts 16 to 18, with a ``higher-than-normal number of impacts, which is not a good thing.''

In 160 years of record keeping, only eight seasons have brought 16 or more storms, according to Accuweather.com.

One factor that could generate major hurricanes this year is the strength of the Gulf "loop current" that flows at rounhly 4.5 miles per hour:

The Loop Current "is one of the fastest currents in the Atlantic Ocean,'' [the Weather Undergound's Jeffrey Masters] writes. "The current is about . . . 125 to 190 miles wide and . . . 2,600 feet deep, and is present in the Gulf of Mexico about 95 percent of the time.

"During summer and fall, the Loop Current provides a deep . . . layer of very warm water that can provide a huge energy source for any lucky hurricanes that might cross over.

The Price of Oil - $4,300 per Barrel

Let's see - that's 33 days at up to 50,000 barrels a day or roughly 1,650,000 barrels times 4300, equals roughly $7.1 billion US. That's the tab BP could face for the Deepwater Horizon spill if it's fined under the US Clean Water Act. From Reuters:

The little-known, seldom applied clause in the Clean Water Act was added in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, and was intended to beef up the arsenal of penalties the government can apply to oil spillers to deter future disasters.

"These civil penalties could be staggeringly high, possibly running into the billions," said Professor David Uhlmann, director of the Environmental Law program at University of Michigan.

Total liability -- including civil fines as well as the cost of clean-up, economic damages and potential criminal liability -- "will run into the billions and may be in the tens of billions," Uhlmann said.

Under the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency can seek in federal court to fine any party whose negligence results in an oil spill in U.S. federal waters.

The basic fine is $1,100 a barrell but that can be increased to $4,300 per barrell if the court finds the spill resulted from gross negligence. It's the "gross" part that's tough to prove but Congressional investigations seem to point to a measure of wilful neglect on the part of the companies involved in this drilling rig.

Oopsie, maybe there won't be any Christmas bonuses this year at Bandito Petroleum.

Corporate Populism - Krugman's Wake-Up Call

Western democracy, as we've grown it since Magna Carta, is under attack today not from foreign totalitarianism but from domestic and global corporatism. Indeed, today's "corporatism" could just be the 21st century's equivalent of fascism. In today's New York Times, Nobel economist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman warns that's the very struggle underway today in America.

"...[Wall Street's] rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.

So what President Obama and his party now face isn’t just, or even mainly, an opposition grounded in right-wing populism. For grass-roots anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests, which will be the big winners if the G.O.P. does well in November.

If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same formula the right has been using for a generation. Use identity politics to whip up the base; then, when the election is over, give priority to the concerns of your corporate donors. Run as the candidate of “real Americans,” not those soft-on-terror East coast liberals; then, once you’ve won, declare that you have a mandate to privatize Social Security. It comes as no surprise to learn that American Crossroads, a new organization whose goal is to deploy large amounts of corporate cash on behalf of Republican candidates, is the brainchild of none other than Karl Rove.

But won’t the grass-roots rebel at being used? Don’t count on it. Last week Rand Paul, the Tea Party darling who is now the Republican nominee for senator from Kentucky, declared that the president’s criticism of BP over the disastrous oil spill in the gulf is “un-American,” that “sometimes accidents happen.”

The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations."

It sounds to me that this hellspawn of RJ Reynolds and Lee Atwater, today's Rovian Corporatist Republicans, have perfected the art of manipulating a large segment of the American people by luring them to a populist movement that is really a corporatist service. It worked for years on tobacco, it's working still - and will for many, many years to come - on global warming, why ought it to do any less well on thwarting regulation of their interests to protect the public interest?

Harnessing populist discontent to advance a corporatist oligarchy is simply brilliant. Diabolical certainly - but brilliant.

Israel - Nukes - Apartheid South Africa

1975. Two defence ministers - one named Botha, the other Peres - meet to seal a pact. The South African asked for nuclear warheads. The Israeli, today's prime minister, responded, offering them in "three sizes."

Secret, apartheid-era documents reviewed by The Guardian, confirm that Israel has a substantial nuclear arsenal:

"...Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.

The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa's post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky's request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week's nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.

They will also undermine Israel's attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a "responsible" power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted.

South African documents show that the apartheid-era military wanted the missiles as a deterrent and for potential strikes against neighbouring states.

These revelations ought to spark an international furor but, chances are, they won't. It's not as though Israel's nuclear programme has really escaped anyone's attention and a degree of military cooperation between apartheid South Africa and Israel was also understood. These documents suggest, however, that Israel was willing to proliferate nuclear warheads into southern Africa by putting them into the hands of the apartheid white movement.

That's not something you just brush off. Israel was totally willing to assist a regime oppressing its own majority people, its blacks, even to the point of transferring to it nuclear warheads.

The sad part is that, it could happen, isn't really that surprising.

Camp Kandahar Under Attack

The Toronto Star reports the Canadian base at Kandahar is under Taliban attack.

Taliban militants fired rockets and mortars at Kandahar airfield in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, wounding NATO troops, officials said.

The attack came days after a brazen assault on one of the coalition’s biggest bases in Bagram, north of the Afghan capital, in which an American contractor was killed and nine U.S. troops wounded.

"Kandahar airfield came under indirect fire at approximately 8 o’clock tonight and shortly afterward a ground attack was under way as well," a spokesman for NATO-led forces in Afghanistan said. A small number of NATO personnel were wounded, the spokesman said.

An intelligence source on the Kandahar base said three rockets had hit the base. One hit a helicopter terminal used by foreign troops, wounding four foreigners, one hit a shopping area and another did not hit any significant target.

In America, Jim Crow Rides Again

America's racist past is being revived today by the country's far right.

Lincoln may have freed the slaves but Republican Rutherford Hayes sold them out in exchange for the presidency in 1877, an event known as the Great Compromise. With that, the federal government abandoned all efforts to protect the civil rights of southern blacks facilitating everything from lynchings to institutional segregation. Miscegenation laws passed by some states banned interracial marriage and blacks were widely disenfranchised.

The Civil Rights movement that took hold in the 50's culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. The bitter slave state south has been fiercely Republican ever since.

A lot of progress was made over the past half-century. However the election of president Barack Obama has sparked an ugly, racist backlash in America even to the point of pundits and pols defending racial discrimination.

Colorofchange.org is fighting back. Here's an excerpt from their latest e-mail campaign:

On Wednesday, Rand Paul, the GOP’s US Senate candidate for Kentucky repeated his claim that a central piece of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was wrong, and that businesses should be free to discriminate against whomever they please.1

Paul and his supporters don’t seem to care that without federal intervention, Black people might still be second-class citizens in many aspects of American life: where we eat, where we work, even where we live.

Then, on Thursday, FOX anchor John Stossel went even further, calling for the section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that applies to business to be repealed. And he’s refused to back down.

While Paul may have started this outrage, he can be taken care of at the ballot box — FOX News can’t.

Stossel’s position is an affront to Black America and everyone in this country who believes in racial progress. It’s one thing to be a candidate with backwards views. It’s another to be employed by a supposed news network and to use that platform to push hateful ideas that our nation repudiated decades ago."


Fox News, of course, is the fetid nest of that other bigot Glenn Beck who proclaimed that Obama hates white people. Beck freely peddles racist diatribes.

And then there's Rush Limbaugh. Here, for your entertainment and illumination, are a few gems from Limbot:

"I mean, let's face it, we didn't have slavery in this country for a hundred years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the south. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark."

"You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you James. Godspeed."

"Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"

"The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practise robberies."

This is the ugly face of America, its increasingly vocal far-right. The far right in Canada isn't really any better, it's simply running behind.

UN - Biodiversity Loss Worse Than Global Warming

One of the most dangerous aspects of the 21st century, one we may pay dearly for, is our stubborn dependence on 19th century politics and economics. This isn't your great, great grandfather's world, so why would you choose to sail the 21st century's stormy seas in his leaky old boat?

We've got a whole mess of things to fix up if we're going to see mankind through into the 22nd century in some viable form. There's the obvious one, global warming, and the spinoff impacts we collectively call "climate change." Then there's overpopulation; desertification from soil exhaustion; air, water and land contamination; resource depletion; species extinction; disease and species migration; deforestation; protracted drought, floods and severe storm events, on and on and on. That's some pressure cooker of grief that we're going to have to sort out and, as we've seen from the Kyoto experience, our existing political and economic structures can't cope with it.

As these problems pile up on our doorstep, we're either going to have to shut down - batten the hatches and await what's coming - or we'll have to change.

The United Nations will release a major report on biodiversity this summer calling for just that - radical change. From The Guardian:

"The Stern Report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.

The UN's biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving "natural goods and services", such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

...The UN report's authors go further with their warning on biodiversity, by saying if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.


"We need a sea-change in human thinking and attitudes towards nature: not as something to be vanquished, conquered, but rather something to be cherished and lived within," said the report's author, the economist Pavan Sukhdev.


The changes will involve a wholesale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives, Sukhdev, told The Guardian. He referred to the damage currently being inflicted on the natural world as "a landscape of market failures".

...The report follows a series of recent studies showing that the world is in the grip of a mass extinction event as pollution, climate change, development and hunting destroys habitats of all types, from rainforests and wetlands to coastal mangroves and open heathland. However, only two of the world's 100 biggest companies believe reducing biodiversity is a strategic threat to their business, according to another report released tomorrow by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is advising the team compiling the UN report.


"Sometimes people describe Earth's economy as a spaceship economy because we are basically isolated, we do have limits to how much we can extract, and why and where," said Sukhdev..."

The fatal limitations in our traditional but obsolete economic and political structures is evident in how the world community has struggled with global warming. There is no sustaining community of interest on which to found effective action. Instead, we're divided into camps that are eerily Dickensian. That we're stuck on global warming as an isolated problem, rather than as an integral component in a much broader environmental threat, reveals the inadequacy of our atrophied institutions and those who lead them without ever looking ahead.

For Canada, it is beyond idiocy to assume that our country will coast through the 21st century on the tarry wealth of Athabasca. That sort of thinking reflects a political and social complacency that, if anything, will ensure that our country, our people, are overtaken by events possibly in a manner akin to being run over by a bus.

Global Famine Closing In

A billion people worldwide are malnourished even as Goldman Sachs and others of that ilk disastrously game the commodities markets. For some people, one family's famine is their path to even greater riches. This is what we have become. This is what we tolerate in the name of free enterprise and global free trade.

As they gamed the derivatives market, dealing a body blow to First World economies, so these Titans of Wall Street are gaming the food market, driving the price of food staples beyond the reach of the poorest and most vulnerable. And we sit by and let them do it. From CBC News:

Over an 18-month period, unprecedented panic and hoarding in the world's primary food markets, coupled with crop failures and price speculation, caused the three key global staples — wheat, maize and rice — to actually triple in cost.

In that process, many of the world's poor lost virtually all their meagre savings simply trying to survive this inflation.

To make matters worse, this calamity was immediately followed by the still continuing global economic crisis, which compounded the problem in the developing world by tossing hundreds of millions out of work.

The result, according to UN studies, is that there has never been more desperately poor people in the world than today.

In a remarkably short time this truly vicious cycle has effectively knocked whole nations out of full participation in the world economy, which in turn further undermines global confidence.
Developing nations have seen their budgets and their balance of payments ravaged as they struggle simply to import enough food for increasingly desperate and angry populations.

Yes, most food prices moderated this spring because of better harvests in Asia. But the past spikes, along with other factors, have left prices still too high for many small-plot farmers and the urban poor.

In India, for example, food inflation remained above 20 per cent last year and has been running at above 16 per cent since.

According to the World Food Program, about 80 per cent of those in Asia, South America and Africa can afford only one-third as much food as they could two or three years ago.

The CBC's Brian Stewart points out that the Harper government, in conjunction with the Obama administration, Spain and South Korea, is spearheading a food security programme to encourage agricultural reforms in the hardest hit nations. Unfortunately what our generosity cannot buy for them is a reliable, abundant supply of freshwater. We can assist them with better seeds, fertilizers and new technology but that won't overcome the freshwater crisis setting in from Asia to Africa.

I commend Harper, Obama and the others for their gesture but it's a very limited gesture. You cannot and will not bolster world food security without accompanying programmes to adapt to the impacts of climate change already afflicting many of the most vulnerable regions and some working solutions to their growing freshwater calamities.

Stephen Harper's Ace in the Hole?

He's the very best single thing Stephen Harper has going for him. Before long he may even deliver up the country to a Harper majority. Oh well, today's Liberals deserve to be put out of their misery but it's a damned shame it's going to take an election to do it.

What passes for today's Liberal leadership has no vision for Canada, no answers to the challenges already upon us and soon to land on our doorstep. Today's Liberal leadership might have managed to be a mediocre government - for the 1980's. There's no drive to it, nothing that resonates with the Canadian public. The leader hops back and forth on issues as though he's constantly getting the hotfoot treatment. When he does stand firm it's on disastrous positions like Gaza and the Tar Sands and the militarization of Canadian foreign policy. Thanks, but ....

I guess what really gets under my skin is that the Libs are letting Harper win by default. He simply has them outmatched, always well ahead of them on strategy, ducking or deflecting everything they throw at him. The Libs fuel voter apathy which is an elixir to Harper, it solves many of his potential problems.

It saddens me to come to this place, for the first time in my adult life, of not being able to support the Liberal Party. I have in the past sometimes held my nose and voted Liberal as the default option but not this time, not with this leader, not with his policies.

Today's Ekos poll has the LPC trailing the CPC by nine points, 25.1 to 34.4. For any real Liberal, concerned about their Party and their country, that ought to be humiliating enough to demand far better, right now.

What's Oilier? Athabasca or Ignatieff?

Michael Ignatieff has tempered his enthusiastic support for the Athabasca Tar Sands by calling for some sort of miraculous environmental remediation.

“It’s not just a matter of getting better publicity, we’ve got to get the water use down; we’ve got to get the tailing ponds problems sorted out, the CO2 down. These are real problems for a great industry.”

Um yeah, that's right Iggy and if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle! "Real problems for a great industry" indeed. Isn't that the rhetorical equivalent of wiping your backside with wax paper? And, in case you missed it, Iggy wants you, or at least your tax dollars to fix it.

Ignatieff said Ottawa must do more to clean up the oilsands so it can sell it to the world, adding the industry and national energy policy are “a national unity issue,” and an economic dynamo.

I don't want Ottawa backing itself into some sort of obligation to clean up Athabasca. The people who made the mess are the multi-trillion dollar combine called Big Oil. It's their mess and they should damned well clean it up just as they've been promising, over and over and over again, for the past two decades.

It surely doesn't sound remotely Liberal to me that the Canadian taxpayers should be on the hook to mop up after Big Oil.

What's implicit in Ignatieff's lame Tar Sands position is that he doesn't understand or doesn't believe all that scientific business about anthropogenic global warming. He wants to build the future of Canada on the fossil fuel industry, and the dirtiest form of it to boot, at the very time we need to be working to decarbonize our economy, to decarbonize our society. Unfortunately Iggy reveals a truly "Thelma and Louise" vision of Canada.

In the best case scenario, Ignatieff is just pandering, being disingenuous, lying his Ivy League ass off. In the worst case scenario he actually means what he's saying. Either way, this is not the guy to lead Canada anywhere.

BP Boss - We've Been "Extraordinarily Successful" On Oil Spill

BP CEO Tony Hayward tells Forbes magazine that his company has been "extraordinarily successful" in tackling the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Hayward even thinks the oil spill may help the oil industry:

"Deepwater drilling will be transformed by this event," he says. "If we can win the hearts and minds of the communities that are impacted, then we have the potential to enhance our reputation rather than have it damaged."

...Hayward, 52, has been with BP since 1982, served as Sir John Browne's right-hand man and became head of exploration and production before taking over in 2007 from Browne, who was felled by personal scandal following the catastrophic refinery explosion in Texas City in 2005 and the Prudhoe Bay pipeline spill a year later. Given the latest comeuppance, you might expect a little more humility from Hayward. Nothing doing. "The company is much better able to sustain this sort of incident than it could possibly have been able to three years ago."

Read the entire article here.

This Blows Holes Through the Tar Sands and "Clean Coal"

Remember CCS, "carbon capture & sequestration", the solution that allows safe, limitless exploitation of fossil fuels? It's more than a myth, it's a lie.

Whenever Big Coal and the Alberta oil patch face tough questions about carbon emissions they immediately wave the carbon capture & sequestration flag and assure critics that, very soon, any day now, they'll be capturing those carbon emissions and sequestering them safely underground where they'll never harm the planet or mankind. A new report shatters the myth of CCS and leaves its proponents looking utterly deceitful.

A Guardian article published on Sunday says the CCS myth is unrealistic, unviable and based on deeply flawed assumptions.

A new research paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon in the fight against global warming.

The document from Houston University claims that governments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.

Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the "totally erroneous" premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University.

"It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface," Economides said.

The paper concludes that CCS "is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others."

The Carbon Capture and Storage Association, which lobbies for CCS, notes, "..that Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, had been injecting CO2 into an old reservoir on the North Sea Sleipner field for some time as a successful experiment in carbon storage. But Economides says the Sleipner scheme involved a million tonnes over three years, while one 500mW commercial station would need to absorb and store 3m tonnes annually for 25 years.Economides, who admits he veers towards being something of a climate change sceptic, says the oil and coal industries see these schemes as potential solutions so they can keep on doing what they have been doing in the past, but "CCS is the last refuge of the scoundrel," he said. "

Economides says, "...vested interests are protecting a new concept foisted on the world by geologists without proper thought.

"I was a [practising] petroleum engineer for many years and soon realised that geologists did not understand flow and the laws of physics, against which you can't argue."

I suspect the University of Houston team are correct in dismissing CCS as a con. The fact that the CCS "miracle" has been repeatedly promised for so many years yet still remains the uncertain subject of pilot, small-scale demonstration projects speaks for itself. Worse still, when you look behind the Alberta government's CCS smokescreen you discover, in the fine print, that their ultimate "target" is to capture and sequester an underwhelming 20% of Tar Sands CO2 in any case - if such a plant ever materializes.

The Houston University report guts every excuse and false promise held out by the supporters of the Athabasca Tar Sands whether from Big Oil or its political backers, Tory and Liberal. The Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, has already foolishly placed himself on record as a wholehearted supporter of the Tar Sands. Maybe it's time he did a little reading, learned of the magnitude of all the environmental threats posed by this mad venture, and carefully but deliberately climbed down from that perch.

NATO Seeks Legitimacy at the Margins

NATO has a huge problem. There's nothing remotely near the North Atlantic to pose a military threat to its members. The Soviet Union brought the last realistic military threat to justify the alliance's existence and, in case you haven't heard, the USSR is so 1991.

So with nothing close by, NATO is casting its net to distant shores in its quest for villains. A new report, NATO 2020, argues for "dynamic engagement" which appears to be code for battling in remote locales as America's new Foreign Legion. The report, written by the so-called "Group of Experts" calls for NATO to refashion itself as sort of a global policeman ready to call in aerial bombardment on wedding parties in any corner of the world on very short notice.

The Cold War rivalry that once stirred fears of nuclear Armageddon has long since disappeared. NATO’s role in maintaining the unity, security and freedom of the Euro-Atlantic region is ongoing. Its status as the globe’s most successful political-military Alliance is unchallenged. Yet NATO’s past accomplishments provide no guarantee for the future. Between now and 2020, it will be tested by the emergence of new dangers, the many-sided demands of
complex operations, and the challenge of organising itself efficiently in an era where
rapid responses are vital, versatility critical, and resources tight.

...The new Strategic Concept must also serve as an invocation of political will or -- to
put it another way -- a renewal of vows, on the part of each member. Threats to
the interests of the Alliance come from the outside, but the organisation’s vigour
could as easily be sapped from within. The increasing complexity of the global
political environment has the potential to gnaw away at Alliance cohesion; economic
headaches can distract attention from security needs; old rivalries could resurface;
and the possibility is real of a damaging imbalance between the military contributions
of some members and that of others.

The 58 page report is too complex to summarize here but it is plainly conceived in the shadow of the World Trade Centre towers. That, to me, raises the prospects that NATO may somehow define itself by the events of 9/11, just as America already has. I remain convinced that NATO was less than prudent in yielding to Washington's pressure to expand to the borders of Russia which seemed to be a ploy to anchor American interests in the Caucasus and south Asia. There are enormous geopolitical challenges developing in those regions that pit American, Russian, Chinese and Indian interests against each other and at times forge unnatural alliances. Will NATO's new Strategic Concept drag the members' commitment into service of Washington's interests? I want NATO to continue but on a rationalized, clearly defined and delineated basis. Getting dragged into one botched American war is enough.

Coal Keeps America Strong, Safe and "Better"

Sure it's perverse but that's the message Big Coal is feeding the American public. Watch this ad. It links military service, the war in Afghanistan, and "doing one's bit" by keeping America's coal fires burning:



Sleazy? You Betcha! Sadly effective? You Betcha.

Then again I'm from British Columbia where coal is the backbone of the province's mining sector. Grrr

The Cost of Tax Cuts

Stephen Harper is on the neo-conservative track to fiscal ruin. He's given up on deficits. How can you tell? By his insistence on going ahead with corporate tax cuts.

Taxes are, of course, how government pays its bills. When tax revenues fall short, government makes up the difference by going into debt, by borrowing. But Bush/Cheney set the bar for fiscal irresponsibility by introducing a witches brew' of borrowing coupled with tax cuts and topped off with two foreign wars and reckless financial deregulation.

When you're already deep in deficits, the only way you can fund tax cuts is by borrowing the money. You get yourself in hock to lenders so that you can take taxpayers off the hook. It's pure, neo-conservative ideology straight from the Bush/Cheney playbook and you can find the payoff in the current disastrous state of the American economy.

Stephen Harper is a neo-conservative ideologue, a reactionary blinded to reality. Harper's tax cuts merely shift the burden to the non-exempted taxpayers - the rest of us - but he hasn't got the guts to be upfront and raise our rates so he defers the impact by borrowing the money we'll have to repay, with interest. And this is the joker who promised to "Stand Up for Canada"?

Deepwater Horizon is Not a Petro-Fluke

A long overdue, cautionary tale on the global dimension of oil disasters - including Athabasca - from today's McClatchey Newspapers. With attention riveted on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, it's a story repeated around the world.

Like many of her neighbors, Celina Harpe is angry about the oil pollution at her doorstep. No longer can she eat the silvery fish that dart along the shore near her home. Even the wind that hurries over the water reeks of oil waste.

"I get so mad," she said. "I feel very sad."

Harpe, 70, isn't a casualty of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She lives in a remote corner of Alberta, Canada, where another oil field that's vital to the United States is damaging one of the world's most important ecosystems: Canada's northern forest.

Across the globe, people such as Harpe in oil-producing regions are watching the catastrophe in the Gulf with a mixture of horror, hope and resignation. To some, the black tide is a global event that finally may awaken the world to the real cost of oil.

...There's no denying that the rust-red plumes of oil and tar balls in the Gulf of Mexico are a potential ecological calamity for American Southern shores. More than half the petroleum consumed in this country, however, is imported from other countries, where damage from exploration and drilling is more common but goes largely unnoticed.

No one's tallied the damage worldwide, but it includes at least 200 square miles of ruined wildlife habitat in Alberta, more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater spilled into the rainforests of Ecuador and a parade of purple-black oil slicks that skim across Africa's Niger Delta, where more than 2,000 polluted sites are estimated to need cleaning up.

..."Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oil fields all over the world, and very few people seem to care," said Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and the author of "Amazon Crude," a book about oil development in Ecuador.

"No one is accepting responsibility," Kimerling said. "Our fingerprint is on those disasters because we are such a major consumer of oil."

Europe, Africa Heat Up

Europe's Mediterranean region is headed for a real scorching according to the Zurich-based Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science. From Reuters:

People in cities around the Mediterranean including Athens, Rome and Marseilles are likely to suffer most in Europe from ever more scorching heatwaves this century caused by climate change, scientists said on Sunday.

The number of heatwaves was likely to surge to almost 3 each summer from 2071-2100 in the Mediterranean region from just one every third year from 1961-1990, it said. Most other parts of Europe would suffer far less.

"Some of the most densely populated European regions, such as the urban areas of Athens, Bucharest, Marseilles, Milan, Rome and Naples, would experience the severest changes in health indicators," they wrote.

..the study was the first to pinpoint areas of Europe where rising temperatures would coincide with rising humidity, high night-time temperatures and long-lasting heatwaves -- all factors that can aggravate health problems.

Global warming will mean more moisture in the air from the Mediterranean, for instance, making it harder for people to sweat away excess heat. High night-time temperatures can make sleep harder.

Another recent study has found a dangerous warming of Lake Tanganyika, the world's second largest lake, that is being linked to global warming. The heating is a threat to the lake's rich fishery. Heating intensifies stratification forming a barrier to prevent nutrients from the lake bed from reaching surface algae that form the beginning of the lake's food chain.

About those Tamil Tigers

Harper made enormous political hay out of Canadian Tamils and their support for the Tamil Tigers in their rebellion in Sri Lanka. Naturally in Harper's black and white world view it was Tigers-Bad, Government of Sri Lanka-Good.

According to the latest report from the International Crisis Group, maybe we ought not to have been so uncritically supportive of Sri Lanka:

Both sides in Sri Lanka’s civil war violated international humanitarian law throughout the decades-long conflict. However the violations became particularly frequent and deadly in the months leading to the government’s declaration of victory over the LTTE in May 2009.

Evidence gathered by Crisis Group provides reasonable grounds to believe that government security forces repeatedly and intentionally violated the law by attacking civilians, hospitals and humanitarian operations. The government declined to respond to Crisis Group’s request for comment on these allegations. Evidence also shows that the LTTE violated the law by killing, wounding or otherwise endangering civilians, including by shooting them and preventing them from leaving the conflict zone even when injured and dying.

Much of the international community turned a blind eye to the violations when they were happening. Many countries welcomed the LTTE’s defeat regardless of the cost of immense civilian suffering and an acute challenge to the laws of war. The United Nations too readily complied with the government’s demands to withdraw from conflict areas.

Today's political leadership, Conservative and Liberal, have abandoned the calm, even-handedness that once marked Canadian foreign policy and our country is the worse for it. When you give uncritical support to one side in a conflict, you're condoning if not outright supporting what they do and whether it's Honduras or Gaza or Sri Lanka you usually wind up backing some pretty ugly atrocities.

UN Calls for End to Over-Fishing

A UN report warns that saving global fish stocks from total collapse means beaching 13-million fishing boats worldwide. From The Guardian:

The UN's environment branch, UNEP, gave a sneak preview of its green economy report that will be published in October. It said that if the world remained on its current path of over-fishing, by 2050 all fish stocks could have become uneconomic to exploit or actually extinct.

Pavan Sukhdev, who heads UNEP's green economy initiative, said: "That is not as absurd as it sounds, as already 30% of the ocean fisheries have collapsed and are producing less than 10% of their original ability."

At the heart of the UN's analysis is the $27bn of subsidies it estimates is being injected into fishing every year, mainly by developing countries. The UN says the subsidies are huge in terms of the scale of the industry – amounting to almost a third of the $85bn total value of fish caught.

Among those subsidies, the UN defines just $8bn-worth as "good" in the sense of encouraging sustainable fishing of healthy stocks. Most of the subsidies are "bad", meaning they lead to overcapacity and exploitation, and about $3bn of the subsidies are "ugly", actively leading to the depletion of fish populations.

Among the most egregious practices targeted by the report are inducements to increase the size of massive trawler fleets that are among the main culprits of overfishing, and fuel subsidies on fuel for fleets.

"We are paying ourselves to destroy the very resource on which the whole fishing industry is dependant. We are in the process of eroding the natural capital that underpins our economies," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's director.

The UN estimates 20-million jobs need to be cut from the global fishing industry.

Uh-Oh - Costa Rican Scores Top UN Climate Post

Hammer, meet Tong. UN Secretary General Ban has chosen Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica will be the new U.N. climate chief. A Costa Rican, eh? Curious.

Ms. Figueres hails from a country that's expected to take it in the neck from global warming on everything from sea level rise to increasingly violent storms. From Reuters AlterNet:

Ms. Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, non-profit sector and private sector," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

This year, negotiators have agreed little except to hold two extra sessions in the run-up to a meeting in Mexico that begins in late November.

Many policymakers expect the Mexico meeting also to fall short of a binding deal, looking to 2011 for agreement on a successor to Kyoto. The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
Some analysts are doubtful of any new formal, binding pact beyond Kyoto, expecting instead a patchwork of national targets and schemes.

Figueres' challenge will truly be to herd cats, an awful lot of cats including some very big cats that are decidedly opposed to being herded by anyone. Good luck, Christiana!

The US Justice System Blinks on Life Sentences for Kids.

By the slimmest of majorities, 5-4, the US Supreme Court has turned all wobbly and ruled it's unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole unless somebody actually died. US courts can still give kids life but they have to leave open the possibility of parole maybe after 50 or 60-years or long after it really matters any more.

The case concerned a young Floridian who commited armed robberies at the age of 16 and 17. The Sunshine State likes banging up kids and boasts an impressive 70% of America's children imprisoned for life.

Chief Justice Roberts sided with Kennedy and what the New York Times describes as the court's "four liberal justices" to ban life without parole for kids. The four losers predictably included Alito, Thomas and Scalia. Thomas, in a remarkable burst of creativity, acutally said something, holding, ''I am unwilling to assume that we, as members of this court, are any more capable of making such moral judgments than our fellow citizens.'' In other words, as far as Thomas is concerned, who cares what's constitutional when the Florida legislature has okayed life without parole for kids? With his way of thinking, he'd be a stable boy on a fine, Southern plantation or at least riding at the back of the bus.

Lawyers, Guns & Money - Playing and Being Played in Afghanistan

Only now are we truly coming to grasp the real nature of the Afghan war. For the first seven or eight years, we thought that we defined the war. We deployed our weapons, our technology, our soldiers to fight what we stubbornly insisted was our way of warfare.

And they let us do it because they knew it was suiting their purposes, not ours.

"They" are all the crazies in Afghanistan - the politicians, the bureaucrats, the warlords, the drug lords, the insurgents. Each was well served by the way we fought our "war without end" in their homeland. It became obvious early on that we weren't going to win this one, we weren't in it to win. Once that reality settled in, each of these players shaped a course to best exploit what we had to offer - while it lasted. In a country that doesn't see a lot of opportunity, we were the best deal they'd had in a very long time.

If you doubt that assessment, ask yourself this. How would Karzai, how would the Fahims and the Dostums, how would the bureaucratic mandarins, how would the national police and how would the insurgents in all their varieties have acted these past eight years if they truly believed we were in this war to win, to do whatever it took for however long that took? Much of Karzai's intransigence and double-dealing is fueled by his conviction that we're not going to win our war and I suppose he can't be blamed for that. The rest are merely following suit.

They knew from their rich history of these things that we weren't fighting their war, the only war over there that matters, the war that will decide the course of their future. We certainly know how to fight their war, the Yanks have even developed a brilliant field manual on the subject, but, when its precepts aren't followed, invoked, it's just a nice book on the shelf.

A glimpse into the nature of our Afghan conundrum appears in today's Washington Post. WaPo reporter Greg Jaffe has penned an insightful piece entitled "Combat Generation: Trying to Work with an Afghan Insurgent." The article tells of the experience of Army Lt. Col. Robert Brown and the strange offer he received last November from insurgent warlord, Mullah Sadiq, who has been on the Army's "kill list" since 2005:

"Sadiq wanted 50 assault rifles, $20,000 and a promise that U.S. forces would not kill him. In return, he promised to turn against more-radical Taliban insurgents and to begin to work with the Afghan government.

Sadiq's proposition gave Brown a chance, however tentative, to achieve a victory of sorts in his corner of Afghanistan and redeem the loss of his men.

"This has the potential to work," Brown told his commander."

Lawyers, Guns & Money. Overturn the "kill order", hand over the weapons and pony up a bag of cash and Sadiq will turn on the really, really bad guys. If only. Was this Brown's chance to play the insurgency or were the insurgents playing Brown? In a country were treachery is the routine and capacity for betrayal is bottomless, chances are it was a mix of both.

..."It has become a given within the U.S. military after nearly a decade of grinding battle in Afghanistan and seven years in Iraq that U.S. forces cannot kill their way to victory. Enemies must be persuaded to lay down their weapons through a mix of negotiation and force. Grievances must be understood and wherever possible addressed. These principles are at the core of the military's coming campaign in Kandahar, which U.S officials are touting as the most important battle of the nine-year war.

Sadiq had collaborated with the Americans before. Right up to 2004 he regularly dealt with a US Special Forces officer. Dealings with that officer's successors soured and, in 2005, the Americans tried to take Sadiq out with a Hellfire missile.

..."Sadiq's brother-in-law insisted that the U.S. commandos were acting on bad intelligence from a rival who had accused Sadiq of murdering his father a decade earlier.

Brown has no idea why previous U.S. commanders sought to kill Sadiq.

"We spent the first five or six years in Afghanistan making enemies, because we were used to settle political, economic and historical conflicts," he said. "We were pretty credulous."

Even as Col. Brown was working to shore up a deal with Sadiq, the Karzai government in Kabul balked. Sadiq, they feared, might emerge to challenge their own control over his region even if he did thwart the Taliban. Who would control Sadiq after the Americans left?

For going on nine years now we've been waging our form of warfare in Afghanistan, deluding ourselves into believing it works even as we are taught that this isn't war as we understand it with allies and enemies readily defined and constant. We don't comprehend warfare where enemies and allies cross sides with fluidity as and when that suits them, where even our supposed friends manipulate us to their purposes and against our own.

At the end of the day we're just banging away on drums. Why?

Gunter Makes the Case For No Oil Tanker Terminal in BC

I know he didn't mean to warn us about the Athabasca Tar Sands but the Edmonton Journal's Lorne Gunter has never been the sharpest pencil in the box. In his latest drivel piece on the Deepwater Horizon debacle, Gunter defends offshore drilling platforms as inherently safer than oil tankers when it comes to spills:

According to a study by the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, offshore drilling remains less damaging than shipping oil by tanker.

"Since 1991, oil tankers have still spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms and more than twice as much as pipelines."

So there you have it, courtesy of CanWest's own Lorne Gunter. Bad as offshore oil rigs are, they're nothing compared to oil tankers when it comes to oil spills. Ergo, thanks to Lorne, no oil tanker terminal on the BC coast should be built to ship Tar Sands oil to Asia, right?

Of course this is just another example of Gunter getting tripped up by his rank ideology. Tankers may have spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms but that's peanuts when you compare the amount of oil they deliver from the oil fields of the Middle East to the piddly amounts produced by our local, offshore rigs. Gunter is comparing apples to oranges but handily making the case against a BC oil seaport anyway.

The man may not be sentient but, at times, he's damned handy.

An Exxon Valdez Every Four Days?

That's the high end of the range of assessments of oil pouring out of BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico - 70,000 barrels a day. The low end remains the initial 5,000 barrel a day guess of the US Coast Guard and British Petroleum.

The estimates were increased by some observers based on recent sea bed video showing raw oil belching into the sea. From The Guardian:

"National Public Radio in the United States last night reported that the well is spewing up to 70,000 barrels of oil a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez disaster every four days. Nearly 11 million [gallons] of oil were spilled in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground, oiling beaches and poisoning marine life for generations. NPR said scientific analysis of newly released video footage from the ocean floor suggested the gusher was 12 times more powerful than estimates offered so far by the Coast Guard or BP.

"Its analysis was conducted by Steve Werely, an associate professor at Purdue University, using a technique called particle image velocimetry, a method was accurate to 20%. That puts the range of the oil spill from 56,000 to 84,000 barrels a day."

If Werely's forecast is even remotely accurate, the Deepwater Horizon disaster will stand as a compelling indictment of seabed oil drilling. Here in British Columbia it has grabbed the attention of a lot of people no longer willing to accept Premier Campbell's blithe assurances that it can be done safely.

By the way, while the North American media has come to use the Exxon Valdez disaster as a benchmark, in terms of global oil spills in ranks a paltry 52nd.

My, My, My Halliburton Hearts Inhofe

Senator James Imhofe, who is to climate change denialism what Joseph Goebels was to Aryan supremacy, stands alone atop the list of US senators sitting on the Energy and NaturalResources Committee and the Environment and Public WorksCommittee who received handouts from Halliburton. Imhofe's take was more than double even the other Republicans on these committees while most of the Dems were shutout altogether.

Hmm, wonder if Jimmy Imhofe is going to give Halliburton a rough time over that Deepwater Horizon disaster. After all accidents, like global warming, do happen, no?

Coastal First Nations Slam Alberta Oil Tanker Route

Their message is clear, we've seen what's happening today in the Gulf of Mexico and, "if Enbridge brings oil tankers to British Columbia's coast, we will wake up one day to the same kind of disaster on our own shores."

Coastal First Nations officers Art Sterritt and Gerald Amos don't pull any punches in their editorial in today's Vancouver Sun.

...Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline would carry the world's dirtiest oil from the Alberta oilsands to Kitimat on the B.C. coast, to be loaded onto foreign-bound supertankers. Some 225 tankers per year would attempt to navigate the waters where a passenger ferry sank in 2006, and where last year a freighter ran aground.

...Like the Exxon Valdez, the impact of a spill so close to shore would be swift, devastating and would last for generations.
Our people are fishing people. While many Canadians do not know where the food they buy comes from, we still rely on traditional foods such as wild salmon, halibut and shellfish. We thrive despite high unemployment because we have access to these foods. Lose this, and we lose our way of life.

...With Enbridge's tankers lurking in the shadows, the future of the area we pledged to protect hangs in the balance.
Because it threatens the basis of our culture, Coastal First Nations firmly oppose the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline. In accordance with traditional laws, we declared a ban on the transport of oilsands crude oil through our territories.

It is a declaration we will defend by whatever means necessary. It is one Enbridge would be wise to abide by.

The Campbell faux-Liberal government is already plunging in popularity thanks to its excessively business-oriented policies. A petition to force Campbell to put his HST (harmonized sales tax) to a referendum is said to already have enough signatures even with two months of canvassing time remaining. This oil tanker venture and Campbell's support for offshore oil exploration and offshore drilling could very easily be the final nails in his political coffin. The sooner he's gone, the better for British Columbians and our province.

Food for Thought - Canada's Growing Agricultural Deficit

A lot of us think of Canada as a land of great agricultural abundance. It's not and that's entirely our own doing. Watch this badly needed wake-up call:



While domestic food production is important in its own right, it will become critical in less than a generation. We'll pay dearly if we don't wean ourselves from our dependence on cheap imported foodstuffs. Globally, agriculture is taking a beating due to a variety of ecological scourges from desertification and freshwater depletion to the migration of pests. If the warnings about Peak Oil are true that, combined with the other pressures, could land us with a dramatic and quick food crisis. We have the ability to restore Canada to agricultural self-sufficiency and now is the time to see to it. Yes it may be more expensive to produce locally but that difference could all but disappear before long.

Here's another critical policy that the Libs can run with, if only...

Skin Cancers Linked to Driving

A new study by the St. Louis School of Medicine has found an apparent link between skin cancer and long hours spent at the wheel. Americans, of course, drive on the right meaning the driver sits on the left side. That leaves the driver's left side, arm and face in particular, exposed to UV radiation.

What the researchers found was an increased incidence of left-side skin cancers. For men it was 56% while women were still 52% left-side over right-side. However when it came to the most lethal of skin cancers, melanoma, they occured on the left side in 74% of cases.

There's nothing really new to this. Airline pilots have known this for years because, with the large side cockpit windows and the high altitude exposure to not just UV but also elevated gamma radiation, they've been particularly vulnerable to these sorts of cancers.

Warren Grabs the D-Ring and Ejects

This may be old news but I haven't seen anything about it on Liberal or Progressive aggregators so I thought maybe someone should get it out there.

Warren Kinsella has bailed on Michael Ignatieff. The Globe's Jane Taber says Warren, like Elvis, has left the building:

Warren Kinsella has quit as head of the Liberal war room, complaining in part about the treatment of Michael Ignatieff’s former chief of staff, Ian Davey, and ex-communications director Jill Fairbrother.

Although he says he has moved on and is still a federal Liberal, Mr. Kinsella told The Globe in an email this month he “was unhappy about the way in which some people were dealt with.”

“For example, Ian and Jill and others are my friends, and they brought me in. I didn’t like how they were treated but they moved on, and so have I.”

This seems to run true to course for the Liberal leader. Even at that I wonder if Kinsella would have ditched him if he thought Ignatieff had even a remote chance of winning the next election?

Update: I've since checked and found that WK posted the announcement himself yesterday on Liblogs. That's the price you pay for ditching those guys.

A Tory Is ...a Tory, On Either Side of the Atlantic

Who can forget Canada's great "Coalition Days" when the Liberals might have formed a government in partnership with the NDP and the contractual backing of the Bloc? Who can forget the Harpies' response, the nonsense about an unconstitutional coup d'etat that revealed the profound depth of ignorance about Canada by oh so many Canadians?

Well the UK Tories are up to the same bullshit tricks. Labour and the Tories, neither of which can form a government without a coalition, are vying for the favour of the Liberal-Democrats. So far both are offering the Lib-Dems the promise to hold a referendum on proportional voting after they ascend to power.

But it was the remark of the Tory deputy leader, William Hague, that had that old familiar ring of Harper. Hague argued that a Labour/Lib-Dem coalition would mean, "a second unelected prime minister in a row." Say that again? Since when did the Brits get the right to elect any prime minister? They, like us, get at best the right to vote for a member of parliament and that's about it. And besides, if Tory leader Cameron wasn't able to get a majority, by what possible stretch could he claim to be anything but "...a second unelected prime minister in a row"? Or the 30th or the 80th or whatever?

These Tory greaseballs seem to have an inexhaustible ability to pull these remarks straight out of their backsides.

When Nothing Else Sticks, Sometimes You Have to Fall on Your Own Sword

You can't say they didn't try - try and try again. However it seems the Vatican has run out of would-be scapegoats to carry the blame for its global, clerical paedophilia scandal. So, when in Rome... be a good gladiator and fall on your own sword.


Joe Ratzinger, reprising his role as Pope Benny the XVIth, just couldn't stick this to the media or the pro-choice movement or the gay rights activists or the Semites or the anti-Semites either. So now that he's fresh out of alternatives, he's blaming the kid diddling on - wait for it - the Church. Well, not so much the Church, as the priests and bishops and cardinals. After all, you can't blame buildings, can you?


"The greatest persecution of the church doesn't come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sins within the church," the pontiff said. "The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice."


Well that's a lovely sentiment but the world waits to see how it plays out. And, in fairness to Joe, he has ditched a bunch of buggering bishops of late and even impounded the Legionairies of Christ order after revelations that its founder was a father in every sense of the word and perhaps had his way with a few seminarians to boot. Still, the one hot topic that, for Joe, is not on the table for discussion remains the Church's doctrine of celibacy.

Epitaph for an Ambitious but Lacking Man

"...there was no other way. Let's not pretend this is an elegant departure of his own volition in the interests of the country. [The man] lost an election that might have been won outright had he only departed sooner. No good grace now can erase the catastrophic mistake the man has made in so over-reaching his political skills and talents. Should there be pity and generosity for him now in his leaving? For all those years he plotted, planned, schemed and wrought havoc on his party in his single-minded determination to seize the crown he was not equipped to wear – though he had gifts and virtues too. But there will be time enough on many a long winter evening to ponder the dark and strange character of [the Man] when he is gone."

Polly Toynbee wrote this passage of the soon to retire Labour leader, prime minister Gordon Brown. As her words sunk in I had a moment to wonder if Canadians are not just one election away from the moment when we might well say these same things about another man, one closer to home?