Do They Stay or Do They Go? Europe's Tactical Nukes

Sam Nunn and the Nuclear Threat Initiative are adamant - tactical nuclear weapons, the legacy of the Cold War in Europe, have to be secured and scrapped.  In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, the former senator described these mini-nukes as "a terrorist's dream."

If we don’t address this issue with urgency, we may wake up one day to a 1972 Munich-Olympics scenario, with a masked terrorist waving a gun outside of a nuclear warhead bunker somewhere in Europe. This time the hostages could be millions of people living close by. 

Nunn isn't exaggerating.  There are plenty of these nuclear warhead bunkers throughout Europe and terrorists would have the advantage of initiative in deciding which of them to attack and when.  These are battlefield weapons, intended to be used against enemy formations.  They come in many forms including nuclear land mines, nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, nuclear artillery shells and nuclear bombs to be slung under the wings of jet fighters.   Generally speaking they're more powerful than the nukes dropped on Japan in 1945.

Nunn and his colleagues at NTI, including George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, argue forcefully for scrapping of nuclear weapons.  They argue there has been so much proliferation already and so many non-nuclear states poised on the brink of developing their own weapons that another nuclear war capable of sparking a global nuclear holocaust is almost inevitable.   They believe the only way to stop that is a general, nuclear disarmament.

NTI is trying to get its message across in time for the NATO summit that begins tomorrow in Lisbon.   However PressEurop is reporting that the decision has already been taken, those nukes are staying.

“Tactical nuclear weapons to stay in Europe,” announces De Standaard. The Belgian daily explains that NATO’s new strategic concept, to be approved at a summit scheduled for 19 and 20 November, does not call for the withdrawal of 200 American nuclear weapons located in Europe. Some countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and Norway believe that “these weapons have no military purpose.” However, given their proximity to Iran and Russia, Turkey and the Baltic countries are staunchly opposed to any withdrawal. De Standaard notes that France is adamant that the Alliance should not be used to promote the cause of nuclear disarmament in Europe.

Why Ireland Recoils at Being Rescued

The very idea of the European Union bailing out the Irish government and the country's banks is almost more than the country can bear.  It's not that they don't need the bailout.  They do, they need it desperately.  It's not as though the bailout won't save the country from collapse.   That's exactly what it will do.

Think of it as a kid who has lost his job having to go back to live with his parents.

The Irish struggled for centuries to free themselves of British domination.  Barely a century after winning their hard-fought struggle for independence, their wanton excesses have left them right back under someone else's boot.  It's so bad that the Irish leader, Brian Cowen, is in denial, refusing to admit that a multi-billion Euro bailout is even in the works.   From The Guardian:

Historian Diarmuid Ferriter described it as devastating and a " humiliating milestone"  that the nation's sovereignty was being compromised nearly 100 years after hard-fought independence. A leader in the Irish Times talked of ignominy. " There is the shame of it all,"  it said. " Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF."

But the country's inhabitants probably didn't have much time to read their papers yesterday. At 8.20am, the governor of the Irish Central Bank confirmed – despite protestations by the taoiseach, Brian Cowen, that there was no IMF bailout – that an IMF loan of tens of billions of euros was being prepared.

By mid-afternoon the country seemed to have descended into chaos. There were angry outbursts in the Daíl, accusations of a government cover-up, new threats voiced over the country's low corporation tax rate. Cowen nearly lost his temper with reporters. Again. The finance minister admitted the banks had " very big issues".  And to cap it all, there were fresh accusations that the banks were lying about their figures to maximise the price they would get from the state, which nationalised the banks' most toxic debts this year.

Ireland's government and economy are reeling, the nemesis that inevitably follows on the heels of hubris, but the real victim may be the Irish psyche.

The F-35 is Cracking Up

It's supposed to have a lifespan of 8,000 hours but that may be wishful thinking.  A "B" model airframe undergoing fatigue testing has sustained cracks in the rear bulkhead after just 1,500 hours.   The F-35B is the short-takeoff/vertical-landing model being developed for the U.S. Marine Corps.    In testing the F-35B is apparently faring somewhat worse than other models.

The Pentagon has been working for weeks to come up with ways to expedite testing and to fix defects in the aircraft.

New budgets and delivery schedules for the F-35 are expected to be announced on Monday after the Defense Acquisition Board meets to review the latest cost and test data.

The Dutch Don't Have to Get All Pervy About Airport Security

America's Transportation Security Administration is catching a lot of heat from the travelling public over its intrusive, full body scanners that allow operators to look under your clothes for any concealed objects while getting a pretty good look at your 'junk' too.

McClatchey Newspapers reports that the TSA went overboard with their pervy technology and could have had a safer, effective and non-intrusive system used by the Dutch at Schiphol airport.

Unlike the backscatter imaging devices that provide revealing body images and which have stoked concerns about radiation, the system at Schiphol uses radio waves to detect contraband.

The Woburn, Mass., firm that manufacturers the system, L-3 Communications Security & Detection Systems, claims on its website that the radio waves are "10,000 times lower than other commonly-used radio frequency devices."

If the software identifies a passenger carrying explosives, an outline of the problem body area is displayed on a generic mannequin figure instead of on the actual image of the passenger's body. The mannequin image, which appears on the operator's control panel, " can then be used by security personnel to direct a focused discussion or search,"  the company website reads.

The " automatic threat detection"  system dubbed " ProVision ATD,"  sells for $40,000 to $150,000 and doesn't use ionizing radiation or X-rays.

McClatchey says the TSA has gotten enough heat and has ordered 200 of the ProVision units so you won't have to worry about them leering at yours.

Palin Believes She Can Defeat Obama

" I believe so."  That was Sarah Palin's response when asked by Barbara Walters if she could beat Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

Could she be right?   Well, it is remotely conceivable that America's median IQ could slip into the low double digits, just not very likely.   By all accounts, chances are she'll be taken out by her own team, the Republicans.   Her performance in the mid-terms was less than inspirational.   Palin backed a number of Tea Party candidates who went down in flames.   In her home state of Alaska, the right winger she backed lost to a "write in" candidate.  Ouch, that burns!

Palin's potential Republican presidential rivals are honing their skinning knives.  If she files her nomination papers she'll be like a bull moose on opening day of hunting season.

In a way I'd like to see her seek her party's presidential nomination.  It would be the Republicans admitting they still have room for the village idiot and I suspect her very presence would be toxic to whichever candidate does get the Republican nod.

Well, She WAS Underage....

A 15-year old South African girl has been charged with statutory rape along with the 14 and 16-year old boys who raped her.

Prosecutors had concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge the boys with actual rape but, hey, they're all underage so that means they can all be charged with statutory rape for 'consensual' sex with a minor.

See how that works?  The National Prosecuting Authority figures it can't make rape charges stick against the rapists so that instantly transforms the crime into a matter of consensual sex.

 " "We do feel that this is further brutalization,"  South Africa's Eye Witness News quotes Lynne Cawood from Childline South Africa as saying.

" Secondly, dramatization of a child who is incredibly vulnerable,"  she said.

South Africa has one of the highest incidences of rape in the world.
One woman is raped every 17 seconds, child rights groups say.

"This is Canada, Not Zimbabwe..."

That was the reaction from prominent U Vic climate scientist Andrew Weaver to the Conservative Senate sabotage of climate-change legislation.

It ticks off Weaver that Harper, having been voted in on a promise to do away with the unelected Senate, instead packed the institution with ill-informed patronage appointments (" Mike Duffy, climate scientist extraordinaire" ) who waited until 15 opposition members were absent before defeating, without debate, a bill that had already been OK'd by the elected arm of Parliament.

The UVic climatologist, sputtering words like " unbelievable" and " dictator" and   " shocking affront to democracy,"  says he hopes the opposition will force Harper's minority government to fall. " He's got to get kicked out. This is Canada, not Zimbabwe . . . or maybe it is.

" It's all about not wanting to do anything about the issue," Weaver says of the Senate sabotage. It's about pandering to the oil industry, to the Conservatives' Alberta power base.

 Weaver had a lot of time for Jim Prentice, who quit as Harper's environment minister this month to take a job in banking. Prentice understood the issues, but couldn't get past the wilful ignorance of the Flat Earth Society at his own cabinet table, Weaver says. "The level of scientific illiteracy in the Harper government is mind-boggling."

 " Climate scientists are  a collective Noah,"  Weaver says. They have done their job, given the evidence to the politicians — only to be ignored. Weaver, the author of Keeping Cool: Canada in a Warming World, also had a key role when the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its report in 2007. People like him must be tempted to throw their hands in the air and walk away, particularly when constantly challenged by the half-informed.

 

 

Did US Healthcare Really Plot to Do-In Michael Moore?

A former vice president of one of America's largest healthcare insurers said industry executives were panicked that Michael Moore's documentary "Sicko" could be as powerful as "Fahrenheit 911."  One exec apparently said if nothing else worked, Moore might have to be pushed "off a cliff."

Thanks, Uncle Sam. Warren Buffet Praises the Washington Bailout

To the Tea Partiers and the Republican morons, hucksters and fixers who feed on them, Satan arrived in their cherished United States in the form of the government bailout of Wall Street and the banks.  Begun by Bush at the end of his term the programme was carried on by Obama.   And, today, billionaire Warren Buffet says they made the right call.

India Sounds Climate Change Alarm

It's about bloody time.  The Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment has released a report on the sheer havoc that will descend on the world's largest democracy within twenty years.  Yeah, that's right, within the next two decades.

More flooding, more drought and a spreading of malaria would occur, as the disease migrates northward into Kashmir and the Himalayas, according to the report by 220 Indian scientists and 120 research institutions.

The temperature rise, which could be even more extreme along the coasts, would cause drastic changes in India's rain cycles that threaten water supplies and agriculture — the key source of livelihood for most of India's 1.2 billion people.

The report comes out just weeks before the Nov. 29 start of the U.N. climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, where nations will try again to reach a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions thought to contribute to global warming.

" ""There is no country in the world that is as vulnerable, on so many dimensions, to climate change as India is," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said in a statement released with the report on Tuesday. "We must continue this focus on rigorous climate change science."

India's many ecosystems and proximity to the equator make it particularly sensitive to climate change, experts say. The fact most of the country relies on freshwater sources, rather than desalinating sea water, amplifies the threat of global warming on society.

The report also says sea levels will continue to rise, threatening India's more than 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) of coastline.

Mangrove forests along West Bengal's coastlines "would definitely go underwater," said Sidarth Pathak, a climate policy official with Greenpeace India. Coastal cities such as Calcutta, Mumbai and Chennai might also face a threat, he said.

Now, just in case you're profoundly stupid enough to say, "It's India, who cares?", I'd like to share a few thoughts with you.  Anyone who thinks India is the only country in that region that will be hard hit is delusional.  Anyone who thinks India won't be destabilized by this even dumber.  Anyone who can't grasp that three of the nations in line to be hammered by this are nuclear powers and all three of them are dependent on and have rival claims to the Himalayan glacier feeds is as dumb as dirt.

Worse still, anyone who thinks that Canada will be immune from the repercussions of this is a fool.   Do you think these countries don't already have us fingered as the key culprits in global warming?   Do you think they've somehow overlooked the literature about how we Westerners are responsible for most of the climate-change driving carbon emissions already in the atmosphere?  Do you think they won't be able to link their suffering to our indulgence and do you think, even for a minute, they won't be viewing us by our steadfast refusal to take the lead on climate change initiatives?  If you do think any of these things, all I can say (with a genuine pre-apology) is you're a fucking idiot.

Here's something else you might think about - a common grievance is a powerful force to unite otherwise disparate nations.

I want you to think about these things because I know those dumb shits, Harper and Ignatieff, and all the other Petro-Pols of Parliament Hill, won't.  Any change that can occur is going to come from the bottom up.  That means you and me, not our Parliamentary Peckerheads.   You have to agitate for action.  You have to demand better from these jackasses and, if you don't get it, you have to work to have them ousted.  Waiting for them to wake up is not an option.   There's simply not enough time left.

World Heritage - Wrestling?

The United Nations culture and education agency, UNESCO, has unveiled a list of what it describes as "intangible world heritages" that must be preserved.

The 42-new items added this year include French gourmet cooking, Croatian ginger bread, and Turkey's Kirkpinar oil wrestling festival where big, muscular guys are oiled up and go at it, apparently often putting their hands down their opponent's pants.

Other entries include the Peking Opera, Belgium's winter fair and its end-of-winter bread and fire feast, Alencon lace making from France, no less than three Indian dance forms.   Even Lithuania and Luxembourg got the nod as did Mexican cuisine.  Canada?   No, nothing.

UNESCO's list comprises traditions that must be deemed to spread knowledge of intangible cultural heritage and require that protective measures be taken to promote them.  Well then, what about this one?

Help Stop Food Speculators

With a billion people living with chronic hunger and global agriculture beset by the dual ravages of climate change and the freshwater crisis it is morally reprehensible to tolerate the investment sector gaming global food prices.  This has to stop.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is warning that the poorest, most vulnerable people (as in "human beings") are facing severe food problems this year and potentially far worse conditions in 2011.

In the latest edition of its Food Outlook report, the agency also issued a warning to the international community to prepare for harder times ahead unless production of major food crops increases significantly in 2011.

Food import bills for the world’s poorest countries are predicted to rise 11 percent in 2010 and by 20 percent for low-income food-deficit countries.

This means, by passing a trillion dollars, the global import food bill will likely rise to a level not seen since food prices peaked at record levels in 2008. 


...Contrary to earlier predictions, world cereal production is now forecast to contract by two percent rather than to expand by 1.2 percent as anticipated in June. Unexpected supply shortfalls due to unfavourable weather events were responsible for this change in direction, according to the report.   

Global cereal stocks are forecast to decline sharply and Food Outlook makes a strong call for production to be stepped up to replenish inventories. World cereals stocks are anticipated to shrink by seven percent according to FAO, with barley plunging 35 percent, maize 12 percent and wheat 10 percent.

It has been widely reported that Goldman Sachs, just one Wall Street firm, made a billion dollars this year through global food speculation.  The Independent accused Goldman of gambling on starvation.  

There was a time when commodity trading was a vehicle to assist farmers by getting money into their hands that they needed to be able to plant their crops.  But when there's a chronic shortage of food it's no longer about helping the farmer but rather gaming the market.

The World Development Movement is waging a campaign in the U.K. seeking government intervention to block food speculators.  Our government should be acting, both domestically and internationally, to put the boots to these food speculators.  Write your MP.  Write Ignatieff and Layton.  Tell them this has to stop and they have to make that happen.

Washington Pot Slags Beijing Kettle

I guess when you're actually the pot, the only black thing you can see is the kettle.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (okay, before today I didn't know it even existed either) has released a scathing assessment of those perfidious Chinese fellas.  Today's report to Congress was the Commission's eighth missive since its creation in 2000.

At a press conference, Chairman Dan Slane unloaded on the wily Chinese:

The Chinese government quite simply intends to wall off a majority of its economy from international competition.

 China certainly needs to address its environmental problems, which include severe air and water contamination. However, the goal of maintaining eight percent GDP growth per year hinders China’s ability to enact effective environmental policies. China may be more interested in developing a world class green technology export sector rather than cleaning up its environment.

Remind me, what country has the greatest per capita greenhouse gas emissions?  What country's government won't be approving any measures to combat global warming?  Sorry to interrupt.

China is now capable of producing both advanced commercial and military aircraft. Unfortunately this improvement is primarily due to strong Chinese government support which often excludes foreign firms, and a requirement for
technology offsets from Boeing and Airbus, in return for market access in China. Two days ago China announced its first 100 orders for its large commercial aircraft, an aircraft expressly designed to compete with Boeing and Airbus. Alarmingly, China appears to be directly transferring improvements in commercial aviation to its defense aviation sector.

Boeing - meet the F-18.  Oh, you've already met?  Oh, you actually make the F-18 and lots of other military stuff.  Okay, I get it.

And, from the "Whistling Past the Graveyard" file, there's this:

We considered whether America’s growing debt implies that China, as America’s largest foreign creditor, has gained political leverage over the U.S. government. We found that there is no economic justification to believe that China has gained political leverage over the United States or that a decision by China to scale back or even to cease its purchases of U.S. Treasuries should be viewed with alarm.


Finally, China’s currency manipulation continues to harm U.S. manufacturing and
employment. There appears to be no real motivation by the Chinese to adopt market based approaches with regard to its currency.

And this is from a country that just conjured up 600-billion dollars of magic money?  600-billion?

And just who named this committee anyway?  It's supposed to be the U.S.-China Review Commission but it doesn't seem to want to review anything the U.S. is doing or factor that into its critique of China.

America has already fired the first broadside in its currency war with China.  It seems like this commission's report is ammunition for a second round.

Training More Afghan Soldiers is A Waste of Time

A waste of time, money and lives.   Conservative Steve Harper and Progressive Conservative Liberal Mike Ignatieff may think it's just dandy to keep anteing up to stay at the table with the big boys but they're a perfect pair of silly arses.

Somebody has to have the courage to accept that Afghanistan is a lost cause.  That takes moral and political courage on a level not even remotely approached by the prime minister and his reluctant sidekick.

Training Afghan soldiers is a farce.   How many soldiers have we already trained over the past ten years?   How many of them are still in the Afghan National Army?  For Harper, Ignatieff and all those deadheads at National Defence HQ those two questions define "don't ask, don't tell."   Because if you asked and if they told you how many Afghans have been trained and how few of them remain they wouldn't be able to conceal the utter futility of it.

Train them to do what exactly?  Banging away on their fellow Afghans?   That part is logical enough until you ask, "but why?"   Fighting is all well and good and the Afghans are about as warlike as any people on the planet.  But fighting for the sake of fighting is just stupid.  You have to fight for something.  If you don't have something worthwhile to justify the carnage, fighting is merely an obscenity.

Look at the war being fought.  Maybe there's an answer there.   Well, it's a civil war now.  It stopped being an insurgency when the Talibs began controlling territory, establishing their own political, judicial and security apparatus.  They've been doing that for quite a while.  We do chase them out from time to time at this place or that but they come back.

So what is the point of a civil war?  The rebels are fighting to oust the government and take over.  The government side is fighting to, well, to remain the government side.  So the raison d'etre of the Afghan National Army is to defend the existing government from Hamid Karzai on down through the legislature, the judiciary, the bureaucracy and themselves, the security services.  The question then becomes is there really anything worth defending?

We know the sitting regime is corrupt.   We know the bureaucracy is corrupt.   We know the national police service is corrupt.  So there's nothing really worth defending there but what about the judiciary?   While you still cling to the rule of law there exists a vehicle for setting straight what ails the politicians, bureaucrats and police.  There is hope!  What's that you say?  The judiciary is just as rotten as the others?  Oh dear.

The International Crisis Group has just released  a report on Afghanistan's judicary.  Here's the opening line, "Afghanistan's justice system is in a catastrophic state of repair."    Oh, oh, don't like the sound of that.

" Despite repeated pledges over the last nine years, the majority of Afghans still have little or no access to judicial institutions. Lack of justice has destabilized the country and judicial institutions have withered to near non-existence. Many courts are inoperable and those that do function are understaffed. Insecurity, lack of proper training and low salaries have driven many judges and prosecutors from their jobs. Those who remain are highly susceptible to corruption. Indeed, there is very little that is systematic about the legal system, and there is little evidence that the Afghan government has the resources or political will to tackle the challenge. The public, consequently, has no confidence in the formal justice sector amid an atmosphere of impunity. A growing majority of Afghans have been forced to accept the rough justice of Taliban and criminal powerbrokers in areas of the country that lie beyond government control. 

 ...The courts, for years, have suffered manipulation from an executive branch that has abused the law to fortify its position in the ongoing tussles between the secular and religious, the centre and periphery, the rich and poor. The Afghan government’s historic inability and persistent unwillingness to resolve conflicts between state codes, Islamic law and customary justice embedded in the legal culture have further destabilized the country. The critical leverage provided to fundamentalists in the constitution has concurrently had a deep impact on the evolution of legal institutions.

...The lack of a clearly defined arbiter of the constitution has undercut the authority of the Supreme Court and transformed the court into a puppet of President Hamid Karzai. Given the wide range of powers granted the president and lack of checks and balances in the system, it is unrealistic to expect change will come from his quarter. The international community, meanwhile, has done little to create incentives for political restraint and accountability within the executive.

Well at least the Afghan people have us, the Western forces, to provide an example of law and order and the way things should be done.  What's that?  No?

...Extrajudicial actions by the U.S. and its coalition partners against Afghan citizens have also distorted the justice system and are fuelling the insurgency. U.S. and NATO actions must conform to national and international laws, including an end to arbitrary detentions. There should be no expectation that Afghan officials and institutions will realign the justice system to conform to international norms until U.S. and NATO allies adjust their own policies and practices."

A corrupt government, a corrupt judiciary, a corrupt bureaucracy, a corrupt police service and a wobbly army seeking to hold off an ideologically driven rebel force.   Wait, haven't I seen that movie before?   Yes, of course.  Vietnam!  How did that one end?

We can train more soldiers, scores of thousands of them, but unless they have a government and a judiciary and a bureaucracy and a police service they truly believe are worth dying to defend, we're just wasting our time.  The American commander in Afghanistan claims the current desertion rate is 23%.  Others maintain it is even higher.  That is not an army that's willing or able to defend the criminal enterprise known as the Afghan government.

As the Vietnamese would put it, it's time for us to di di mau out of there.

How Long Before Canadian Jetliners are Forced to Land in the U.S.?

Hang'em High Vic Toews wasted no time defending the right of American authorities to demand the passenger manifests of all Canadian aircraft passing through U.S. airspace.

Canadian carriers would be required to give the U.S. Transportation Security Administration lists of all passengers including names, gender and birth dates.  The idea is that passengers the Americans have on their watch list could either be subjected to additional security or denied passage.

But what if the Americans spotted a name on the list that was the same as a person they really wanted to get to or perhaps had a warrant out for his apprehension?  If the stakes were high enough would they allow the individual aboard the flight and then compel the airliner to land at some U.S. airport to snatch the passenger?  After the Maher Arar case can anyone really believe that to be unlikely?

And what about reciprocation?  Do the Americans have any intention of preclearing their flight manifests with our authorities for Canada overflights?  Didn't think so.

"No Deal" on Climate Change

We're all Easter Islanders now.   There's another climate change summit coming up, this time in Cancun, but don't hold your breath waiting for a global agreement to combat greenhouse-gas emissions and anthropogenic global warming.  Well, if nothing else, summit delegates have had some wonderful travel opportunities - Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Bonn, Kyoto, Bali, New York, Copenhagen and now Cancun.

So where's the global agreement, the deal to cap and reduce carbon emissions to keep the world on the safe side of potential global warming tipping points?  Nowhere, that's where.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was created to find a deal to stabilize carbon emissions but even the head of that organization has thrown in the towel.   In July, Costa Rican Christiana Figueres was appointed to head the UNFCCC.  But she came to the job convinced there would be no deal.

As Bloomberg reported in June,  " Figueres, 53, told reporters today in
Bonn, where the latest two-week round of talks is taking place. "I do not believe we will ever have a final agreement on climate change, certainly not in my lifetime," Figueres said. "If we ever have a final, conclusive, all-answering agreement,
then we will have solved this problem. I don't think that's in
the cards." 

Ms. Figures is banking on "incremental" action to curb carbon emissions over the next 20, 30 or 40 years at the national or regional level.  That's like a blind person trying to herd cats.

University of East Anglia climate science prof Mike Hulme writing in today's Guardian says the international approach to global warming represents a break from the past:

"..there has been a re-framing of climate change. The simple linear frame of "here's the consensus science, now let's make climate policy" has lost out to the more ambiguous frame: "What combination of contested political values, diverse human ideals and emergent scientific evidence can drive climate policy?" The events of the past year have finally buried the notion that scientific predictions about future climate change can be certain or precise enough to force global policy-making.The meta-framing of climate change has therefore moved from being bi-polar – that either the scientific evidence is strong enough for action or else it is too weak for action – to being multi-polar – that narratives of climate change mobilise widely differing values which can't be homogenised through appeals to science. 

Those actors who have long favoured a linear connection between climate science and climate policy – spanning environmentalists, contrarians and some scientists and politicians – have been forced to rethink. It is clearer today that the battle lines around climate change have to be drawn using the language of politics, values and ethics rather than the one-dimensional language of scientific consensus or lack thereof."

One thing that's inescapable in Figueres' and Hulme's comments is that climate geo-engineering is no longer merely a contingency, but an imperative.  We're going to have to fall back on a mix of remediation (curbing carbon emissions); adaptation (technologies and political responses to global warming impacts already en route); and geo-engineering to try to defend our civilization from runaway global warming feedbacks.

There is something overlooked in Figueres' and Hulme's remarks, the greater picture.  They're focused on one thing - global warming, man-made climate change caused by excessive greenhouse gas emissions.  What they don't take into account is that global warming is but one of several potentially existential threats now facing mankind.

Global warming has a bevy of parallel or associated problems - deforestation, desertification, unstable precipitation patterns, an increase in number and intensity of major storm events, overpopulation, over-dependence on finite freshwater resources, species migration and extinction, fisheries collapse, air/soil/water contamination, resource depletion and exhaustion, global security threats including nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

Anthropologist Jared Diamond in his book "Collapse" convincingly argues that you cannot cherry pick among these challenges.   To solve any of them, you must tackle all of them.  There's a common thread that runs through these problems - they're all global.  They don't readily admit themselves to national or even regional solutions.  They require global action, effective global solutions.

Resiling from a unified, global treaty on climate change all but guarantees we will not be able to find global consensus on any of these other issues that threaten our civilization and are certain to destabilize our world.   As Gwynne Dyer points out in his book "Climate Wars" it won't be global warming that kills you.   It will be war.

Ireland - Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings

The Celtic Tiger is wounded and bleeding but is still desperately trying to stay ahead of the European Union that it fears has castration on its mind.

Ireland is broke, it is insolvent, it cannot meet its debts.  The country breezed through its own supposed economic miracle days, refusing the see the bubble until it burst with a collapsing housing market and a devastating bank crisis.   The Irish government moved to salvage the country's financial institutions, underwriting their weakness by guaranteeing bondholder claims without having the financial strength to make good on those promises as the bailout swelled to almost half of Ireland's GDP.

The European Central Bank is trying to pressure Ireland into allowing itself to be bailed out, fearing the repercussions of a total Irish collapse on the greater EU economy.  If the Irish bleeding isn't staunched some believe it could have a domino effect, sending the Spanish and even the Italian economies into the same freefall.

So what's stopping Ireland?   Why won't it take the EU's helping hand?  Because it stands to lose sovereign control over its own economy.  The European Financial Stability Facility operates like an in-house IMF.   It comes through with funding to get an economy afloat again but expects the borrower to swallow some bitter fiscal medicine.  Part of that would require tax increases.  Part of Ireland's economic miracle rested on luring companies to the republic with a 12.5% corporate tax rate.  Bring corporate tax rates in line with the rest of Europe and Ireland could see some big departures.  On the other hand, an Irish collapse could see even more companies returning to Britain.

Ireland lept into the arms of the E.U. to free itself of British domination.  Then it went on a fiscal binge of casino capitalism.   Like the great Irish famines of the 19th century, Ireland's 21st century collapse is being marked by the flight of Irish youth abroad in search of a better life.  Many of them realize that Ireland's once vaunted prosperity was all an illusion carried out through a collusion of government and banks.

$23-Million Is Now "Small Potatoes"?

Apparently, defrauding 70-people out of 23-million dollars is no longer worth prosecuting in Toronto.   A Crown Attorney told one of the victims that there aren't sufficient resources to prosecute the case. 

 "... an email from Crown attorney Christine McGoey obtained by CBC News, the Crown said one of the reasons it decided not to pursue the case was because of the competition over trial time.

"There are very serious criminal matters competing for limited trial time, with cases being stayed because of delay," wrote McGoey.   "And we have to consider the impact of any delay that might occur throughout the process and the variety of factors that are taken into account in assessing which cases will go to trial before others."


Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/11/15/tzvi-erez.html?ref=rss&loomia_si=t0:a16:g4:r2:c0:b39539038#ixzz15SWULPfF

Shoot, Ready, Aim - Madness on the Arctic Seabed

A warning from the Pew Environment Group.  Big Oil is pressing to get Arctic seabed oil drilling underway this summer even though they have no way of effectively dealing with spills or other mishaps.   Think Deepwater Horizon but then factor in sub-zero temperatures, hurricane force winds, 30 foot seas and months of constant darkness.

"There is a lot of pressure by Shell to drill this summer," Marilyn Heiman, director of the US Arctic programme at Pew said. "But the oil companies are just not prepared for the Arctic. The spill plans are thoroughly inadequate."

Trying to clean up a spill in the extreme conditions of the Arctic would be on an entirely different order of magnitude. "The risks, difficulties, and unknowns of oil exploration in the Arctic … are far greater than in any other area," the report said.

The consequences for the Arctic's environment would be dire, it said, wiping out populations of walrus, seal and polar bear and destroying the isolated indigenous communities that depend on hunting to survive.

Getting to the scene of a spill would be a challenge. The nearest major port, Dutch Harbor, is 1,300 nautical miles away from the drilling areas in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, and what few air landing strips exist are not connected to any road system. There are no coast guard vessels in either sea, and the nearest coast guard station is 950 miles by air away in Kodiak Alaska.

Response teams would confront gale-force winds, massive blocks of ice and turbulent seas, total darkness for six weeks of the year, and extreme cold. Cranes would freeze and chemical dispersants, such as those used to break up the BP spill, might not work.

Then there is the ice. Left undetected, a pipeline leak could spread oil beneath the surface of sea ice. Ice floes could carry oil hundreds of miles away from the source. At freeze-up, oil can become trapped within ice within the space of four hours, remaining there until spring. If it becomes trapped within multi-year ice, oil could stay in the environment for years, or even a decade, the report said.

To my mind, if we allow Arctic seabed drilling, without first establishing "worst scenario" precautions, properly deployed, equipped and staffed, we have indeed taken leave of our senses.   That would be a horrid rejection of the imperative that man find ways to live in harmony with our environment.

Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.   Just because we can get at unconventional sources of fossil fuels, doesn't mean that justifies the risks and consequences.  As climate scientist James Hansen puts it, some of this oil should just be left safely in the ground.

The Tea Party Disease - Anti-Intellectualism

It's hard work.  Trying to conjure up rational explanations for irrational behaviour, especially mass irrational behaviour, is hard and frustrating work.  But that's the Herculean chore that befalls anyone trying to make sense of modern American, rightwing populism exemplified in the Tea Party movement.

In his new book, Griftopia, journalist Matt Taibbi warns that there has evolved, among the American people, a powerful bloc of angry voters happily wallowing in willful ignorance, simpletons who are puppets in the hands of his country's genuine "elite", the powerful few at the very top.  Here are some excerpts:

"...it’s so pathetically easy in the TV age to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense, with the Tea Party being a classic example of the phenomenon. If you want to understand why America is such a paradise for high-class thieves, just look at the way a manufactured movement like the Tea Party corrals and neutralizes public anger that otherwise should be sending pitchforks in the direction of downtown Manhattan.

There are two reasons why Tea Party voters will probably never get wise to the Ponzi-scheme reality of bubble economics. One has to do with the basic sales pitch of Tea Party rhetoric, which cleverly exploits Main Street frustrations over genuinely intrusive state and local governments that are constantly in the pockets of small businesses for fees and fines and permits.

The other reason is obvious: the bubble economy is hard as hell to understand. To even have a chance at grasping how it works, you need to commit large chunks of time to learning about things like securitization, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc., stuff that’s fiendishly complicated and that if ingested too quickly can feature a truly toxic boredom factor."

So long as this stuff is not widely understood by the public, the Grifter class is going to skate on almost anything it does -- because the tendency of most voters, in particular conservative voters, is to assume that Wall Street makes its money engaging in normal capitalist business and that any attempt to restrain that sector of the economy is thinly disguised socialism.

That’s why it’s so brilliant for the Tea Party to put forward as its leaders some of the most egregiously stupid morons on our great green earth. By rallying behind dingbats like Palin and Michele Bachmann -- the Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn’t a threat because "carbon dioxide is natural" -- the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism itself a rallying cry. The Tea Party is arguing against the very idea that it’s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics."

" ...Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions -- just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are."

A G20 Lament

The G20 summit has come and gone but without solving the currency crisis that absorbs the developed world, the latest spasm in our global meltdown.   We've heard endless theories about what is really wrong with the system but here's a fresh, and compelling, explanation from renowned academic David Harvey.   He takes a Marxist scalpel to dissect the beast:



If David Harvey's perspective has left you in a funk, take heart.  The fiscal wizards remain alive and well.   Here's a British take on the subprime collapse.   This will cheer you up:

The 14 Steps to Fascism, or, America This Way

"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism

because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

- Benito Mussolini

Mussolini's notion of fascism is becoming well and truly implanted in the United States.   America's "bought and paid for" Congress is a manifestation of the merger of state and corporate power.   The Roberts U.S. Supreme Court and, in particular, its ruling in the Citizens United case granted judicial sanction to this marriage of interests.   The recent mid-term elections and the vast amounts of money and muscle thrown in to skew the result by prominent multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers is a plain expression of fascism at work.   So too is America's far right, corporate media that keeps a population befuddled and misled.

But what is fascism really and why should we care?   Professor Laurence Britt analyzed traits common to the notable fascist regimes in 20th century Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Chile and Indonesia.  He came up with a shortlist of 14 features of modern fascism:

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.  

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.  
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.  
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.  
5. Rampant sexism.  
6. A controlled mass media.  
7. Obsession with national security.  
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. 
9. Power of corporations protected.  
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.  
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.  
12. Obsession with crime and punishment.  
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. 
14. Fraudulent elections. 

That pretty much sums up 21st century America.  You see in today's Tea Partiers the very same sort of maniacal morons that once succumbed to fits of apoplexy at rallies in public squares in Bavaria.   The mindless rage fueled by fear, frustration and bitter anger. 

Missing from the good professor's commentary on fascism is the inevitable devastation it leaves in its wake.   Lord knows it has certainly filled hundreds of graveyards in Afghanistan and Iraq and seems poised to add even more soon in Iran.

On this special day it's good to remember that our fathers and grandfathers fought, and in their droves died, to free the world from the poisoned grip of fascism.  We do them no honour if we become complacent to this same scourge ourselves. 

The Continuing Corporatism of America's Bought & Paid For Congress

Sometimes you know it but you still have to see it to believe it.  That's where the Center for Public Integrity comes in.   It has published a look at the 25 senior GOP lawmakers expected to move into power positions in the U.S. House.   The expose details each man's direct financial bonds with the companies they're going to be representing in the new year.   Take a look, find a face, click and see for yourself.

Exposing the High Seas Black Marketeers

When you're a fish that can bring as much as $100,000 delivered to the market, your days are numbered.   That, of course, would be the eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna.  It's a monstrous beast that can live for 40-years and weigh as much as 500 kilograms.  It fetches top dollar in Japan where consumers account for 80 per cent of all bluefin consumed.   When they're willing to part with a hundred grand for a single fish, you can be sure they'll keep arriving.

The Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Journalists has just released a report, The Black Market in Bluefin.   The report is the result of a 7-month project looking into the black marketeers who are pillaging the endangered species and the government officials who look the other way.

 "Led by the French, Spanish, and Italians, joined by Turks and others, Mediterranean fishermen violated official quotas at will and engaged in an array of illegal practices: misreporting catch size, hiring banned spotter planes, catching undersized fish, and plundering tuna from North African waters where EU inspectors are refused entry. An illicit market even arose in trading quotas — when regulators finally started enforcing the rules — in which one vessel sells its nation’s quota to a foreign vessel that had overfished."

The report that exposes the corruption that surrounds the pirate fishermen and the officials who collude with them to empty the seas of the bluefin.

Suddenly We're Back in the 60's.

This is beginning to feel like a time warp.

1950's Russian propeller bombers lurking at the borders of Canadian airspace ready to strike.

An aging Mafia don gunned down at his own home.

A Russian spymaster defects to the West with assassins in hot pursuit.

The Russian newspaper, Kommersant, reports that the head of Russia's deep-cover spy ring in the U.S., a Colonel Shcherbakov, unmasked the gang of spies arrested in June and then bolted for safety just before American authorities moved in.

"There has never been such a failure by Section S, the American department that Shcherbakov directed," said Gennady Gudkov, deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's security committee, confirming that Kommersant's report was accurate.

The paper said Shcherbakov had left Russia days before U.S. authorities announced the spy ring arrests on June 28 -- and quoted a Kremlin official as saying a Russian hit squad was probably already planning to kill him.

"  We know who he is and where he is," the unidentified official was quoted as saying.   "Do not doubt that a Mercader has been sent after him already."

Ramon Mercader was the Russian agent who murdered exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico in 1940.

Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln, How Did You Like the Play?

The World Bank has released a report warning that the cost of coping with natural disasters could triple to - wait for it - $185-billion a year by the end of the century.

The report was written by a pair of economists who, to their credit, admit that their calculations don't include the cost of climate change impacts.   Which makes me ask, "why bother?"

If climate scientists are right, by the end of this century the last thing we'll be worrying about is a paltry $185-billion a year.

Canadian Conservatives Have Lost Their Way

This is a message for all Canadian conservatives, including those who now pass themselves off as Liberals.   In fact, it's a message to every rank Petro-pol, Oilhead and Tar Sander on Parliament Hill.

It's not my message.  No, I'm merely relaying a message from a Conservative, a true Conservative by the name of Paul Foote who explains why, if protecting the environment isn't your priority, you're not a decent conservative:

As the grandfather of modern conservative political thinking, Edmund Burke, put it: we are "  temporary possessors or life renters"  of this world and have a moral obligation not to squander our natural inheritance, lest we  ""leave to those who come after … a ruin instead of a habitation."   Respect for the past and responsibility to future generations creates a duty to conserve our resources and protect the environment.

The actions now required to protect the future also have more immediate benefits. It supports our national security. A shift to decentralised, renewable energy sources makes the UK less dependent on foreign countries and less susceptible to the changes in energy markets. It is a self-sufficiency that would undoubtedly appeal to the conservative.

A shift to greener energy sources also creates big opportunities for business. This year, for the first time, investment in renewable energy outstripped investment in conventional energy. Our economic competitiveness is bound to our ability to become leaders in green technologies. The green agenda is the growth agenda.

For centuries, political momentum has been primarily concerned with raising people's standard of living, which has focused overwhelmingly on material advantage. We have come to a point in history where we can no longer view the good life so narrowly. Protecting the environment is about protecting and improving the quality of people's lives. This task not only includes defending ourselves against global threats like climate change, it also means taking responsibility for more local environmental problems such as flood risk, graffiti and litter.

Everything Foote is saying you would have heard a century ago from another true conservative - Teddy Roosevelt.   But conservatism is no longer conservatism, it's corporatism and to corporatism environmentalism is an unwanted fetter on the bottom line.   As we've seen in America's bought and paid for Congress and in our own Parliament, the stooges of corporatism sit on both sides of the aisle.

Romeo Dallaire's Remembrance Day

"This Remembrance Day I choose to honour the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, past and present, and their families, by imagining the world they’ve fought to make possible.

It is a world without child soldiers; where cluster munitions and landmines no longer litter countrysides. It is a world where the threat of nuclear proliferation and future genocides have ceased to exist.

These ideas may seem bold. Even unbelievable. But consider this.

Until 1957, the soldier was known only as an instrument of war. That year, a Canadian, Lester B. Pearson, imagined a soldier could be an instrument of peacekeeping, too.

One bold idea, one cause, and one nation had the power to change how peace is kept.

This Remembrance Day, we can choose to honour our men and women in uniform, and their families, by recognizing their sacrifice. But we can also do more than that.

We can imagine that the world our soldiers fight and die to protect is possible.

And we can build it to honour their sacrifice. Because that, too, is a choice.

 Sincerely,

LGen the Honourable Roméo Dallaire, (ret’d), Senator (Quebec)

Saving the Rainforest, One Juicy Steak at a Time

Brazil is the world's second largest producer of soy beans.  It provides almost 24% of global production compared to Canada at 1.3%.   The United States reigns supreme with 41% of annual worldwide soy bean production.

But Brazil?  Second place?   How can that be?   Well the picture below is how that can be, how it is.

That used to be Amazon rainforest at Santarem, Brazil until it was cleared to make way for soy bean plantations.   Yeah, that Amazon rainforest, the "lungs of the planet" forest, one and the same or at least it used to be.

The Brits don't grow a lot of soy but they sure use a lot, especially for cattle feed.  And most of that cattle feed is coming from South America, from fields like the one pictured above.   But that may be coming to an end.

When British MPs return to work tomorrow they'll be debating a Labour private members' bill to require government to act to limit wildlife and rainforest destruction from the production of animal feed.

Many prominent British chefs are speaking out in favour of the Sustainable Livestock Bill and surveys show a solid majority of Brits favour measures to make food producers more accountable for the impact of their livestock products.  There's been one outspoken opponent, the National Farmers' Union, that thinks Parliament should keep its nose out of their business.

Canada Wasn't Ready For Afghanistan Casualties

Then again it's not like we're not in our tenth year of the Afghan War.   Harpo's Veterans Affairs minister, Jean-Pierre Blackburn, admits his department wasn't prepared to handle the 'influx' of wounded from Afghanistan and is now 'scrambling' to meet the new demands.

And Blackburn places the blame squarely where it belongs - on his staff.  “This department was functioning with traditional veterans. With the Afghanistan situation, this department was not ready.”

What?   They only had 'traditional' veterans? What in hell is this jerk on about?  Wait, there's more:

“Now we are doing those changes to be sure that our new modern veteran will obtain all the services that they should obtain.  The situation in 2010 is not the same one in 1945 or 1953,” he said, referring to World War II and the Korean War.

Oh yeah, of course.   A guy who gets his foot blown off in 2010, he's not remotely like a guy who got his foot blown off in some French forest or some Korean hillside.   He's a  modern veteran or, as we like to call them, a "ModVet."

Blackburn is right, though.  The situation in 2010 isn't the same as 1945 or 1953.  Back then we understood that war generates a lot of severely wounded soldiers and we prepared for that.  In 1945 and 1953 Canada and our soldiers didn't have to contend with both fighting an enemy abroad and the Harper government once they got home.   That greaseball Harper made full and shameless use of our soldiers for partisan advantage while he could but now it's all he can do to force his lips to say "Afghanistan."

New Veterans Ombudsman Off to a Predictable Start

There's one thing common to senior NCO's, they know their place.   You don't rise through the military enlisted ranks by being outspoken to your superiors.   You take your orders, salute and do as you're told.  It's sort of like being in Harper's cabinet.

And that appears to be a perfect fit for Canada's new veterans' ombudsman, retired C.W.O. Guy Parent, who rises up through the ranks of his department to fill in for his former boss, Colonel Pat Strogan who stood up to Harper and paid for it with his job.

Chief Parent wasted no time in slagging his former boss and assuring his new bosses that he'll toe the line.

"  I think Mr. Stogran in the last few months has gone away from the traditional ombuds role to become more of an advocate, which will be of very great value to us now for the future,"  Parent said.


"  But we need to go back now to an approach that is actually constructive and based on facts so we can approach the department and make recommendations that will accomplish something in the end." 

In fairness, it's too soon to know if Parent is the bootlicker that he comes across as but, if he isn't, he's going to have to prove it.   And he can slag Strogan as much as he likes but the Colonel had the respect and support of the ordinary soldier and that  Parent can't inherit.

But What About Bikini Waxing?

A notorious Russian prison in Moscow is going to install tanning beds to improve the health of its inmates.

"We are developing additional medical services ... and even sunbeds will be put in place," Butyrka's head Sergei Telyatnikov told state-run radio station Vesti FM.

The sunbeds, which Telyatnikov said would be used for medical purposes, will be installed by the end of the year, the state-run RIA news agency said." 


Russia's prison service recently admitted half of its inmates are seriously ill with diseases ranging from HIV to tuberculosis.

Well, I guess if you're going to be slung into a dank, 19th century Moscow dungeon, a tanning bed might not be such a bad idea.

35 - 29. Time to Start Looking for a Star in the East?

Yet again the Harper Tories remain firmly stuck in minority territory and the Ignatieff Liberals remain even more firmly mired well behind by six points.   No matter how poorly he governs Harper remains almost effortlessly well ahead of his only potential rival, Ignatieff.

Some argue it's because Canadians "don't give a shit" about federal politics any longer and that may be true.   But Libs can't duck their problems that easily and not ask themselves why they're not connecting so that voters actually do give a shit.  A disengaged electorate is a Tory win and a Liberal loss.   Holding Harper to a minority isn't the same as keeping him in a box.   He is advancing his ideological agenda, bit by bit, incrementally and the hapless Libs do nothing except sit by and watch.

Right now I'd bet that Jim Prentice is a better bet to become a Harper slayer than Michael Ignatieff.   If Harper returns with yet another minority, he'll be much more vulnerable to a threat from within than to any from the Liberal ranks.   That shouldn't be the case, but it is.   If you're hoping he'll be unseated by a Liberal, you would do well to start looking for a star in the East.

Watching the Sun Setting on America

Change is afoot.   You can see it everywhere if you know what to look for, where to look.   The global power base is changing.   Power and influence is slowly draining out of America and passing to China.

One of the signs of this transition from a declining America to an ascendant China is the attitude displayed by other players.   Around the world officials are now calling out America as they once never would have dared.   The German finance minister slamming the U.S. for living so long on borrowed money.   African nations quite curtly snubbing American overtures to establish a military presence on the continent.  The Japanese telling America to get out of Okinawa.   Now, according to AFP, the Chinese are suggesting that the G20 should begin monitoring the U.S. Federal Reserve.

China’s state media has issued a new broadside at the US Federal Reserve’s move to prime the US economy, suggesting the Group of 20 should monitor policy shifts by the US central bank.

The Xinhua news agency said in a commentary the Fed was “risking the global recovery by following its own track for economic revival” by spending an extra $US600 billion ($A593.65 billion) buying Treasury bonds to stimulate the US economy.

It's obvious that the Chinese, like the Euros and others, are no longer hesitating to grumble about what they see as America's fiscal excesses.   Free Market America is now calling on them to accept fixed limits to the trade surpluses countries like China and Germany can run with the U.S. and they're openly balking.

America's problems are compounded by its dependence on these same upstarts for loans to keep itself afloat and its insistence that those loans be written in American dollars while, at the same time, it undermines its own currency by printing another $600-billion of magic money.   That's like saying "loan me some money and I'll pay back some of it."

The sun is setting on America and that's a reality ushered in when Ronald Reagan introduced America's Age of Ruin.   Reagan single-handedly transformed the U.S. from the world's largest lender nation into the world's largest debtor nation and the only president who even tried to reverse that and put America back on an even keel was Bill Clinton.   That is the post-Reagan Republican legacy, the hollowing out of America's power and prestige.

America isn't going to precipitously collapse.  It will probably just continue to decline as the Brits did after WWII - but only if it's lucky and comes to its senses in time.  If ruin does befall America, it will be of its own making.

Bush - Should've Kept His Mouth Shut

Not much good (or sensible) ever came out of the mouth of former president George w. Bush.   After eight disastrous years in the White House he should have understood that much.  Yet Bush couldn't help but come out with his 'memoirs' which is a term that only very loosely describes the nonsense and outright fabrications he peddles in "Decision Points."

Now it's one thing to make silly statements.   We've all done it.  It happens.  Most of us, however, don't go out of our way to incriminate ourselves as Georgie has.  In his book Shrub foolishly allows that he quite freely authorized the waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects.  One of them, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was waterboarded an impressive 183-times.    I don't even think the Khmer Rouge came close to that.  Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, long, long ago the American courts ruled that waterboarding is indeed what it is, torture.   That makes Bush a torturer.   That makes Bush a criminal, in fact a war criminal.  

George tries to muster up something resembling the defence of necessity.   He writes that the waterboarding crimes paid off in intelligence that foiled plots to attack targets abroad including Heathrow Airport and London's Canary Wharf.  That might be an interesting argument, if it was true, but British officials wasted no time rejecting Bush's claims.

The Brits say they didn't get any actionable intelligence from Mohammed just organizational stuff about al Qaeda.   And, as for that Heathrow business?  That happened a month before Mohammed fell into U.S. hands.

Years ago F.B.I. agents who did successfully interrogate Mohammed, in the effective, non-torture way, stated that nothing useful or reliable had come from the CIA's waterboarding attempts.   That might explain why they repeated them 183-times, no?  I mean it pretty much speaks for itself.

So, once again, George is caught up in a lie, just like when he was asked whether he'd ever done cocaine.   Meanwhile former German chancellor Gerhard Shroder has come straight out and said Bush is peddling lies in his book.   Shroder told der Spiegel that "the former American president is not telling the truth"   in claiming that he gave Bush his full support for aggressive action against Iraq.  Shroder says he told Bush Germany would stand behind him if the purported link between Saddam and al Qaeda was proven but he quickly came to realize that the American tale was  "false and constructed."    

Bush was never out of the country before he became president and that's probably a good thing.   These days it might not be wise for senior members of his administration to do a lot of traveling abroad where people might start asking awkward questions.

Do As I Say, Not...

British prime minister David Cameron should be wary about lecturing the Chinese.  The text of a speech Cameron is to give in Beijing extols the rule of law and urges the Chinese to follow the example of Britain and others.

This is an ideal time for Cameron to practice what he preaches, the rule of law.   There is mounting evidence in the U.K. indicating that war crimes were committed by the British military, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and likely by the British cabinet and former prime minister, Tony Blair.

If Britain's vaunted rule of law is to have any meaning, if it is to be spared the indignity of political expedience and hypocrisy, then surely Cameron must honour it by seeing that war criminals in his own land are duly prosecuted.

India's Coal Binge

It's being called a "$35-billion bankrolling of enhanced global warming by capital markets."  The 'It' is a prospectus from the Indian state owned coal company, Coal India, which is selling 10% of its shares on the domestic and foreign markets.  It's the largest ever initial public offering on the Indian stock exchange.  From The Guardian:

" Coal India's prospectus, crafted with the help of a clutch of big-name investment banks, did not mention climate change once in 510 pages of exhortation to invest.
And invest the fund managers did, unfettered by risk regulation or any meaningful requirement to place a value on the climate consequences of their scramble for short-term profit. The offering was oversubscribed 15 fold, and the stock soared on the first day of trading, 4 November, valuing Coal India at $49bn.

Those ending up owning stock include 484 foreign funds, 195 mutual funds, 44 insurance companies, and many banks. Many of these investors were using ordinary citizens' money, and this would have included the nest eggs of people worried about global warming and its dire impact on the world by the time they retire. But those people are mostly allowed no say in where their pension funds, insurance premiums, and banking deposits are invested."

The Coal India news comes hot on the heels of yesterday's warning by the OECD's International Energy Agency that the growing market for oil foreseen for the next twenty years will leave us utterly incapable of meeting the goal to restrict warming to 2 degrees Celsius.   In other words, we're stampeding ourselves full bore down the path to runaway global warming.

Brits Reject Bush Claim Waterboarding Saved UK Lives

A key part of George w. Bush's new autobiography is his admission that, while President, he committed the war crime of authorizing waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects.   Long settled American law holds that waterboarding is torture and, as such, a criminal act.

To justify his war crime Bush made the claim that information tortured out of these suspects,  "helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States."

According to The Guardian, British officials say there is no evidence to support Bush's claims that waterboarding saved the lives of any Britons.

" It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction."

Oopsie!   If you're going to confess to a war crime and then seek to justify it, you really need to have your facts straight.   Don't try to justify it with things that happened a month before the crimes were actually commenced.   But wait, there's more.

Der Spiegel reports that former German chancellor, Gerhard Shroder, has come right out and accused George of deliberately lying.

" In his memoirs, called "Decision Points" and released on Tuesday, Bush writes that Schröder told him in January 2002 that the US president had his full support when it came to his aggressive Iraq policy. Bush wrote that Schröder indicated he would even stand behind Bush should the US go to war against the country.


On Tuesday evening in Berlin, Schröder denied that he ever made such a promise. "The former American president is not telling the truth," he said. He said the meeting in question focused on the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and whether those responsible were supported by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
.
"Just as I did during my subsequent meetings with the American president, I made it clear that, should Iraq ... prove to have provided protection and hospitality to al-Qaida fighters, Germany would reliably stand beside the US," Shröder said. "This connection, however, as it became clear during 2002, was false and constructed."

Oh, my goodness, there goes another of Bush's balloons shot down - his claim that he had no idea his intelligence on Iraq was flat out wrong.   Of course it was wrong, it was "false and constructed."   That's constructed as in plainly made up.

If the Tar Sands are Such a Boon to Alberta, Why All the Boondoggles?

The Athabasca Tar Sands make money - for Big Oil at least.  The bitumen pits supposedly make plenty of money for the federal and Alberta governments too but just how much do they really pour into government coffers?

Like all good petro-states much of this vital information isn't readily available to the public and just as much probably isn't even known.   It's just as easy to cook the books as it is to cook the bitumen.

The sludge we process to provide SUV juice to American gas pumps is heavily subsidized.    For example, if Big Oil paid the actual value of the vast quantities of fresh water it draws from the Athabasca and Peace Rivers there probably wouldn't be a project at all.   But the oil companies get that public property for virtually nothing.   When we give public property to a private company, that's a subsidy.

What about the land, air and water contamination associated with bitumen extraction and processing?   When you let the producers off the hook for the cost of cleanup, that's a subsidy.   When our healthcare systems and society bear the cost of the human toll from that contamination, that's a subsidy.

Today there was a torrent of greenwash from the Alberta government about carbon capture and sequestration.   There'll be a fund set up for that - a shared fund - industry and the Alberta government will pick up the tab (supposedly).   The government's share is a subsidy.

But what might become the biggest subsidy of them all is the Alberta government's agreement to assume liability for whatever might happen should all those millions of tonnes of compressed CO2 leak back out to the surface - ever as in forever and ever, amen.   CO2 is lethal.  When If that pressurized and toxic gas eventually does find an opening to the surface maybe this century, maybe next, maybe a millenium from now, the liability for deaths and loss could be enormous.   That too is a subsidy or at least the present value of that indemnity sure is.

These are all subsidies but only when you recognize them for what they are.  If you're like the Alberta government or even our federal government, you can pretend to turn a blind eye.   But that doesn't change a damned thing and, when it comes to change, it'll be the people of Alberta who stand to get short-changed.

We've Lost Control of the Environment, Is the Global Economy Next?

You hear rumours of protectionism and currency wars.   They pop up every few days and then they subside.   Washington wants China to revalue its currency, the Yuan.  It wants its major trading partners to limit their trade surpluses with the U.S.   Then Washington announces plans to print 600-billion dollars worth of magical money to buy back government debt.   Nations are getting angry and they're all quick to point fingers.

German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, isn't pulling any punches:  "The German export successes are not the result of some sort of currency manipulation, but of the increased competitiveness of companies. The American growth model, on the other hand, is in a deep crisis. The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector unnecessarily and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies. There are many reasons for America's problems, but they don't include German export surpluses."

Herr Schauble is right, the U.S. has lived on borrowed money, trillions of dollars of money borrowed from foreign lenders, since Reagan ushered in America's Age of Ruin.   America turned its back on manufacturing, opting instead for an insane, short term, high-yield FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) economy that was bound to undermine its economic strength and stability.   Vast wealth accrued to America's top 10% while the remaining 90% worked ever harder to simply tread water or fall behind.

Now America is going out and simply printing 600-billion dollars worth of non-existent wealth and that's alarming the world.   But America has a rich, recent history of forays into non-existent or fictitious wealth.   The Savings & Loan scam was non-existent wealth, the Dot.Com bubble was mainly non-existent wealth, Enron and Worldcom too, and most recently it was the housing bubble and trillions of dollars of credit default swaps backed by completely non-existent wealth.   This time, instead of Wall Street or American banks pulling the non-existent wealth scam on the American people, it's Washington giving its foreign lenders a taste of the same medicine.

America, the great believer in free trade and free market economies, is now yelling "uncle" - "Uncle Sam" that is.

No one knows how this one is going to play out.  Inventing $600-billion dollars is a gutsy move, especially when you know what it could mean to your economy in the long term if your foreign benefactors dump the greenback as the world's reserve currency.   This is one to keep an eye on.

The Only Question Now - Just How Bad Will It Get

The International Energy Agency warns we can kiss goodbye any hopes of limiting greenhouse gas-driven warming to under 2 degrees Celsius.   The energy arm of the OECD says oil demand will grow steadily over the next 25-years essentially dooming climate change goals.

Even under climate change pledges made under the Copenhagen Accord last year, fossil fuels will still account for more than half the increase in total energy demand, with oil to remain the dominant fuel, the IEA said in its World Energy Outlook report.

The broad failure of the Copenhagen summit on the climate would cost the world $1 trillion in extra investments needed by 2030 to avoid irreparable damage to the climate, raising the total investment needed to $11.6 trillion, the IEA estimated.

...The IEA, the energy monitoring and strategy arm of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, concluded that this " rising demand for fossil fuels would continue to drive up energy-related carbon dioxide emissions through the projection period.

"  Such a trend would make it all but impossible to achieve the two degree C goal..."

It's already becoming widely accepted that the November climate change summit in Cancun will be a failure marked by bickering between China and the U.S.   Meanwhile climate change denialists are leading the pack of Republicans that have captured the House of Representatives killing even the pathetically inadequate measures proposed before the elections.

Well, we're all Easter Islanders now.  It's too bad we won't figure out what that really means for our country and our people while we still have time to implement proper adaptation and remediation measures.   Those are steps you have to take before the problems land on your doorstep.

The Latest Tar Sands Subsidy - Albertans Assume Liability for Carbon Sequestration Failure

In theory, capturing CO2, liquifying it and pumping the highly pressurized liquid into underground chasms is a great way to get rid of the harmful greenhouse gas.  In theory.

Unfortunately it's theoretical and replete with unresolved questions that leave "CCS" an unproven option.   While a pilot project is being run in Saskatchewan, no one has run a successful operation on the scale that would be needed to sequester carbon emissions from the Tar Sands.

But, assuming that the empty reservoirs beneath Alberta could be used to house massive volumes of liquid carbon dioxide, what then?  There's a huge problem.  That pressurized CO2 could leak out and when it reaches the surface it's very lethal.  So you have to monitor what's happening underground and on the surface and somebody may have to compensate anyone damaged (i.e. "killed") if when leaks occur.  And just who is that 'somebody' going to be?   Why that would be the people of Alberta.

The province, the Alberta conservatives, say there'll be a fund into which the province and Big Oil will chip in to monitor the CCS wells.   That's probably true, at first.   However scientists warn that the need to monitor will do on effectively for ever, millenia at a minimum.   So does anybody think Big Oil is planning on picking up the cost of that monitoring into perpetuity?  What a joke.

But then there's the leakage thing, compensating the dead and injured.   Big Oil isn't even sticking around for that one.   In fact the sweetheart deal the Alberta Cons have cooked up leaves the people of Alberta liable - forever and ever, amen.  And, as Andrew Nikiforuk points out in Tar Sands, Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, not only is the rock vulnerable to failing under the pressure of liquified CO2 but that area is perforated with drilled wells, 300,000 in all.   In other words it's just a matter of time before there's a failure and large volumes of lethal, concentrated CO2 reach the surface.

CCS sounds good until you look at it and read between the lines of the deal that Alberta has cooked up with Big Oil.   Then it begins to look like a formula for disaster.