Oooh, This Could Get Nasty

China has provoked outrage in the Philippines by deploying this oil platform, the country's first deepwater drilling rig, into the South China Sea.

The rig, CNOOC 981, began drilling operations yesterday in disputed waters 320 km from Hong Kong.

According to Reuters, civil society and political groups with links to Philippine President Benigno Aquino III's political allies plan to take to the streets on Friday to "protest the Chinese presence" in waters near Huangyan Island.

The Chinese embassy in Manila has issued a safety alert, advising Chinese nationals to enhance safety awareness, avoid going out and stay away from protesters.

Ctrip.com International Ltd, a leading online travel service provider in China, decided to suspend trips to the Philippines Wednesday, citing safety risks of tours as tensions over Huangyan Island escalate.

A Global Times correspondent in Manila said the Chinese communities there are calm despite Friday's looming protest.

"Issues concerning sovereignty are non-negotiable for China. The Philippines took China's restraint for granted and kept staging provocations," a researcher surnamed Ma with the Southeast Asian Institute of the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences, said.

"The planned global protest against Chinese embassies has shown Manila's intention to internationalize and complicate the issue. Beijing will lose its patience if Manila doesn't back off," Ma said.

Hard as this may be for Canadians to believe, the BBC is reporting that the Chinese do seem to be spoiling for a military confrontation.

War talk, it seems, is all the rage in China at the minute.

Yes, there are serious people in serious publications seriously advocating war.

...At the heart of the issue is what is called Scarborough Shoal by the Philippines and Huangyan Island by China, a little more than 100 miles (160km) from the Philippines and 500 miles from China.

...The odd thing here is that the Philippine navy consists of just one proper ship and that is an ancient US Coast Guard cutter which is hardly a match for China's navy, as this online commentary by "The Comparativist" makes clear.

The Comparativist writes: "I think this is happening because the Philippines is so weak. The Chinese government can beat the war drums all they want, and as loud as they want, and no war is going to happen. It's akin to bullying someone in a wheelchair that you know can't punch back."


But there are dangers here too. The president of the Philippines has tweeted this statement this week, making clear that the Philippines believes America will help protect it from any Chinese aggression. So a dispute could lead to a very tense situation.

China's policy in the South China Sea is not a simple matter, directed clearly from the top as the International Crisis Group has detailed, but affected by many different players.

It's a dangerous dynamic that could escalate much further yet.
A few other things to consider.   The United States recently conducted Operation Chimichanga, a stealth bomber, fighter live-fire exercise simulating a first strike against China.   There are escalating tensions developing between an ascendant China and a U.S. is slow decline that could quickly transform into a new Cold War. And last month The Guardian reported on recent war games between US and Chinese military leaders during which Chinese hostility toward the United States seethed to the surface.

Switzerland, My Sincere Condolences

The Swiss have a new countryman, er countrywoman.   She's Michelle Bachmann who, thanks to her marriage to flamboyant, gay-curing psychologist, Marcus Bachmann is entitled to claim Swiss citizenship.   The kids wanted dual citizenship so Michelle went along.

I wonder if this is the end of Bachmann's political aspirations or if she'll show up yodeling a different tune in 2016.

Cornering Rupe With His Own Words

Poor Rupert Murdoch, will his demons never go away?  Unfortunately, for him, no because the demons plaguing him at the moment poured out of his own mouth at the Leveson inquiry.

The focus now is on contradictory statements Rupe made about his lunches with Margaret Thatcher.

Robert Jay QC, counsel for the inquiry, highlighted the issues on Thursday as he opened its third module - dealing with relations between media figures and politicians.

 

Referring to Murdoch's statement last month that he had "no recollection" of the event, Jay said: "One does at least have to question whether this is selective amnesia. Mr Murdoch told us in evidence that he did not enjoy frequent encounters with Baroness Thatcher.

"The acquisition of the Times and its associated titles must have been one of the most important in his commercial life.

"This was a time of heightened emotion. Could an intimate lunch at Chequers really have been forgotten?

And then counsel employed a rhetorical device that I find quite brilliant - 

"Human recollection is notoriously patchy and unreliable, we all know that. The fact that I, for example, would be 100 per cent certain of being able to remember an event such as this occurring 30 plus years ago is not going to assist you in coming to a conclusion either way."

Oooh, ouch!

Jay said if the inquiry accepted Mr Murdoch's evidence the "point goes not further".

"But if you do not the consequences are capable of being wide ranging," he went on.

"Not merely would the selective amnesia appear to be convenient but inferences might be drawn as to Mr Murdoch's true motives and intentions seeking out the prime minister's ear in January 1981.

"Furthermore this case is capable of bearing on Mr Murdoch's integrity."

If, in fact, the inquiry decides that Rupe did indulge in a bit of highly-selective memory, a very delicate term for lying, then straight out the window go his other self-serving denials about not knowing anything about the voice-mail tapping or corruption of police officers and on and on and on - the sort of stuff most of us have long assumed he was lying through his teeth about.

The Big Three - Global Dilemmas Pegged By Science

The Athabasca Tar Sands controversy is about three key things - energy, carbon emissions and water usage and contamination.   Oddly enough those three are the very "global dilemmas" identified as needing urgent government action by the heads of the national science academies of 15 countries, including the UK, the US, China, Germany, Russia and India.

"On water and energy, the scientists recommended that governments should look at both resources as being interlinked. They said the efficient use of these resources would be key, and recommended developing ways of managing demand for them, as well as investing in scientific research on energy efficiency and the sustainable use of water.

"They also recommended that governments should make key data on energy and water freely available, and that the indirect costs associated with energy – which could include the relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change – and the costs of the degradation of water supplies should be accounted for . These costs should also be included in the development of policy.

"Natural disasters have been taking an increasing toll in recent years – last year's economic losses owing to natural disasters were the highest ever.

"In order to mitigate these risks, the scientists recommended that governments should undertake systematic assessments of disaster risks, and conduct research to improve our understanding of the underlying causes of such disasters."

Hmm, that all sounds entirely sensible I guess, unless you're a Petro-Pol digging in, waiting for The Rapture.

Harper, You Punk, Man Up!

Those goddamned self-righteous Tories like nothing better than to preach responsibility except when they get a chance to dodge it themselves.   And, when a chance does arise, they'll use their full bag of tricks - secrecy, deception, manipulation, fear mongering - to get really stuck into their dodge.

And so far I figure Harper's biggest responsibility dodge, perhaps the greatest one in our history, is the Athabasca Tar Sands/Northern Gateway scam.  On that one, he's in full-bore, balls to the wall, EnRon mode.

The Northern Gateway (and the Kinder Morgan scam through Vancouver's inner harbour) are all about one thing, shipping dil-bit, or diluted bitumen, to Asian markets in the holds of supertankers.

The operation sees these tankers arrive at our docks carrying dilutents that are pumped to Alberta where they're mixed with lightly processed bitumen.   As their name suggests, these liquids dilute bitumen enough that it can be pumped through pipelines back into those supertankers' holds.   From our docks that toxic, carcinogenic sludge passes through and grievously endangers our British Columbia coastal waters so that it can be shipped all the way to Asia for refining into synthetic crude oil.

Do you see all the effort involved here?   It begins with tankers full of dilutents produced offshore that have to be shipped all the way to British Columbia in tanker holds and then pumped all the way to Alberta so that they can be mixed with bitumen into a sludge that can then be pumped all the way back to British Columbia docks for loading into supertanker holds for shipment all the way back to Asia so those dilutents and all the other bitumen crap can be refined out to create synthetic crude oil.   The carbon emissions in the shipping alone are enormous and all the extra expense and environmental risks make that so much worse again.

Is there an alternative?   Of course.   We could skip the dilutent/dil-bit trans-oceanic dance altogether and, instead, do the full refining operation right on site, in Alberta.   Take the sludge, upgrade it into raw bitumen, refine that into synthetic crude oil and pump that to our foreign customers if need be.   Why do we have to transport all these abrasives, corrosive acids, heavy metals, carcinogens and other toxins in an impossible to treat goop that sinks right to the bottom in the event of a spill?   What's the motivation to do that?   After all it's more expensive, more complicated and far more dangerous to transport dil-bit sludge than it is to ship refined synthetic crude.   So why are Harper and the Oil Patch so insistent on doing something so obviously unproductive, unnecessarily expensive and risky, boneheaded even?  Why?   Well, as near as I can figure it, it's an accounting error, a la EnRon.

You may remember EnRon, the Texas energy giant that feigned mega-wealth and profitability by carrying giant liabilities "off the books."  It was all the brainchild of this whiz kid, Jeffrey Skilling, seen here doing the "perp walk" that was all the rage back then:

So why isn't the Alberta Oil Patch building refineries to handle all this Asian trade?  My guess is that Big Oil and the Alberta and federal governments would much prefer to "offshore" the carbon emissions and other environmental impacts of refining that bitumen sludge.   Just as Jeffrey Skilling taught EnRon to keep massive liabilities off the books, so offshoring dil-bit keeps  massive carbon emissions and other enviro impacts off Canada's and Alberta's books.   And that's just wrong.

It's wrong to expose vast tracts of Alberta and British Columbia to the inevitable pipeline spills for which Enbridge has such a proven reputation.  It's wrong to expose coastal British Columbia to the godawful risks inherent in dil-bit spills from the tanker disasters that are inevitable.    It's just wrong to generate unnecessary supertanker traffic to carry dilutent/condensates that aren't really needed.  It's just wrong to deprive Alberta/Canada of the jobs, revenues and profits of those refinery operations.

But, above all else, it's wrong for Canada to "offshore" our responsibility for the carbon-emissions and other environmental fallout of transforming tar sand into synthetic crude oil.   We know how poorly China handles this sort of thing.   If you knowingly hand the keys to a drunk driver in the middle of a parking lot full of baby carriages, you're doing the wrong thing.   That's irresponsible.

If Harper is going to ram through pipelines to carry Athabasca petroleum products through to Asian markets, it's his responsibility to see that done at the absolute minimum risk to Canada and, in particular, to the province and people of my own British Columbia.  He has no moral right to place us and our pristine coastline in dire risk so that he can "offshore" the environmental implications of bitumen processing.   It's time for that despicable weasel to Man Up.

Do You Really Need to Ask?

The question is why a CIA officer, Jose Rodriguez,  mechanically shredded 92-hours worth of video of captives being waterboarded.

"It's not a pretty sight when you are waterboarding anybody or using any of these techniques, let's be perfectly honest," Rodriguez admitted.

 "John Rizzo, the CIA's top legal counsel who oversaw the legalisation of the techniques in an exchange of memoranda with the Department of Justice, wanted to be certain that what was happening at the black site was in accordance with what had been legally agreed.

He had not anticipated that waterboarding would be used as often as it was. And he sent one of his most experienced colleagues to the black site, believed to be in Thailand, to find out.
Rizzo's colleague viewed all the 92 hours of video and concluded that the techniques were being legally applied, but he was uncomfortable about what he saw.
"He did say that portions of the tapes, particularly those of Zubaydah being waterboarded, were extraordinarily hard to watch," Rizzo told me. 

 Rodriguez knew the tapes were potentially a ticking time bomb and wanted to destroy them. He waited for three years with increasing exasperation at the apparent unwillingness of anybody on high to take responsibility for authorising their destruction.

Then when news of the CIA's secret black sites leaked, Rodriguez's patience ran out. 

Why did Rodriguez destroy the recordings?   Because they were proof of serious crimes, torture committed by the CIA and because those crimes undermine the very legitimacy of the tribunals now prosecuting those torture subjects.   The tribunals are supposed to be "trying" the charges against these accused terrorists but, by refusing to allow any mention of the torture, the tribunals have themselves become prosecutorial.   The whole thing is a sham.

About That Balmy Winter Weather - Part Deux

Most of Canada had a delightfully warm winter and enjoyed an early spring.   Now the bill has come due.

In Ontario, farms face the loss of millions of dollars worth of crops.

The early warm weather in March, followed by sudden flash freezes, has caused devastating losses to tender fruit and apple growers in a large part of southern Ontario.

Steve Smith says there are no blossoms on his apple trees in Port Elgin, about 40 kilometres southwest of Owen Sound, which means there will be no apples.

Agriculture specialist John Cline at the University of Guelph says the apple industry alone in Ontario is worth up to $400 million.
Roughly 2,800 people are employed in the province’s apple orchards, including 2,300 foreign workers hired during the growing season.

Phil Tregunno of the Ontario Tender Fruit Producers Marketing Board in Niagara says about 30 per cent of peaches and nectarines have been affected, with damage totalling about $24 million to those two crops alone.

Growers won’t know the impact on the grape crop until early June.

In Britain there's news of another climate change impact, the migration of southern fish species into local waters.   Bluefin tuna, Thresher sharks, stingrays and anchovies are migrating northward.  We're seeing a similar migration here in coastal British Columbia.

Shark Fins, check. Bear Gall Bladders, check. Dead Baby Tissue, check.

Asians have long had a bad reputation for some of their eating habits.   Their love of shark fin soup is contributing to the decline of global shark populations.  Their fondness for bear gall bladder as a supposed virility enhancer has led to a serious poaching problem.   Now the tonic du jour may be dead babies.

"South Korean customs said it had confiscated more than 17,000 health capsules smuggled from China that contain human flesh, most likely extracted from aborted foetuses or stillborn babies.


"The Chinese Ministry of Health said it had been investigating allegations that capsules were being manufactured from human remains but had found no evidence.


"The South Korean customs agency said pills had been smuggled into the country through parcels and luggage carried from China. The pills were composed of ''ground stillborn foetus or babies that had been cut into small pieces and dried in gas ranges for two days, then made into powders and encapsulated'', the report said.

 ''Flesh pills have been continuously smuggled into [South Korea], camouflaged as health tonics,'' the statement said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/human-flesh-found-in-chinese-health-pills-20120509-1ycyv.html#ixzz1uOHsPwtQ

Who Do Conservatives Hate Alternative, Clean Energy?

More evidence of how far today's radical right is prepared to go to subvert the adoption of alternative, clean energy.

"A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama's energy agenda.

"A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.

"Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using "subversion" to build a national movement of wind farm protesters."

"These documents show for the first time that local Nimby anti-wind groups are co-ordinating and working with national fossil-fuel funded advocacy groups to wreck the wind industry," said Gabe Elsner, a co-director of the Checks and Balances, the accountability group which unearthed the proposal and other documents.

"Among its main recommendations, the proposal calls for a national PR campaign aimed at causing 'subversion in message of industry so that it effectively because so bad that no one wants to admit in public they are for it.'

"It suggests setting up "dummy businesses" to buy anti-wind billboards, and creating a "counter-intelligence branch" to track the wind energy industry. It also calls for spending $750,000 to create an organisation with paid staff and tax-exempt status dedicated to building public opposition to state and federal government policies encouraging the wind energy industry."

World Bank, Countries Must Value Their Natural Capital

Hey, Steve Harper, are you listening?   The World Bank is calling.   They want Canada, and every other country, to start putting values, okay price tags, on all their natural capital.  

Forests, peatlands, coasts, water, wildlife - everything should be costed out.   That way you can do a bit of math and figure out the mega-billion giveaways you've been doling out as freebies to industry- outfits like the Tar Sanders.   You should be handing them an invoice, payment due in 30-days.

It's not a tax, nothing of the sort.  It's simply them paying the value of what they're getting that belongs to Canada and the Canadian people.   Yes it may be reflected in somewhat higher prices but that should be more than offset by the funds remitted by the users of our natural capital.

"Placing a monetary value on natural ecosystems is a key step on the road to "green" economic growth, according to the World Bank, which published a report on green growth on Wednesday at a conference in Seoul, Korea.

"By making such estimates, countries can develop policies that ensure the pursuit of economic growth does not occur at the expense of future growth potential, by destroying natural assets such as water sources or polluting air, rivers and soil.

"Rachel Kyte, vice president for sustainable development at the bank, said that the patterns on which economic growth had been achieved in recent decades were unsustainable, because of the amount of environmental degradation involved.

"She said: 'At current rates, we are in danger of undermining the basis on which growth has been achieved in the last decades. We do not believe that current growth patterns are sustainable.'"

And let's not forget, Steve, to start putting realistic prices on carbon emissions and the second part, collecting that from major emitters.   And you can start all this in the Athabasca Tar fields.   Those suckers have got a huge water bill coming and a bigger bill for environmental degradation costs and for impacts on forests and wildlife (don't forget to bill the pipelines) and for imperilling coastal British Columbia.   What?   That would shut the whole thing down?   Why, of course it will.  That's because this is all a giant Ponzi scheme in which you're robbing Peter, the Canadian people, to line the pockets of Paul, the fossil fuelers.

Is Harper Giving British Columbia Real Cause to Secede?

Some weeks ago Conservative senator Mike Duffy dismissed opponents of the Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline as "anti-Canadian."   The more  I think about it, he may just have a point.

Does the prime monster's insistence on grievously imperilling the British Columbia coastline and fisheries with dangerous supertanker traffic not give British Columbia cause to secede from Canada?  It was, after all, only our entry into Confederation that vested in Ottawa many of the powers it now holds over our coast.   Surely it was implicit in the yielding of those powers to Ottawa that they would not be exercised to the detriment of the province and people of British Columbia.   Surely Ottawa's paramount duty to the province and people of British Columbia is to safeguard our coastal waters, not to expose them to catastrophic risks.

If Ottawa breaches its fundamental duties of care owed the province and people of British Columbia in respect of our coast, our coastal waters and our marine habitat and fisheries on what basis should we consider ourselves bound to remain within Confederation?   The deal is breached, repudiated, torn up and trampled underfoot by Ottawa itself.

This is all hypothetical now but it may not be for long.   That all may change when Harper begins tossing otherwise law-abiding British Columbians by the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, into his jails for civil disobedience.   Each of those victims of Harper's rampage will have family and friends and colleagues, many of whom will not stand for a crackdown.   What happens when they join ranks?

And bear in mind when this dissent does erupt there won't be a rightwing government in Victoria either.  No, the next British Columbia government is already on record as firmly, in fact unanimously, opposed to this supertanker madness.

Upheaval is the New Norm

That was so 20th century.  We're viewing the dynamic forces underway today in Europe as aberrant when, in fact, they may just be the latest manifestation of what will be, for much of this century, something far closer to normal.

We like order in our lives and, because most of us were born post-1950 we have an utterly false sense that order is somehow normal.   That delusion is made far easier to swallow because we had no experience of the incredibly turbulent first half of the 20th century that saw two enormously destructive world wars, the Great Depression, and the death throes of global colonialism.   The experience of the second half of the 20th Century was entirely alien to that of the first half.

I'm no historian, political scientist or anthropologist, yet I'm pretty sure that I lived the first six decades of my life in a period of abnormal peace, prosperity and progress if only in my small corner of the world.   It looks "normal" to us largely because we had no direct experience of what preceded it nor preparation for what would inevitably follow.

Yet never in my lifetime, nor yours, was the world actually stable.   That was all an illusion.  Here's one example.   When I was born the world's population hit a record of about 2.5-billion.   There had never been anywhere near as many humans on Earth.   And in the span of just one lifetime we have broken through 7-billion, headed to 9-billion.   What could conceivably be taken as normal in that?   That's much more akin to malignancy than normalcy.  It took mankind tens of thousands of years to grow to a billion strong, less than a century and a half to double that, and a single lifetime to more than treble that yet again.

Let's remember that we only reached 7-billion thanks to some powerful conjuring acts, civilizational sleight of hand.   The Green Revolution was perhaps our ultimate trick.   We discovered that with sufficient fertilizer and massive irrigation we could produce bumper crops from otherwise marginal farmland.   That led us to empty aquifers and use so many chemicals that we began to exhaust vital farmland, transforming it into desert.  It was the Third World equivalent of defying gravity.

And look what it has brought down upon the world, a civilization dependent on more than they can have and yet demanding ever more.   It's not hard to figure out when you've passed that threshold.  In short order it manifests itself in desertification, deforestation, and species extinction such as the global fisheries collapse.   A recent corporate think tank (KPMG) study found that, over the decades ahead, as the world's population burgeons, we'll actually have about 13% less arable farmland.   That's burning the candle fiercely at both ends.

Our ability to always come up with the "next thing" to allow us to continue taking more than the Earth can provide has helped buffer the illusion of sufficiency and stability.   It has bought us a great deal of time.   Yet, instead of using that breathing room as a precious opportunity to curb our excesses, right our wrongs, and prepare ourselves to live a productive, peaceful future, we squandered that gift and used it to deceive ourselves that we had achieved prosperity, peace and stability.

It's hard to know whether the shifts over the past two decades that witnessed the triumph of corporatism, globalism, authoritarianism were causes or effects of our civilizational decline.  Perhaps it doesn't matter.  That they're linked is apparent and that they have played a powerful role in destabilizing our world is what should concern us.   The way ahead probably means undoing a lot of the damage they have inflicted even if we don't as yet grasp the scope of it.

The recent national elections in France and Greece and the portentious local elections in Germany and Britain have shown the Right is losing its grip.   Were the Brits able to have a national election today, Labour would sweep the Conservatives out of power.

Our thoroughly corporate media has responded predictably, depicting the European tide change as the onset of radicalism and anarchy.   Sticking to the script of their corporate ideology, they bemoan the demise of what Krugman mockingly calls the "confidence fairy" that austerity budgets promise but consistently fail to deliver.   Contrast Paul Krugman's latest column with Andrew Coyne's.  They're writing of different planets.  Krugman's is grounded in fact, Coyne's in ideology.   Then again Krugman works for a genuine newspaper, is an Ivy League professor and holds a Nobel Prize in Economics while Coyne has an i-Pad.

Upheaval of some sort in varying degrees is probably going to spread to most parts of the world by 2050.   Global warming is a big part of what's driving disruptions.   An article in Scientific American, "Where It Rains, It Will Pour -  Otherwise, Tough Luck" details research that finds we have seriously underestimated the impacts of global warming on the hydrological cycle.   In simple terms, already dry regions are apt to become 24% drier while wet regions will get wetter by a similar factor.   That is going to impact in many ways ranging from food insecurity to entire regions turning uninhabitable.  Those impacts will, in turn, destabilize countries great and small, poor and wealthy, and lead to upheaval.

Now is the time to come to grips with the reality of upheaval and how we will choose to respond to it.   It's sort of like experiencing a rocking ship from the comfort and safety of a deck chair or having to stand up and walk the heaving deck.   Our chair time may be over.

Update:

A visitor, Richard, gave me a link below that led to this youtube lecture.  I strongly urge you to watch it and decide for yourself if we can still tolerate a political class that acts as though we were still in the 80s?

Enviro Commish Calls "Bullshit" on Harper

Quelle surprise!   Harper was only bullshitting us on his committment to cut Canadian carbon emissions.   That's the conclusion of our Environment and Sustainable Development Commissioner, Scott Vaughan.

"Canada has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020.

"'In concrete terms, Canada will need to reduce emissions by 178 million tonnes over the next eight years to meet the 2020 target,' Vaughan's report states. 'In comparison, the 2011 Climate Change Plan for the Purposes of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act reported actual reductions totalling six million tonnes for 2008 and 2009.'

"Vaughan said Canada, which pulled out of Kyoto last year, is taking a sector-by-sector approach to reducing greenhouse gases and as a result the approach is piecemeal and lacks coherency.

"The report also says Canada has not done a proper analysis of the costs associated with meeting the goal. That's ironic, he suggested, because the Conservatives justified the decision to leave Kyoto by saying it was too expensive -- estimated at $14 billion in December of last year.

"'Accordingly, I expected that the government would have calculated the projected costs to the Canadian economy of its regulatory approach to meeting its new target. ... Right now, it has not done so. The result is that Parliament lacks a full picture of the combined costs of reaching the 2020 target.'

"Vaughan also said Ottawa has been slow laying out what future environmental regulations will look like. As a result, businesses have not had time to make the necessary capital investments, or to implement the new equipment needed to achieve the reductions by the target year."

When it comes to climate change, Harper is prime, Grade A, bullshit on the hoof.   Ask yourself why we need supertankers to bring in highly toxic solvents and dilutents so that we can mix them with abrasives, corrosives and carcinogen-laced bitumen to refill those tankers for shipment to China?  Why?  Because the alternative is to dispense with the dilutents, refine that sludge in Alberta and ship out refined synthetic crude oil.   But that would expose that other load of bullshit - carbon capture and sequestration.  There would be enormous carbon emissions and other environmental problems from refining that crap in Canada so, despite the even more enormous risks to BC coastal waters, Harper wants to simply export it to be refined abroad.   That way he supposedly keeps the environmental costs off his books.  If that sounds perverse, it is.   But so long as he remains snug in Big Oil's pocket and has every Tory MP and Senator kissing his bum on demand, there's nothing to stop him...  except you and me.

Our Perverted Petro-Prime Minister and His Big Oil Pals Caught Again

Are Harper and his ilk just born liars?   Can their warped, Born Again brains even recognize truth?

Courtesy of The Tyee, the latest Northern Gateway pipeline outrage.  It now turns out that pipeline is designed to carry 60% more toxic sludge bitumen than claimed that could translate into many hundreds of additional tankers passing through British Columbia's coastal waters.

"Prime Minister Stephen Harper may need to do more than rush these projects through under cover of legislative shelter. 

"Particularly when British Columbians learn the true magnitude of what these projects mean for tanker traffic.

"So far, Kinder Morgan has told us their twinned pipeline proposal would expand capacity from 300,000 barrels per day and 71 tankers a year to 850,000 barrels per day and more than five times the tankers.

"That's an oil tanker a day transiting Burrard Inlet.

"We've also been told that Enbridge's Northern Gateway project represents 525,000 barrels a day of crude oil flowing along the pipeline into Kitimat, and 193,000 barrels a day of condensate flowing along a pipeline in the other direction, out of Kitimat. Every year, 220 tankers will navigate the difficult and vulnerable Douglas Channel in order to pick up raw crude and drop off toxic condensate.

"What most people don't know is Northern Gateway has been designed to carry 60 per cent more crude oil and 40 per cent more condensate -- all that's required is an increase in pumping power along the pipeline route.

"... More crude, more condensate, more tankers, more risk -- way more risk.

"Hidden in the thousands of pages of evidence filed with the National Energy Board is Enbridge's intended capacity expansion plan. It's imbedded in an answer to a National Energy Board Joint Review Panel question requesting "a detailed description of the potential expansion scenarios which could be possible by adding additional pump stations and pumping facilities."

"Enbridge notes in their documents that "these expansion scenarios and associated facilities are not part of the applied for project... any future expansion scenarios and associated facilities beyond the applied for project would be the subject of future regulatory application."

"But there is no mandatory hearing requirement for modifications to existing pipeline systems. The legislation is very clear on this, as are NEB publications. 'Hearings are not required for additions to existing systems.'"

Why Tibet Will Never Be Free

This map says it all:

The Tibetan plateau is key to controlling the headwaters of just about every major river in East and South Asia.   China controls Tibet, it controls most of the water that it and its neighbours depend upon.

As written on this blog for years, it was always going to come down to this.  It's all about water, who can take what and the nations that will emerge was "water haves" and "water have-nots."   Right now it's China that holds the whip hand.   And Tibet is the key to China's water security.   End of story.

Here's What The F-35 is Really About. Canada's First, First-Strike Air Force

It's about one thing - a sneak attack against China.  And that's just what the United States Air Force had in mind when it conducted Operation Chimichanga.  Wired magazine's military correspondents David Axe and Noah Shachtman described what is on American military planners' minds.

"The first sign of the coming U.S. air raid was when the enemy radar and air-defense missile sites began exploding. The strikers were Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, flying unseen and faster than the speed of sound, 50,000 feet over the battlefield. Having emptied their weapons bays of super-accurate, 250-pound Small Diameter Bombs, the Raptors turned to engage enemy jet fighters rising in defense of their battered allies on the ground.

"That’s when all hell broke loose. As the Raptors smashed the enemy jets with Amraam and Sidewinder missiles, nimble Air Force F-16s swooped in to reinforce the F-22s, launching their own air-to-air missiles and firing guns to add to the aerial carnage.

"With enemy defenses collapsing, B-1 bombers struck. Several of the 150-ton, swing-wing warplanes, having flown 10 hours from their base in South Dakota, launched radar-evading Jassm cruise missiles that slammed into ground targets, pulverizing them with their 2,000-pound warheads. Its weapons expended, the strike force streaked away. Behind it, the enemy’s planes and ground forces lay in smoking ruin.

"The devastating air strike on April 4 involved real warplanes launching a mix of real and computer-simulated weapons at mock targets scattered across the U.S. military’s vast Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex near Fort Yukon, a tiny former fur trading post, population 583. “Operation Chimichanga,” as the exercise was reportedly designated, was the first-ever test of a new Air Force long-range strike team combining upgraded Lockheed Martin F-22s and Boeing B-1s carrying the latest air-launched munitions, along with old-school fighters, tankers and radar planes for support.

"China is steadily improving its air defenses. To make sure the bombers can get through, the Air Force plans to send fully-stealthy warplanes in first. The Northrop Grumman B-2 stealth bomber is the ideal trailblazer, as it proved over Libya when three B-2s knocked out the bulk of Libya’s radars, missiles and airfields in a single pass. But the Air Force possesses just 20 B-2s, only a handful of which are combat-ready at any moment.

"So the F-22 fills in. With the latest Increment 3.1 upgrade, the F-22s can lob 250-pound, Boeing-built Small Diameter Bombs at least 60 miles with pinpoint accuracy, a capability apparently tested out during Operation Chimichanga. The Raptor-bomb combo “was critical to follow-on forces completing their missions,” F-22 commander Kunkel said.

"But even the F-22 is in short supply. So far only one Alaska-based squadron has the Increment 3.1 Raptors. When the upgrade is complete, around 150 F-22s will be able to carry the tiny, precise bomb — still a relatively small force for taking on potentially thousands of Chinese radars, missiles and jet fighters. The smaller F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to give the Air Force stealth capability in large numbers, but the F-35 is tens of billions of dollars over-budget and five years behind schedule."

Axe and Shachtman are right, you can't wage much of an air war on China with just 150 F-22s.  That's a job that's going to require many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of F-35s.   That's what the F-35 is, a stealth light bomber, a purely offensive, first-strike weapon.   Air defence of Canada?  C'mon, please.   There's nothing remotely defensive about the F-35.   For the first time in our country's history we're going to be left with a purely offensive, first-strike air force.  Maybe that doesn't bother you but it should for it says much about the path of Canada's foreign policy into the next thirty years.

Sarko No Mo

Widespread European unrest is reaching polling stations in several countries today.   Most notable is France where president Nicholas Sarkozy has conceded defeat to new president  Francois Hollande, the first socialist to hold the office in nearly 20-years.

Hollande is projected to win by a nearly 52% margin.

"Nicolas Sarkozy, defeated after one term in office, became the 11th European leader to be swept from power since the economic crisis in 2008. But the defeat of the most unpopular French president ever to run for re-election was not simply the result of the global financial crisis or eurozone debt turmoil. It was also down to the intense public dislike of the man seen as "President of the Rich'"

Sarkozy's German contemporary, Angela Merkel, is also feeling the anti-right sting in state elections.

"Voters in northern Germany appeared to have turned their backs on a governing centre-right coalition in a state election, which was viewed as a test of the durability of Angela Merkel's government and a measure of its chances of re-election next year.

"The demise of the centre-right government which has run the state since 2009 is significant not least because the federal coalition is made up of the same parties.

"Voters' rejection of the alliance is seen as sending an important signal to the central government and will increase pressure on Merkel to end her collaboration with the Free Democrats."

Exit polls in Greece suggest the centre-right coalition government is in danger of losing enough seats to jeopardize its hold on power.    Votes are flooding into groups opposed to Greece's austerity programme.

"A Metron analysis poll showed the leftists gaining as much as 18.5%, more than the mainstream Pasok lead by former finance minister Evangelos Venizelos, who negotiated the latest €130bn (£105bn) loan agreement reached between Athens and the EU and IMF.

"'That agreement now belongs to the past. It has been delegitimised' said Panaghiotis Lafazanis, a prominent Syriza MP. 'Our strong showing sends a message especially to Europe that Greeks have rejected austerity.'

Lafazanis said Syriza would keep to its pre-election pledge to form a government of 'the united left' that would work to stop the fiscal remedies meted out to Athens by its EU partners.

The election, called by Lucas Papademos, the technocrat prime minister overseeing an emergency coalition for the past six months, is the most critical in decades. Not since the restoration of democracy in 1974 has so much been at stake, with politicians and analysts alike saying Greece's political stability and future in the eurozone would rest on the result.

Harper's Reckless Indifference to Inevitable Catastrophe

"But Skipper, the oil's 600-feet down"

It would probably take something of a mass insurrection to stop Stephen Harper's plans to transport toxic Alberta sludge through British Columbia's coastal waters.  A Victoria Times Colonist writer said we're up against the CPC - the Conservative Party of Canada, the Communist Party of China and the Calgary Petroleum Club - and they don't plan to let British Columbia stand in their way.

The Victoria paper's Sunday edition takes a look at the state of federal oil disaster response preparation on our coast and it's anything but assuring.

"Sheila Malcolmson, chairwoman of the Islands Trust, the land-use and planning agency for the Gulf Islands, said she has peppered the federal government with questions about oil spill response plans.

"'We are told that successful [spill cleanups] recover 10 to 15 per cent of the oil, so our first priority has to be advocacy around preventing spills in the first place,' Malcolmson said.

"'Then, the other area of concern is, when there's a spill, what is the capacity for cleaning it up? The more we learn about that, the more worried we are.'"

"Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell [wants] an analysis of crossborder spill readiness.
'It seems that Canada's oil spill response plan in the Pacific Northwest is to call the Americans,' Cantwell told a sub-committee hearing last year in Washington."

Cantwell appears to be referring to the only two ocean-going tugs capable of rescuing a supertanker that has lost its steering or engines.   They're positioned at Anacortes, Washington,  south of Victoria, several days steaming distance from the proposed tanker port in Kitimat.

Another article by the same reporter explores the fleet of oil spill response vessels and barges already positioned along the length of Vancouver Island.    The vessels belong to Western Canada Marine Response Corp.   But what's the point of having that equipment if you can't get it to the disaster in time?

" Even with that stash, it could take WCMRC up to 72 hours, plus travel time, to assemble the equipment at the scene of a major spill - a time frame that exceeds Transport Canada standards."

But in coastal B.C. waters, an oil spill might actually be wishful thinking.   A report released by Pembina and the Natural Resources Defence Council in December contrasted dilbit - diluted bitumen - that Harper wants to ship out of BC ports with conventional crude oil.  It's like comparing apples and hand grenades.   Conventional crude oil tends to be broken up by wave action, provided it doesn't reach shorelines.   Bitumen, however, dumped into water congeals and sinks straight to the bottom.  It doesn't help that bitumen is also laced with acids, heavy metals and other toxins and carcinogens.

Oil booms probably won't do much bobbing on the surface while a supertanker load of bitumen rests on the bottom six hundred or more feet down.   And as for the 72-hours business, how long did it take the BC ferry, Queen of the North, to find its own way to a 600-foot deep grave when it had a run in with the treacherous rocks in that same area?  It was just a matter of hours, not days, not three days, not a week.   A few hours and it's over.

"Time lags are one of the many concerns the Dogwood Initiative has about spills, a conservation group running an anti-tankers campaign.

"Different kinds of ships come with different kinds of risks, and crude oil tankers come with virtually all the risks and no benefits for British Columbians, and especially Vancouver Islanders," he said.
Technology for dealing with a spill still comes down to shovels, buckets and cotton pads, [Dogwood spokesman Eric] Swanson said.

"Booms are only useful in calm seas, low winds and low waves," he said.

"And stuff like bitumen sinks to the bottom, so booms are no use."

The Times Colonist concludes its bitumen disaster expose with a look at the bottom line - money.  Again, Harper and the CPC gang are setting us up for a beating.

"Insurance is  ...compulsory for ship owners.

"Damage claims are funnelled through the Canadian Ship-source Oil Pollution Fund or the International Oil Pollution Fund.

"However, some critics believe funds in Canada do not have the depth to pay for cleanup of a major spill.

"'Once the ship owner runs out of insurance, he can legally walk away and say 'That's your problem, government,' " said Stafford Reid of EnviroEmerg Consulting Services.

"Reid, who wrote a report for the Living Oceans Society on marine vessel risks and response plans, said that in the case of an incident such as a major spill from a bulk carrier, the insurance money would likely last less than a week.

"In addition to the cost, the immediate worry in the case of a major spill would be how to clean up bitumen, which would likely sink below the surface, said Sheila Malcolmson, Islands Trust chairwoman.

"Bitumen is a thick slime of unrefined tar that is mixed with condensate, a toxic solvent, so it can move through pipelines.

"'There is no capacity to deal with oil sinking in the water. We have asked the federal government about the capacity to deal with a bitumen spill and we haven't had any reassurance,'  Malcolmson said.

"'You can't boom it and you can't skim it and you can't see it from the air.'

"Federal government spokesmen said research is being done into "non-traditional" fuels and Environment Canada is leading the investigation.

"The bitumen-cleanup question is also being studied in the U.S. where it came to public attention in 2010 after an Enbridge pipeline burst in Michigan and leaked about 843,000 gallons of bitumen into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River."

Oh that's grand.   Environment Canada, headed by rancid EnviroShill Peter Kent, is looking into "non-traditional" fuels.   They haven't got a clue how to deal with a bitumen dump on the seabed in the treacherous, stormy waters of northern B.C.   But they're going to look into it.   Yet, having no clue about what to do when one or more of those tankers goes down, they're hell bent on getting that pipeline built and tankers transiting those waters just as quickly as possible.

So the upshot of this is that the federal government has an oil spill agency, the Western Canada Marine Response Corp., a private company that has a fleet of vessels, barges and equipment to deal with oil spills but with no capability to deal with bitumen spills.   And most of that equipment is positioned where it would be days away from the most likely disaster areas, even if that equipment was somehow effective.   And Enbridge, it seems, will be using ship owners as liability cut-outs for bitumen disasters.   When the ship owner's insurance runs out the 3 CPCs - Conservative Party of Canada, Communist Party of China and Calgary Petroleum Club - express their condolences and summon the next tanker to the fueling dock.   And if any means of seabed bottom bitumen clean-up is discovered - a huge "if" - the British Columbian and Canadian taxpayers will be stuck with the tab.

And that's ALL FOR A BUNCH OF GREEDY SWINE FROM ALBERTA.

It's Very, Very Good - Only It's Very, Very Not

The folks at DND have grown used to treating our Parliamentarians and the Canadian public like imbecilic dupes.   That much comes through loud and clear in the 160-word letter the department issued to justify the purchase of the exceedingly overdue, grossly overpriced and haplessly underperforming F-35 light bomber.

The letter contends the F-35 meets the "mandatory operational requirements" of the Canadian Forces which, it seems, could be taken to mean limited range, minimal payload, and substandard speed, climb and turn rates.

But the kicker comes in the line claiming the F-35 has "very, very low observable stealth capabilities", a boastful claim that's now being cast in serious doubt.   Some are saying that borders on fantasy.

The DND snake-oil salesmen concluded with what really is on their minds.  "Having the jets would make it easier for Canada to operate alongside defence allies around the globe who were also buying them."   Having the F-35 is Canada's admission ticket into America's aerial Foreign Legion.   That's another way of saying the F-35 has virtually nothing to do with the defence of Canada.  It's an offensive weapon.   It's a penetration strike, light bomber relatively incapable even of defending itself much less Canadian airspace.

The Raincoast May Be Getting Wetter

Coastal British Columbia may not be a great place to live if you have problems coping with rain.   We have what I like to call the "Rain Festival" that runs from around mid-October until somewhere between June and July.   Lard, Jaysus and Tunder but it can get wet.  New research is showing that it's probably going to get wetter yet.

"Warmer air allows for more water vapor. So scientists have long predicted that global warming will result in a more intense water cycle—the process by which water evaporates from the oceans, travels through the atmosphere and then falls as rain. Now new measurements of the ocean's salinity prove that prediction—and suggest that global warming strengthens the water cycle even more than anticipated.

"'What we found is that regions that are salty in the main are becoming saltier' and areas that boast more rainfall are getting fresher, explains oceanographer Paul Durack of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who led the research to be published in Science on April 27. 'It's another independent estimate of how the climate is changing as we pump out CO2.'"

What's the best way to cope with what can seem like interminable rainfall?  The internet.  Just go on line and read about all the places that should be getting all that extra rain but aren't.   Read about the people there and what doing without that extra rain does to their lives.  Imagine what they would give to trade places with you.  Just do that and you find you've suddenly got nothing at all to bitch about.

Extending data from 3,500 sensor buoys received over the past decade, "to the millions of historical salinity readings from 1950 to 2000 reveals that, as predicted, evaporation strengthened in drier regions—making the oceans saltier there—and rainfall strengthened in wetter regions—making the surface seawater fresher. In fact, global warming of roughly 0.5 degree Celsius over that span strengthened the water cycle by roughly 4 percent, or around the amount predicted by physicists' equations. "Through a lot of investigation, it provides us with what we would have guessed," Durack says.
 
But that's not what scientists' computer models predicted. Though various computer models match the actual distribution of saltier and fresher regions quite well, the computer models underestimated the actual rate of water cycle intensification by half. That suggests that impacts on the water cycle of future warming of several degrees Celsius could be substantial, strengthening rainfall and evaporation by as much as 24 percent.

The stronger water cycle will mean stronger rains and intensified droughts over the oceans. And what holds at sea also extends over land, because the oceans cover 71 percent of the globe, hold 97 percent of the world's water, and have already sucked up 90 percent of the extra heat trapped by humanity's greenhouse gas pollution. The increase in warm water vapor as the globe heats will fuel more violent storms, whereas droughts in places like Australia, stuck in the middle of oceanic regions dominated by evaporation, will only grow more severe. Or as Durack says: "wet regions will get wetter and dry regions drier." Given that freshwater availability affects everything from food to energy, this may prove a more difficult challenge for human civilization and natural ecosystems to adapt to than that posed by global warming itself.

42-years On, Is It Time to Revisit Kent State Massacre?

Four of the Kent State students wounded by Ohio National Guard gunfire on May 4, 1970 that left four of their fellow students dead want U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder to order a new inquiry into the tragedy.

The soldiers said they fired in self-defence, not at a command to fire.  Now the survivors claim that digitally-enhanced audio proves the officer in command did order his troops to fire on the student protesters.


A command to fire has never been proven and guardsmen said they fired in self-defense. Criminal charges were brought against eight guardsmen, but a judge dismissed the case. Wounded students and families of those slain later received a total of $675,000 after civil lawsuits.

The shootings also spawned an investigative commission, numerous books and Neil Young's song, "Ohio," which became an anti-war anthem. A Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a teenage girl kneeling over the body of one of the slain students became an enduring image of the tragedy.

In 2010, Alan Canfora, one of the wounded students and director of the nonprofit Kent May 4 Center, asked the Justice Department to review the enhanced recording, which was taken 250 feet from the guardsmen when they fired their shots in 1970.

Canfora and other audio specialists say the enhanced recording shows a clear military order to fire seconds before the shooting. The troops fired 67 shots over 13 seconds.

Can China Ascend Without Triggering Cold War?

Cold wars, in case you're too young to remember, can be ridiculously ruinous ventures.   Just ask Vladimir Putin.  The Soviet Union came to an end due to Cold War spending when world oil prices collapsed and, with them, its vital source of foreign capital.  Sorry, no, it wasn't Ronald Reagan's doing but, since we're on the subject, it was Reagan's Cold War spending that transformed the United States in the brief span of his eight years in office from the world's largest creditor nation into the world's largest debtor nation.  See where this is going?

Now the world in 2012 seems perched on the edge of another Cold War.   This time the principals would likely be the returning champ and sole true warfare state, the United States, and the upstart, China - Peoples Republic whereof.

The Old Cold War focused on the Fulda Gap, the lowlands between Frankfurt and the former East German border where massive hordes of Soviet Bloc tanks were expected to flood into the West and drive on to the Channel.   The New Cold War  it seems is looking up, focused in space.

"As China continues to develop as a nation-state, it was inevitable that at some point its path forward would drive it to develop its own space strategy. It was similarly inevitable that as China began to do so, its plans would come to be interpreted as additional reason to question the country's intentions.

"For those predisposed to distrusting Beijing, China's plans for space would be additional fuel to the fire regarding their view of China as a strategic competitor. Beyond this point, China's financial ability to entertain manned space travel stands in sharp contrast to American and European fiscal situations where space exploration is likely to be one of many inevitable budget sacrifices.

"A recent report, "China's Evolving Space Capabilities: Implications for US Interests" was commissioned by the Congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC). Released last week, the report acknowledges the important role space plays in a nation's conception of itself as a "great power".

"As the report's authors Mark Stokes and Dean Chen with the Project 2049 Institute write, "... since the Cold War, space technology has been viewed as a metric of political legitimacy, national power, and status within the international community."

"...What ill intent is most troubling to American policymakers? Simply put, the ability of China's space strategy to deny access to American military resources in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.

 "...China now has the ability to peer into the Formosa Strait and surrounding East and South China Sea areas to see real-time movements of US naval equipment.

"...The second advantage China's space-based infrastructure could provide it with is related to Beijing's nascent Anti-Satellite (ASAT) capability. In the event of a conflict, China's ASAT technology could allow it to blind large segments of the American communication infrastructure, making a coordinated response of military assets difficult, if not impossible.

"Beijing's ASAT capability is not only an example of China's growing capabilities in space, but also the speed with which their capabilities have grown. While the Pentagon has many concerns over China's growing military abilities overall, Beijing's ASAT capability remains one of the most vexing.

"...ASAT capabilities are tricky to defend against and would likely present American military planners with additional pressure to launch a pre-emptive strike to disable China's ASAT launch infrastructure, a move that would require deep ingress within mainland China, a move that would make all but certain a broader war. 

"... Handled properly, reports like the most recent one covering China's building space capabilities point out the facts of what is changing on the ground, and make it impossible for members of the American government to claim that they were surprised should down the road a conflict occur.

"But handled improperly, reports like this can be deeply unhelpful as they feed into a growing narrative over China's military build-up and naive questions from those outside China's borders over why the country could ever need such capabilities.

"Taken too far, people fearful of China's intentions can easily become the equivalent of Germany in 1914. Then, a German government afraid that it would soon be outspent in an arms race with Russia, France and the United Kingdom, elected to attack Russia and France before Germany's military advantage had completely eroded."

"... Thus far, the American policy community has been able to walk this fine line; but as America's economic and political troubles mount, it will become increasingly difficult for Washington's politicians to avoid painting China in similar light as Germany did to Russia and France in the early 1900s."

This excerpted analysis was the work of Benjamin Schobert of the Rubicon Strategy Group, a strategic analysis consultancy firm.   This isn't some journalistic fantasy, not at all.

What does this mean for Canada?  Plenty.  We do ourselves no favours by ignoring the evolution of a true warfare state within the only country with which we share a border and which is our major trading partner.   We do ourselves no favour by ignoring the implications of a neighbour that powerful whose government has become utterly dysfunctional and erratic.   We place ourselves at risk if we ignore that our "lead partner" has become hyper-militarized and now views military violence rather than diplomacy as its principle instrument of foreign policy.

And, more specifically, we need to evaluate the F-35 bomber, in the context of what is underway in the U.S. and the rising tensions between Washington and Beijing, not to mention Moscow and elsewhere.

The F-35 is nothing if not a Cold War light bomber.   It is a purely offensive weapon, designed to fly a straight line course to a bombing target and then fly a straight line course back out to safety.   To the extent its stealth technology works at all, it's pretty much limited to that one profile.

We need to reject the nonsense that the F-35 has anything to do with the defence of Canada, especially in our undefended and vast north.

There was good reason for Canadian support for our allies in the Old Cold War.   There are no good reasons for pre-enlisting in the New Cold War.

Russia Warns of War

Hard to know what to make of this.   A Russian general, Nikolai Makarov, has warned that Russia will use force against Poland and Romania if NATO deploys a planned missile radar/interceptor in eastern Europe.


''A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens,'' he said.

 

While Russian officials have said previously that the anti-missile sites could become targets in the event of war, the threat of a pre-emptive attack was new.

General Makarov has threatened to target NATO bases hosting an anti-missile system designed by the US to protect European allies against attack from states such as Iran.

Makarov is Russia's Chief of General Staff.

 

Asian Youth Going Blind. No, It's Not What You Think.

All work and no play makes Johnny a blind boy.  BBC reports that kids in major Asian cities are losing their eyesight - to studying.

Up to 90% of school leavers in major Asian cities are suffering from myopia - short-sightedness - a study suggests.

Researchers say the "extraordinary rise" in the problem is being caused by students working very hard in school and missing out on outdoor light.

The scientists told the Lancet that up to one in five of these students could experience severe visual impairment and even blindness.

In the UK, the average level of myopia is between 20% and 30%.
According to Professor Ian Morgan, who led this study and is from the Australian National University, 20-30% was once the average among people in South East Asia as well.

But, But, But, It's May Bank Holiday

If you're from England or ever lived there, you'll know how much Brits love their May Bank Holiday.   Seaside excursions to the coast, picnics, the great outdoors.

Bank Holiday 2012 is shaping up to be a little different, well more than a little out of the ordinary.

Temperatures over Saturday night will dip towards, or even below, freezing in Scotland and parts of Wales and the Midlands while thermometers might struggle to record double-digit centigrade during the day on Saturday and Sunday.

On Monday, south-west England, already badly hit by downpours in the last week, will experience more rain, although on Friday most of the 20 flood warnings that remained in place were in the Anglian region.

The Environment Agency said it would continue to watch river levels although the forecast suggested the weekend would be drier than recent days. A spokesman said: "There is still a lot of floodwater around and the agency is urging people to keep away from swollen rivers, and not attempt to walk or drive through them."

Tom Tobler, of MeteoGroup, the weather division of the Press Association, said: "It doesn't look like it's going to be beach weather. We're looking at some wintry showers in the north over high ground and there may be snowfall."

An AA spokesman said: "We don't think there will be significant getaways of traffic. A lot of people will be staying at home and doing their own thing. The weather's been so foul over the last month, I doubt many people have made plans to head off," he said.

Heartland Institute Proves the Point

The point being that global warming denialism is not about science but focused on cheap public relations gimmicks.   Here's a billboard put up by the far-rightwing Heartland Institute that proves the point:

Not much science to it.  Simply juxtapose a picture of a disheveled mass murder beside "I still believe in Global Warming."   This is just one of several billboards with the same message featuring infamous killers.   Heartland Institute explains their campaign this way:

'Why did Heartland choose to feature these people on its billboards? Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the "mainstream" media, and liberal politicians say about global warming. The point is that believing in global warming is not "mainstream," smart, or sophisticated. In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in man-made global warming – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior."

"All the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory"?   That's where the Heartland shill really thins out.  If they had the science to refute the mountain of multi-disciplinary research that corroborates the theory of global warming, they wouldn't be putting up billboards of Ted Kaczynski.   They and the fossil fuelers would be disproving or refuting the scientific consensus that's causing them so much trouble, so much that they have to resort to this sort of sophomoric stuff.

But they're right about one thing - some really crazy people use their very own denialism to justify immoral and frightening behaviour.

Well That Didn't Take Long

Americans believed in global warming/climate change.   Then they didn't.   But now they do again.

Mother Nature has been given the doubters, predominantly from the south and central states, extra lessons in subjects such as extended drought, massive floods and severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity.   Now all that extra tutoring is paying off.   As Bill McKibbon, writing in Tom Dispatch, notes, the kids finally are beginning to understand the math.

"New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

That the American people are coming around really is no surprise.   They were going to get there, eventually.   The professional denialists did their Alchemist's dance pretty effectively over the past few years but all they could ever do was sow doubt, not solve problems.   And, as the climate change threats remained and grew and worsened, the fact that the denialists were empty-handed and not even proposing any effective solutions became apparent.

But growing public awareness won't lead to effective action of itself.   Corporatism now competes with democracy within the halls of America's governments.   And, yes, money talks.   The corporatists don't have to defeat science.   They know they can't.   They're not even trying.   Instead, their focus is on engaging the willing, particularly those in elected office, to delay and water down climate change actions that will negatively impact corporate ledgers.   Even if they can't win 100% or even 60% of the argument, whatever they win is found money.  It's free, found money; unearned profit.   That's incentive enough to keep their denialism medicine show on the road unless and until they're stopped.

If They Told You the Truth, How Were They Supposed to Lie?

Oh the naivete of Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.   He says that, despite being ordered by Parliament to do so in 2010, the Department of National Defence did not provide him with full information about F-35 costs.

"Over the past few weeks, it has become clear that the Department of National Defence provided the PBO with figures that did not include all operating costs," Page told Parliament's public accounts committee on Thursday.

"The PBO understood that it had been provided with full life-cycle costs from DND as required."

Those operating costs — which have been estimated at around $10 billion over 20 years — have become central to the question of whether Canadians were misled in the weeks before the last federal election.

At that time, Page released a report which estimated that acquiring, maintaining and operating 65 F-35s would cost taxpayers nearly $30 billion.

The Defence Department responded by telling Parliament that the stealth fighter would actually cost $14.7 billion.

Page says it seems the government has kept two sets of books on the F-35 deal.  Apparently the Parliamentary Budget Officer simply doesn't realize this is an advanced business practice pioneered by industry leaders such as EnRon.

Meanwhile Australia has just announced it will delay the purchase of its first squadron of F-35s to help ease budget pressures.   The Aussies have decided to push the decision on when to take delivery of the first dozen F-35s by two years.

There's an interesting aspect to this.   With the US having deferred its own initial purchases of F-35s, Lockheed seemed to be looking to "partner" nations to take up the production slack.  It appeared that Lockheed was looking to peddle its surplus production to these other countries via advanced deliveries.   Australia seemed right in Lockheed's crosshairs.  That may have been the real pressure Australia was trying to duck, Lockheed's.

And the price of Japan's F-35 deal keeps rising.   Including tools, training, testing equipment and spares, it now stands at $238-million per aircraft.

US periodical, Foreign Policy, has a new name for the F-35.   They're dubbed it the "Supersonic Albatross".  

"...with regard to cost -- a particularly important factor in what politicians keep saying is an austere defense budget environment -- the F-35 is simply unaffordable.

"...Hundreds of F-35s will be built before 2019, when initial testing is complete. The additional cost to engineer modifications to fix the inevitable deficiencies that will be uncovered is unknown, but it is sure to exceed the $534 million already known from tests so far. The total program unit cost for each individual F-35, now at $161 million, is only a temporary plateau. Expect yet another increase in early 2013, when a new round of budget restrictions is sure to hit the Pentagon, and the F-35 will take more hits in the form of reducing the numbers to be bought, thereby increasing the unit cost of each plane. 

"...The F-35 isn't only expensive -- it's way behind schedule. The first plan was to have an initial batch of F-35s available for combat in 2010. Then first deployment was to be 2012. More recently, the military services have said the deployment date is "to be determined." A new target date of 2019 has been informally suggested in testimony -- almost 10 years late.
 
"If the F-35's performance were spectacular, it might be worth the cost and wait. But it is not. Even if the aircraft lived up to its original specifications -- and it will not -- it would be a huge disappointment. The reason it is such a mediocrity also explains why it is unaffordable and, for years to come, unobtainable.

... A virtual flying piano, the F-35 lacks the F-16's agility in the air-to-air mode and the F-15E's range and payload in the bombing mode, and it can't even begin to compare to the A-10 at low-altitude close air support for troops engaged in combat. Worse yet, it won't be able to get into the air as often to perform any mission -- or just as importantly, to train pilots -- because its complexity prolongs maintenance and limits availability. The aircraft most like the F-35, the F-22, was able to get into the air on average for only 15 hours per month in 2010 when it was fully operational. (In 2011, the F-22 was grounded for almost five months and flew even less.)

"This mediocrity is not overcome by the F-35's "fifth-generation" characteristics, the most prominent of which is its "stealth." Despite what many believe, "stealth" is not invisibility to radar; it is limited-detection ranges against some radar types at some angles. Put another way, certain radars, some of them quite antiquated, can see "stealthy" aircraft at quite long ranges, and even the susceptible radars can see the F-35 at certain angles. The ultimate demonstration of this shortcoming occurred in the 1999 Kosovo war, when 1960s vintage Soviet radar and missile equipment shot down a "stealthy" F-117 bomber and severely damaged a second.

"The bottom line: The F-35 is not the wonder its advocates claim. It is a gigantic performance disappointment, and in some respects a step backward. The problems, integral to the design, cannot be fixed without starting from a clean sheet of paper." 

For some reason, our Parliament is still stuck on first base - squabbling over costs.   We need - but are not having - parallel debates on delay and, most critically, performance.   Harper is going to fudge on the costs issue, fall back on simple denial, and let it run its course as a public relations problem.   He's counting on getting the opposition so mired down bitching about costs that they give him a pass on the most important points - delay and performance.  And so they will.   It is those sidelined issues that ultimately make the case for ditching the F-35 in favour of an alternative.   

We Lose, We Win?

Here's an interesting idea.   The best and quickest way to restore peace to Afghanistan is for Western forces to pack up and get out.

"Most insurgent fighters are not interested in a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan or in Deobandi creeds, let alone in the geopolitical goals of the Pakistani generals that support them. They fight to rid their districts of foreign occupiers, and after a long and convoluted and misunderstood war, the Western forces are set to oblige them. Many will see the withdrawal as a victory; their mission accomplished, many will go home.

"Insurgent forces will face desertions that might make ANA desertions seem light. Such was the case when the Russian army pulled out of Afghanistan in the late eighties, leaving district after district in the hands of the Afghan army to face the experienced and seemingly invincible mujahideen bands.

"The results were not disastrous for the Russian allies, as was widely assumed. Mujahideen commanders quarreled and fighting broke out between many of them, leading many to seek protection from the Afghan army and to ally with the Russian-backed and previously reviled Kabul government. 

"It would appear that the Taliban are too unified to follow the same destructive path of their mujahideen predecessors, but unity based on a common enemy can be short-lived. Within the Taliban forces ranging across the country are many older leaders tired of war and eager to settle. But there are many younger and more ambitious commanders who were rapidly promoted after their predecessors were killed in drone strikes or night raids."

It's an interesting scenario, Western forces are themselves fueling the insurgency they cannot defeat.  Insurgents defecting upon our departure.   Negotiated settlements between the Afghan National Army and the insurgencies to follow.   Yet the theory seems to overlook the malignant, long-term impacts of warlordism that itself fuels suspicion and treachery.  It also seems to underestimate the role that other regional players from the bordering states from Pakistan to Iran as well as Russia, India and, particularly, China.  It's somehow difficult to believe they all would see a stablizied, peaceful Afghanistan as in their interests.

Ol' Rupe Ain't Gonna Like This - "Unfit" to Lead

News Corp boss Rupe Murdoch showed “willful blindness” toward the behavior of News of the World staffers in the lead-up to the British phone hacking scandal, according to a report released Tuesday by a committee of British legislators.

"The cross-party culture, media and sport committee concluded that Murdoch is “not a fit person” to lead a major multinational company, the Guardian reports, although one of the committee’s Conservative members of parliament disagreed with that depiction at a news conference following the report’s release."