Nature's Version of Waterboarding

Think of it as the difference between a refreshing drink of water and undergoing waterboarding.   We used to expect the former from nature but now, all too often, it's the latter.

Las Vegas is an object lesson.   The desert city is now forced to drain its essential freshwater from a distant corner of the state via a canal system.   Until nature shows up but then it's often in the form of deluge triggering flash floods.

The city, that averages 4.5 inches of rain annually, got hit with a 1.75 inch downpour that left parts of the city flooded, like this parking lot at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:

The floods have hit various spots throughout the American southwest.   Yet this sort of urban flooding is now established world wide.   Many municipal storm sewer systems are not designed to handle the sort of rainfall patterns they're now experiencing.  Runoff becomes concentrated and backs up, resulting in heavy flooding.   From Britain to the Philippines to China to the United States and elsewhere, heavy flooding is becoming commonplace.

Many of these areas are also beset by sustained drought that can harden the ground and make it impervious.   Then, when floodwaters arrive, they don't seep into the ground but simply run off into what the Mexicans call arroyos, normally empty streambeds carved out by centuries of flash flooding.

Today's floods, just like today's droughts, evidence our broken hydrological cycle.   Surface temperatures warm, increasing evaporation.   Atmospheric temperatures warm, increasing volumes of water vapour, itself a powerful greenhouse gas.   Warmer, wetter conditions create more atmospheric energy that results in erratic precipitation patterns and severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity.   Some regions get hit by torrential rains, others are bypassed and experience drought.

This is occuring this year in most of the world's greatest grain producing countries - the United States, Australia and Russia in particular.   Food prices globally are already spiking.  A continuation of this threat will destabilize already wobbly countries around the world.

Predictable, reliable and moderate rainfall has been a vital part of mankind's introduction of agriculture that, in turn, facilitated the rise of civilization.   With but a few exceptions, farmers could count on receiving the right amounts of rainfall at the right times throughout the planting/growing/harvest cycle.   Too much rain or too little rain at any stage and the crop might fail.

Despite demographic predictions that the world population will reach 9-billion by 2050, perhaps 15-billion by 2100, the hydrological cycle problem could make those projections unrealistic.  At 7-billion, mankind's ecological footprint is already placing us in a severe "overshoot" deficit.   World Overshoot Day this year fell on August 22nd, several weeks earlier than just a few years ago.  In effect, mankind now uses a full year's worth of the Earth's renewable resources before the end of August, leaving us to "eat our seed corn" for the balance of the year.   This deficit is only going to be worsened by disruptions in agricultural production from droughts and floods.

We are being overtaken by events.   The theme of Gwynne Dyer's latest column could be "nobody saw it coming."  But it's here and we're going to have to find ways to live with it - better systems to collect and hold rainwater, curbs to water usage and wastage, improved agriculture and food distribution, for starters.   We're also going to have to realistically price carbon to whatever extent necessary to decarbonize our economies and our societies.  Above all else we'll need to develop technologies to strip atmospheric carbon in massive amounts.

For mankind this is likely the fight of our lives.   Yet that is still a far cry better than having to fight for our lives.

A Generation Lost

Since Ronald Reagan ushered in government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, American blue and white-collar wage earners have seen their incomes stagnate - at least the lucky ones that is.    Despite massive increases in per worker productivity, the wealth associated with that has not been shared but has been siphoned off to the top few per cent, the richest of the rich.

In the process the gap between rich and poor has opened widely, social mobility has been thwarted, and inequality of wealth, income and opportunity has burgeoned.   In the process, America's middle class has been gutted.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute, The State of Working America, chronicles the working class' doldrums and warns that "without radical change" it could take another two decades before working Americans get back to their 2000 income levels.

The report makes clear what has been robbed from low- and middle-income people as a result of conservative policies that have their roots in the early 1980s, as the country turned from balanced growth policies in which labor and capital profited more or less in tandem to government policies that advantaged corporations and the wealthy at the expense of workers.

As a result of these policies, the report notes, "the business cycle preceding the recession [of 2008-2009] was already shaping up as a lost decade for American incomes," with median household incomes falling 6 percent during that period. But when the Great Recession hit, median income of working-age families fell another 7.1 percent between 2007 and 2010.

"This is an underappreciated economic calamity," the report says.

The report notes that this calamity is not caused by a lack of overall economic growth. National income, the report notes, has grown enough to substantially improve the fortunes for all. As the data reveal, however, it is the top 5 percent, the top 1 percent, and fractions of the top 1 percent that have received almost all the benefits of the economy’s growth.

Meanwhile Harper FinMin Jimbo Flaherty is partying it up with Canadian CEOs who want Canadians tossed into the same boat as their American counterparts, the key, they claim, to keeping Canada "competitive."

Well, Duh. Water Woes = War

The Interaction Council, a body comprising mainly former government leaders, warns that the world is facing a serious water crisis that threatens global peace, political stability and economic development.

“The future political impact of water scarcity may be devastating,” says former Canadian Prime Minister and IAC co-chair Jean Chrétien. “Using water the way we have in the past simply will not sustain humanity in future.  The IAC is calling on the United Nations Security Council to recognize water as one of the top security concerns facing the global community.”

“Starting to manage water resources more effectively and efficiently now will enable humanity to better respond to today’s problems and to the surprises and troubles we can expect in a warming world.”

In her foreword to the report, “The Global Water Crisis: Addressing an Urgent Security Issue,” IAC member and former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, underlined the danger in many regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa or West Asia and North Africa, where critical water shortages already exist. 

“As some of these nations are already politically unstable, such crises may have regional repercussions that extend well beyond their political boundaries.  But even in politically stable regions, the status quo may very well be disturbed first and most dramatically by the loss of stability in hydrological patterns.”

In an exhaustive compilation of the many factors contributing to deteriorating water security worldwide, 23 eminent international water expert authors identify a host of serious security, development and social risks associated with the water crisis, including food, health, energy and equity issues.

Already, approximately 3,800 cubic kilometers of fresh water is extracted from aquatic ecosystems globally every year.  With about 1 billion more mouths to feed worldwide by 2025, global agriculture alone will require another 1,000 cubic km (1 trillion cubic meters) of water per year - equal to the annual flow of 20 Niles or 100 Colorado Rivers.

It is expected that water demand in India and China alone -- the world’s two most populous countries – will exceed supplies in less than 20 years.

Yep, yep, yep.   A timely reminder that will only fall on deaf ears among the current regime in Ottawa.

Broken Arrow

Another safely retired Canadian general with too much time on his hands, Lewis MacKenzie, is fronting for a group urging the feds to scrap the F-35, first-strike, stealth light bomber in favour of resurrecting the CF-105 Avrow Arrow, itself scrapped by the earlier Conservative government of John Diefenbaker.

Bollocks, Lew.

The Arrow was designed as a high-speed, long-range interceptor to launch nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles against squadrons of incoming Soviet bombers.   In those days the Soviet bombers would penetrate North American airspace to deliver either bombs or short-range standoff missiles against strategic targets.

Some of those Soviet-era bombers are still flying today and every now and then they do probe our air defences.   They get close to the boundary of our airspace, we send up fighters, everyone takes a look at each other and then we and they go home.

Should it ever come to a shooting war with the Russians, they won't be sending bombers into our airspace for us to shoot down.   They wouldn't have to bother.   They would launch salvos of high-speed, long-range cruise missiles that would take out any worthwhile targets those bombers might otherwise attack.   And those missiles are surface-skimming.   They operate down in the weeds where they're harder to detect, track and shoot down.

The Arrow was never designed for low-level, in the weeds, operations chasing down salvos of elusive Russian cruise missiles.   And, besides, there would never be enough of them even if they could operate in those conditions.   Cruise missiles are cheap and, against a serious air defence, you launch lots of them to overwhelm the defenders.

So General Lew's is a truly blockheaded idea.   So is the notion that the F-35 would be much better than the Avro Arrow at defending Canadian airspace.   The F-35 isn't about defending Canada at all.  It's not built for that job.   It's built to operate in conjunction with American forces for a stealth, first-strike against  heavily defended enemy airspace.   The F-35 is intended to take part in an attack on China should Washington deem that necessary.   Buying the F-35 is our admission ticket to America's aerial Foreign Legion.   When will that start to sink in?

Another Crop Failure

Farmers in the United States and Russia are reeling.   Now it's Australia, the world's second biggest wheat producer, where production is in peril.

Lower production in Australia, the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, could boost momentum for world grain prices that have already surged to near-record levels this year, as searing heat has withered crops in the US and Russia.

Poor rainfall in Western Australia is expected to cut Australian winter grain production in the financial year ended June 30 by a fifth to 36.2 million metric tons, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Science said in a statement Tuesday. That’s down from its June estimate of 38.5 million tons.

Abares also reduced its estimate for winter wheat production, by 7% to 22.5 million tons, representing a 24% decline from record output in 2011-12. 

With the world population going straight up and global agricultural production heading in the opposite direction, isn't it time we had some straight talk from our governments, federal and provincial?  Stephen Harper is deranged.   This is happening and yet he's stuck in a terminal brain fart over the riches of Arctic seabed oil and gas the Earth can't afford to burn if our grandchildren are to live some measure of decent life.

It's encouraging that Obama's people have finally figured out there's enough voter support to make climate change a useful campaign issue.   It's frightening that he's running a close race with a Republican nominee and his sidekick, both of whom refuse to acknowledge the reality of global warming.

The Most Endangered

The Guardian has published a photo essay of the 100-most endangered species at risk today.   If you look at these creatures most may appear insignificant, hardly worth bothering about.   That is if you don't understand biodiversity and the critical role it plays in making all our lives, well, liveable.

Everything is connected.   When you're sitting at the top of your particular food chain that's easily overlooked.   Yet, beneath you, is a long chain of critters from microbes to plants to insects, little critters, bigger critters and really big critters that you and I need if we're to exist.   Some creatures are needed as prey, others as predators.  Wipe out one of those, the other goes into severe decline or, worse, overpopulates.

It's estimated the deer population in New England is now four times its numbers when the Pilgrims first arrived.   They wiped out the predators - wolves and cougars - and so the deer populated to become a serious pest problem.   Here on Vancouver Island, the Victoria region has its own deer overpopulation problem because they too drove out their wolves and cougars.   Now some want to start rounding them up and shipping them north to where the wolf and cougar populations are already considerable.  Think that's not screwed up?   Wait until you're awakened from a sound sleep in the middle of a summer night by the astonishingly loud purring of a cougar beneath your bedroom window.

Yeah, that's no house cat.

The point is, when you look at these creatures in The Guardian remember that, while it probably won't be apparent to you, each of them has evolved to fill a vital place in some food chain and, when they disappear, don't count on the effects being benign.

A search of this blog turned up an earlier post on a U.N. report that found biodiversity loss is a greater threat to life than global warming.

About Those Collapsing Fish Stocks

It's estimated that the global fishing fleet is more than twice what would be needed to completely fish out the world's oceans.   As fish stocks collapse in one place or another, larger, ocean-ranging vessels move on to the next unlucky target.

Australia is dealing with one of these right now, the second-largest trawler in the world, the Dutch FV Margiris.

At 143-metres long, the Margiris is the largest trawler, by far, to ever enter Australian waters.   It was originally issued permits to take 18,000 tonnes of mackerel and red bait fish but concerns quickly built over the ship's massive by-catch of creatures ranging from sea turtles to dolphins.

 

Finally a flotilla of 200-small boats turned out to blockade the Margiris in port forcing the government's hand.   Now it has imposed a 2-year moratorium on the vessel while it studies its environmental impact.

Gaza To Secede?

Think Pakistan and the independence of Bangladesh.   Now think Palestinian Authority/West Bank and Hamas/Gaza splitting up.  This little jaw dropper seems to be in the works with Hamas, a charter branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, looking to link up with big brother Egypt, itself now with  Muslim Brotherhood leadership.   In effect, Gaza would be severing all ties with both Israel and the rest of the Palestinian territories.

Hamas may be contemplating... ...cutting its financial ties to both Israel and the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank, in preparations for declaring full independence on behalf of Gaza.

Al-Hayat first reported the story on July 22. The London-based Arabic daily noted that Hamas was poised to sever its limited economic ties with Israel, open a free trade zone with Egypt at the Rafah border crossing, and declare itself liberated. Before the story could gain traction, however, senior Hamas leaders Mahmoud al-Zahhar and Salah al-Bardawil quickly disavowed the reports.

But senior Gazan officials quietly acknowledged to me in recent meetings that Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group, and President Mohamed Morsi’s new Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, are actively discussing this controversial idea. Hamas has approached the question patiently since conquering the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority in 2007. Now, after a half decade of economic hardship resulting from the Gaza embargo, the Hamas government appears to believe that 1.7 million Gazans would welcome the free flow of goods above nearly all else.

...Egyptians are particularly ambivalent. In April, Palestine Press quoted an Egyptian official who opposed the move because it would “cause great harm to the Palestinian cause.” 

...Egypt is also deeply reluctant to let Israel off the hook. As long as Israel controls Gaza’s borders, airspace and coastal waters, it is seen as the occupying power. 

Speculative and radical as this sounds, Gaza is a territory and a people facing existential challenges in urgent need of solutions.  A United Nations report found that without great improvements in water, electricity, sanitation and health services, Gaza could be unlivable by 2020.   Something big has to happen - soon.

Enbridge Dummies Up About Chinese Pipeline

Chinese J-20

 

 

 Just who is going to own the proposed Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline?   Could the totalitarian People's Republic of China be one of the owners?   Enbridge tried to change the subject when the question was posed Saturday at the sham federal review panel hearings underway in Edmonton.  The pipeline operator dismissed it as a "red herring" perhaps oblivious to the "red" reference.   For, after all, it's the Red Chinese, those godless Commie Bastards we've cursed for generations, who are on the Northern Gateway's receiving end.    And it'll be tankers belonging to and operated by those same godless Commie Bastards that'll be plying the treacherous Douglas Channel, Dixon Entrance and Hecate Strait putting the British Columbia coast and the livelihood of its residents in peril so they can get the juice they need for their masses of godless Commie warships and godless Commie warplanes and godless Commie tanks.

Calgary lawyer Barry Robinson, acting for three environmental groups from British Columbia, pushed Enbridge at Saturday hearings in Edmonton on the extent of Chinese ownership — not known at this time — and whether it was possible that China might try to take controlling interest in the proposed pipeline.

Robinson noted that China already has purchased a stake in Alberta’s oilsands deposits. Also, Chinese state-owned companies own the refineries in China that would handle the Alberta bitumen.

“Have you ever considered the scenario that China might want to close the loop and take a run at commercial control of the pipeline?” said Robinson, in questions directed to Enbridge officials at the federal Joint Review Panel hearings.

Enbridge vice-president Paul Fisher replied emphatically: “Absolutely not.”

Of course not.   Enbridge would never make a blunder like that, would they?

The "Fuck You" Century

Cash Salutes Nashville

Societal comity may fall an early victim to the stresses of the 21st century.   The cohesion that marked and underpinned a good many of the achievements of the past century seems have become eroded by deliberately devisive politics (the type favoured by miscreants like our own Harper), economic uncertainty and the emergence of the "precariat"; rapidly widening inequality of wealth, income and opportunity, the arrest of social mobility; and the very costly and destabilizing impacts of climate change.   Fringe groups and radicalism turn mainstream.   Moderation, compassion and cooperation are discounted to abject insignificance.  At times, everyone can seem to be on his guard, bracing for whatever unknown is coming next.   It breeds insecurity, suspicion, anger and frustration.   We seem to be coming undone.

Something like this appears to be flourishing in the United States where the Mason-Dixon line of the 19th century is being reborn and the first signs of an all-American Berlin Wall are manifesting.   Chuck Thompson, author of Better Off Without'em; a Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, describes a growing split between the American South and the north.

Wherever I went in the South I was called a socialist.  I was branded anti-American.

For supporting the administration of a sitting U.S. president, I was told that I was in league with the Muslim vanguard of a secret plot to destroy the United States.

Although otherwise respectable reviewers, bloggers and emailers have accused me of seeking out only the opinions of slack-jawed hayfoots slurping moonshine from ceramic jugs during my travels, the truth is that in the South this sort of ugly invective is mainstream orthodoxy.

It’s the same mainframe groupthink that’s going to allow a millionaire corporate flunky with a track record of destroying jobs to carry and very possibly sweep the South in November.

I dealt with the same reactionary slander everywhere I went.   I heard it from small business owners in South Carolina. From working professionals in Alabama. From college-educated football fans in Tennessee.

Southerners love trashing the rest of the country (when did you last hear a kind Rebel word for New York, Detroit or San Francisco?), but when their blood is really up the go-to move down South is to dismiss their fellow citizens as un-American.

“If we secede, the U.S.A. would become Canada South,” an otherwise likable history major at the University of Georgia told me. “We are the real U.S.A.” By “we,” of course, he meant the South.

In no other region of the country is the need to define one’s moral and patriotic superiority such a fixation. Spend 30 minutes in a Southern church or listening to country radio and the self-congratulatory “we’re the salt of the earth” pathos is impossible to miss.

...The Dixie blowtorch that greeted publication of my book was immediate and intense, a collective meltdown of Limbaughnian proportions.

With few exceptions, from mainstream reviews to blogs posts to personal emails, Southerners were ready to hit the “fuck you” button as soon as they so much as caught wind of a Northern critique of the South.

“I’m not going to read your piece of shit, worthless book that is full of lies and false stereotypes,” wrote one of hundreds of knee-jerk non-readers in a typical email. “Go rot in the heat of the South.”

“I haven’t read the book, nor do I plan to,” wrote a chip-on-the-shoulder blogger before going on to lambaste the book anyway, roughly following the script set forth in published reviews by Southerners that misrepresented my argument and then summarily excoriated the presumed wickedness.

The bully smokescreen in the face of criticism is a traditional Southern defense mechanism. The counterblast of moral reprobation from the South that followed the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, produced the publication of no fewer than 14 pro-slavery novels in three years in an effort to debunk the unflattering portrait of slavery presented by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

...Among the more intriguing passages in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers is the section that recounts an experiment conducted at the University of Michigan by researchers measuring anger and loss of temper.

The study tested the short-fuse reactions of young males encountering a pushy stranger in a narrow hallway. The key to the study was a trigger word—“asshole”—used by the stranger to insult test subjects after he’d “accidentally” bumped into them.

Psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett recorded facial expressions and measured levels of testosterone and cortisol (the hormones connected to arousal and aggression) to determine how quickly tempers flared following minor offense. The results were striking.

Wrote Gladwell: “Most of the young men from the northern part of the United States treated the incident with amusement. They laughed it off. Their levels of cortisol actually went down, as if they were unconsciously trying to defuse their own anger. But the Southerners? Oh, my. They were angry. Their cortisol and testosterone jumped.”

In Canada we have been spared America's legacy of civil war but we seem to be pushing each other's buttons well enough to drive our own disharmony.   Our own Prince of Darkness is a grand master at the politics of division.   He has no interest in repairing the rents in the fabric of our nation.

I think America is going to have a much tougher time remaining the United States during the course of this century.   The existing cultural, political and economic divides that mark the red/blue state dichotomy will only increase absent some sort of progressive reformation of the type seen in America at the turn of the last century.   And the ravages of climate change have set in, primarily in the contrarian South.   That will test the generosity and patience of the blue North for their Southern cousins.

We can learn much from the transformation underway in our southern neighbour - the rise of oligarchy and corporatism at the direct expense of democracy; the evolution of the warfare state; the culture wars inflamed by America's powerful demographic shifts particularly in the southwest where Hispanics are poised to reclaim territories forcibly seized from their ancestors.   We ignore those object lessons at our peril for it is Canada's ability to restore a cohesive, robust and united society that will determine how we weather the remainder of this century.

You Need to Set the Bar High This Time

For the Liberal Party this is no time to settle for a pretty face or a familiar name.   You're already in the hole, neck deep to be honest, and one more mistake could be your last for a good long time.

If you want to remain Stephen Harper's water carrier, faithful assistants in his prime directive to shift Canada's political centre out to the right, then you may as well erode to political nothingness.  That's the course charted by the last non-performer, the one who got your party politically court-martialed and cashiered.

Since Harper weaseled his way into office the Libs' hapless response has been to wait for him to self-destruct and then be swept back into power by a repentant electorate.   But Harper was too smart for that.   He never let up.   He kept attacking the Liberals and their leaders.   He was relentless and he prevailed.   So successful was Harper that Layton played the same game with the same results.   Mauled into irrelevance, the Libs fell catatonic, capable of little beyond mumbling about funding for the arts and daycare, until their support atrophied to just their legacy vote.

The NDP always understood the Liberal "sweet spot" at the centre and Layton knew the IgLibs were too (your adjective here) to hold it.   So, as the IgLibs transformed the party into conservative-lite, the NDP shed its socialist skin to become the new liberal party.

At this point you Libs don't need a pretty face, you don't need a celebrity, you need someone to fight your way out of a very deep hole both your opponents are committed to keeping you in.    That means fighting Harper and it means fighting even harder against Mulcair.  Bugger this, "get Harper" business you'll hear from the NDP.  After their years of chicanery in helping Harper get into office and then helping him to his majority, that business about concentrating on Harper doesn't lie in their mouths.  Besides, as Layton knew, the way forward demands you stomp them back into third place.   You can't get into first without taking back second.

So get yourself a leader, one who knows how to fight.   Get yourself a leader who knows the way back runs first straight through the NDP.   Set the bar high.   This may be your last chance for an awfully long time if you don't.

Is America Still Capable of Legitimate Democracy?

With an electorate as deeply divided as America's, it's not unusual for elections to be decided by a point or two.   So what happens if one side disenfranchises nine or ten percent of the electorate, people who just happen to vote overwhelmingly for the other side?   Is that country still capable of real democracy marked by free and fair elections?

America's modern Republicans, a.k.a. the radical right, is using all but non-existant voter fraud to justify voter I.D. laws that will effectively disenfranchise a significant portion of the Democratic voting base.   With evidence showing fewer than a hundred possible cases of voter fraud versus the elimination of many millions of legitimate voters from the rolls, the election is effectively "thrown" to the Republicans.   They have deliberately and ruthlessly corrupted their nation's democracy and fixed the election.

This is the country that prides itself as the greatest democracy in the world and boasts of being the "shining city on the hill" yet without conscience or even reservation entertains this degree of wilful corruption.   This coupled with the emergence of the first true "warfare state" in centuries and the displacement of democracy by corporatism and oligarchy in which the rule of law is now appropriated to the highest bidder.    This is a nation in ruin.

Who, Exactly, Do Americans Fear So Much?

It has become axiomatic in American federal politics that anyone seeking office must support increasing the country's military spending.   The United States already spends more than the rest of the industrialized nations combined and fields the indisputably dominant army, air force and navy in the world.   First in subs, America.   First in bombers, America.   First in missiles, America.   First in everything else military, ditto.

"Gott [Mitt] Uns" Romney is now attacking Obama, claiming his rival wants to cut the military budget.   Obama, instead of defending the obvious rationale of trimming his government's most bloated expenditure, claims he actually wants to increase the Pentagon's budget but wants tax increases on the rich to pay for it.  Romney wants further tax relief for the rich and more billions for the Pentagon which, presumably, will have to be extracted from blue and white collar wage earners.

Obama is pandering to the voting public, so is Romney.   The American people, it seems, have been powerfully indoctrinated to support ever more military expenditure without any rational scrutiny of the threats their country faces.   Fear is no longer a response to threats, it's a commodity in American society, one that can and is ruthlessly exploited for political gain.

And Romney is also claiming that God [Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, even Mormon] is indeed on his side.

Mr Romney appeared with the televangelist Pat Robertson on Saturday in the swing state of Virginia and seized upon the row at last week's Democratic convention sparked when delegates removed language about God from their platform.

After reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, Mr Romney told the crowd: ''I will not take God out of … our platform. I will not take God out of my heart. We are a nation that's bestowed by God.''

The former Massachusetts governor also appeared to imply that Democrats wanted to remove the phrase ''In God We Trust'' from US currency.

 "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition."

If We Ditch Karzai, They'll Ditch al Qaeda?

The Talibs, at least part of them, seem to want a deal.   They'll stand down and sever ties with al Qaeda but only if we, namely the United States, ditches Afghanistan's constitution and Hamid Karzai.  This all comes via a report from the Royal United Services Institute.

The report concludes: "The Taliban would be open to negotiating a ceasefire as part of a general settlement, and also as a bridge between confidence-building measures and the core issue of the distribution of political power in Afghanistan.

"A ceasefire would require strong Islamic justification, obscuring any hint of surrender," it adds.

Even more surprising, in view of the official Taliban propaganda portraying it as leading a struggle against foreign invaders, the report says the insurgents are "prepared to accept a long-term US military presence in Afghanistan".

...The report even suggests that the Taliban would co-operate in tracking down al-Qaida members, noting that the leadership and base "deeply regret" their past association with the global jihadist group.

The report's authors admit they've been dealing with a minority of the Taliban, not the group's actual leadership.   It's tempting, however, and potentially the closest thing the Americans could claim to some sort of victory in Afghanistan.   Yet Karzai remains a problem.   He's said he'll step down in 2014 anyway.   His successor will need the support of the old Northern Alliance warlords representing the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara, Turkmen and other ethnic opposition and they're decidedly anti-Taliban.

Gwynne Dyer Resets His Climate Wars Clock

Rossby.   Remember the name - Rossby.    Because Rossby is something that's going to play an increasing role in your life for the rest of your days, all of'em. 

When you think of Rossby, think floods and droughts, think really severe winters and abnormally warm winters.

Melting Arctic Ocean sea ice is warming that polar region twice the rate of anywhere else on the planet.   Open water where once there was ice absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting its energy back into space.  The warmer surface temperatures warm the atmosphere overhead.  Warmer air holds more water vapour, another potent greenhouse gas.   That warmer, moister air also holds a great deal of energy that's now giving rise to a much more powerful Arctic jet stream.   And, as jet streams are wont to do, it meanders in loops that reach far south that are called Rossby Waves.

For reasons apparently still unknown these Rossby Waves have gotten larger, reaching much further south, but have also slowed to a crawl.   So, instead of a nice temperate pattern of alternating rain and sunshine, the sort we have relied on for our agriculture since we stumbled upon that idea, we now get extensive, sustained droughts and, in other places, severe flooding.

The Guardian's George Monbiot wrote about Rossby recently.    Now Gwynne Dyer, who usually sticks to military affairs, is discussing it.

I’m no fan of Don Rumsfeld, who helped lead the United States into the disastrous invasion of Iraq when he was George W. Bush’s defence secretary, but I never had a problem with the distinction he made between “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” when discussing the intelligence data. He was brutally mocked in the media for using such jargon, but there really is a difference.

A “known unknown,” in the case of the Arctic Ocean, is how long it will be before the entire sea is ice-free at the end of each summer. The last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, talked about that happening some time in the second half of this century, but it couldn’t be more specific.

The panel usually underestimates the rate of climatic change, but even the pessimists didn’t think we’d get there before the 2030s. I did encounter one maverick at the National Ice and Snow Data Centre who thought it might happen in this decade, but nobody actually knew. A “known unknown,” in other words.

As for the impact that an ice-free Arctic Ocean might have on climates elsewhere, it would obviously accelerate the global warming trend, but beyond that there wasn’t much to go on. This was the territory of the “unknown unknowns.” Big things might happen to the complex atmospheric system of the planet when a major chunk of it suddenly changes, but nobody knew what.

Now we begin to see the consequences. The polar jet stream — an air current that circles the globe in the higher northern latitudes and separates cold, wet weather to the north from warmer, drier weather to the south — is changing its behaviour.

...a warmer Arctic reduces the temperature gradient between the temperate and polar zones. That, in turn, slows the wind speeds in the zone between the two and increases the “wave amplitude” of the jet stream. The jet stream flows around the planet in great swooping curves, like a river crossing a flat plain, and those curves — Rossby waves, in scientific language — are getting bigger and slower.

This is a recipe for extreme weather. In the old days, the Rossby waves went past fast, bringing the alternating of rainy and sunny weather that characterized the mid-latitude climate. Now, they hang around much longer and generate more extreme weather events: droughts and heat waves, or prolonged rain and flooding, or blizzards and long, hard freezes.

The temperate zone has been seeing a lot of that sort of thing in the past couple of years — much more than usual. It’s cutting deeply into food production in the major breadbaskets of the planet, such as the U.S. Midwest and southern Russia, which is why food prices are going up so fast. This was an “unknown unknown.” Nobody saw it coming.

All the scenarios that the militaries of various countries were working with assumed that climate change would hit food production very hard in the tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world, and that is still true. But the scenarios also assumed that the temperate regions of the planet would still be able to feed themselves well (and even have a surplus left over to export) for many decades to come.

Dyer understands the military dimension to this.   He wrote about it in Climate Wars based on research and studies undertaken by the Pentagon, Britain's Ministry of Defence and prominent climate scientists.   A couple of years later he wrote Crawling from the Wreckage in which he turned optimistic, basically relying on a "belief" that we would act in time, that we wouldn't really let this get out of our control, oh surely not.  Dyer envisioned that we'd jettison fossil fuels and transition rapidly into the carbon-free world of nuclear, solar, wind and geo-thermal energy.   Then again, he believed what many scientists then believed, that we had at least a few decades to make that alternative energy world a reality.   They believed a lot of what is happening today and will see over the coming decade wouldn't set in until the end of this century.   This is the still mildly hopeful Dwyer of 2008:



Now Dyer is having his "nobody saw it coming " moment.   He realizes it's already here, it has us in its grip and there's little to nothing we're going to do about it.   If you doubt that, just look to Ottawa.  Stephen Harper is gazing at Arctic seabed oil and gas as though the world needs another huge source of massive carbon emissions.   And Mulcair?   Ever hear "Rossby" cross his lips?   These guys have jumped into a hole and pulled the lid over their heads.   They're Petro-Pols, the lot of them.  It's a Petro-Parliament, Elizabeth May excepted.   Time is not on our side or any other country's.   In fact the Arctic oscillation shows how rapidly and severely we're being overtaken by events.

So, barring some near religious conversion on the floor of the House of Commons, you're on your own.   Hang on, it's going to be a wild ride.

Canada's Deputy Prime Minister Praises Steve Harper, Sort Of

Steve's biggest fan, Israel's Benny Netanyahu, has sung praises of Canada's p.m. for severing diplomatic ties with Iran.   Canada said it acted because Iran was a terrorist state supporting Assad in Syria.  Apparently Netanyahu didn't get the right script.  He says we ditched Iran because of nuclear weapons - that don't exist.

About that Death Spiral Thingee

We had ten, maybe fifteen, years to find the sort of common resolve to mobilize our resources and focus them on the maladies that afflict us collectively.   We did nothing.

We had our "To Do" list from the outset - global warming and climate change; deforestation; desertification; air, soil and water contamination of all sorts; severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity; both sustained and cyclical drought and floods; species migration and extinction, particularly the world's fisheries; disease and pest migration; sea level rise, coastal inundation and salination of freshwater resources; massive over-consumption of renewable resources, particularly freshwater surface and groundwater reserves; depletion and exhaustion of non-renewable resources; overpopulation and population migration; food insecurity and a host of global security challenges including major power realignments, terrorism, regional arms races and nuclear proliferation.  I may actually have overlooked a few.

Out of those items enumerated, on how many have we, the world community, reached consensus to act?   How many of them have we at least brought under control, stopped from worsening?  How many of them have we actually fixed or resolved?   Three questions and all with the same answer.   The very same answer.

Most of these are palpable, tangible, measurable, a good many even visible to the naked eye from space.   Their reality is beyond debate, impervious to obfuscation.   Perhaps that is why they're simply excluded from our political discourse.

We aren't acting and we're not going to act.   That's beyond obvious.   As Jared Diamond points out so well in his book Collapse, you can't solve any of these without solving them all and the solutions to them all are apparent from the common threads that run through them.   Once you look at them collectively and spot the common threads the solutions become apparent.   The solutions are relatively simple but enormous in their magnitude, far beyond anything the leaders of most of the world community would be willing to entertain.

So if we won't act, the remaining option is to react.  It's an exercise in ultimate futility but it's powerfully instinctual, ingrained and even institutionalized in our modern civilization.   Here's how Chris Hedges sees this new reality, the one we'll be left to react to:

When I was a boy and came to this coast on duck hunting trips with my uncle, fishing communities were vibrant. The fleets caught haddock, cod, herring, hake, halibut, swordfish, pollock and flounder. All these fish have vanished from the area, victims of commercial fishing that saw huge trawlers rip up the seafloor and kill the corals, bryozoans, tubeworms and other species that nurtured new schools of fish. The trawlers left behind barren underwater wastelands of mud and debris. It is like this across the planet. Forests are cut down. Water is contaminated. Air is saturated with carbon emissions. Soil is depleted. Acidity levels in the oceans skyrocket. Atmospheric temperatures soar. And someone, somewhere, makes obscene sums of money from it. Corporations, indifferent to what is sacred, see the death of the planet as another investment opportunity. They are scurrying to mine the exposed polar waters for the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals and fish. And since the corporations dictate our relationship to the ecosystem on which we depend for life, the chances of our survival look bleaker and bleaker. The final phase of 5,000 years of settled human activity ends with collective insanity.

“All my means are sane,” Captain Ahab says of his suicidal pursuit of Moby-Dick, “my motive and my object mad.”

...Our political leaders, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in our demise. Our political system, like that in the declining days of ancient Rome, is one of legalized bribery. Politicians, including Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, serve the demented ends of corporations that will, until the final flicker of life, attempt to profit from our death spiral. Civil disobedience, including the recent decision by Greenpeace activists to chain themselves to a Gazprom supply vessel and obstruct a Russian oil rig, is the only meaningful form of resistance. Voting is useless. But while I support these heroic acts of resistance I increasingly fear they may have little effect. This does not mean we should not resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. We cannot use the word “hope” if we do not fight back. But the corporations will employ deadly force to protect their drive to extract the last bit of profit from life. We can expect only mounting hostility from the corporate state. Its internal and external security apparatus, as the heedless exploitation and its fatal consequences become more apparent, will seek to silence and crush all dissidents. Corporations care nothing for democracy, the rule of law, human rights or the sanctity of life. They are determined to be the last predator standing. And then they too will be snuffed out. Unrestrained hubris always leads to self-immolation.

The Guardian's enviro-scribe and author, George Monbiot, writes of a world gone mad.


Our governments do nothing. Having abandoned any pretence of responding to the environmental crisis during the earth summit in June, now they stare stupidly as the ice on which we stand dissolves. Nothing – or worse than nothing. Their one unequivocal response to the melting has been to facilitate the capture of the oil and fish it exposes.

The companies which caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday, Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk. After turning its Arctic lands in the Komi Republic into the Niger Delta of the north (repeated oil spills are left unremediated in the tundra), Russia [and Harper] wants to extend this industry into one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, where ice, storms and darkness make decontamination almost impossible.

 Is this how our children will see it: that we destroyed the benign conditions which made our world of wonders possible, then used the opportunity to amplify the damage? All of us, of course, can claim to have acted with other aims in mind, or not to have acted at all, as the other immediacies of life seemed more important. But – unless we respond at last – the results follow as surely as if we had sought to engineer them.

Stupidity, greed, passivity? Just as comparisons evaporate, so do these words. The ice, that solid platform on which, we now discover, so much rested, melts into air. Our pretensions to peace, prosperity and progress are likely to follow. “And like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve.”

I expect Stephen Harper hasn't spent much time on Shakespeare whether it be The Tempest or Macbeth or (more aptly) even Richard III.  More's the pity.   The weekend news is of his closed doors, sit down with Vlad Putin, at which the two miscreants explored options for exploiting Arctic seabed oil and gas reserves.   Really, in a world that already has five times more identified fossil fuel reserves than our civilization can possibly endure and survive, they want to dig up vastly more.

Putin and Harper are detached from reality.   They see the world in a twenty-year time frame beyond which lies, in their minds, a greyness of obscurity.   They have convinced themselves they can't possibly see into the future so they should simply ignore the warnings of science.  But, as Monbiot writes, the results of their neglect shall follow as surely as if they had sought to engineer them.

I'll take heed of another warning from Shakespeare, from King Lear, Act III:

"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health,
a boy's love, or a whore's oath."

A Canadian Nightmare? Maybe We Should Find Another Way.

Because We Can.   Those three words may be apt to describe the Western mentality from the second half of the 20th century onward.   In the past tense they may make a fitting epitaph for our civilization.

Because We Can informs a sort of consciousness that is inherently self-destructive.  It is a mode of thought that pays lip service to other considerations while placing above them the maximization of production and consumption.   Balance, caution, restraint and everything else that impedes the prime directive are discarded, albeit rarely overtly, as either irrelevant or simply too inconvenient.   If it can be done it must be done and it shall be done.

The Arctic sea bed perfectly illustrates the point.   Believed to hold a vast reserve of oil and gas, the Because We Can-types, like our own prime monster, virtually soil themselves in anticipation of the day when sea ice is no longer an impediment to their rapacious appetites and dreams of economic superpowerdom.

Given that existing known reserves of fossil fuels represent, in terms of carbon emissions, fully five-fold the remaining carbon-carrying capacity of the atmosphere if our grandkids are to enjoy at least a bearable world, the Arctic reserves are patently, ridiculously redundant.   Except that they're ours and except that we are ruled by political and corporate leadership who take communion at the Church of Because We Can.

It's a trite observation that corporations are inherently sociopathic.   That's because they're businesses, not people, something conveniently overlooked by the USSC in Citizens United.  When corporatism dominates the political sphere, it too may become functionally sociopathic.   This is manifest in the radical rightwing of the U.S. Congress and our own federal government in its reckless obsession with achieving short-term superpowerdom at perhaps any cost to our country, to future generations of Canadians, to the world itself.

Unfortunately, the opposition is a reluctant adversary, unwilling to hold a mirror to Harper, to present an alternative vision to Because We Can.   Perhaps as a society we're already too far gone for cultural rehabilitation, too wedded ourselves to the promised bounty of Because We Can, too fearful to face much less embrace alternatives.   Yet, even if all those things were true, does that excuse the opposition from at least trying to show us another course, one far more accommodating to our children and grandchildren and generations far beyond them?   There is reason to fear that Because We Can has become our default mode and, should that be the case, the worst case, we're going to need leadership that eclipses all of the current offerings of both opposition parties before we'll have any hope of changing course.   Until then, for me, it's "none of the above." 

Do We Really Need Des to Tell Us This?

Desmond Tutu wants Tony Blair and George w. Bush tossed into the prisoners' dock before the International Criminal Court.   The Archbishop wants the pair tried for the invasion of Iraq.

Tutu, a Nobel peace prize winner and hero of the anti-apartheid movement, accuses the former British and US leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction and says the invasion left the world more destabilised and divided "than any other conflict in history".

Writing in the Observer, Tutu also suggests the controversial US and UK-led action to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003 created the backdrop for the civil war in Syria and a possible wider Middle East conflict involving Iran.

"The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain," Tutu argues, "fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us."

But it is Tutu's call for Blair and Bush to face justice in The Hague that is most startling. Claiming that different standards appear to be set for prosecuting African leaders and western ones, he says the death toll during and after the Iraq conflict is sufficient on its own for Blair and Bush to be tried at the ICC.

"On these grounds, alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in The Hague," he says.

Unfortunately the noble Archbishop doesn't get the doctrine of "victors' justice" that guarantees the world will have to do a considerable degree of changing before any head of state of countries like the U.S. or Britain will be standing before the International Court of Justice.  

For his part, Tony Blair, wasted no time responding.

In a statement, Blair strongly contested Tutu's views and said Iraq was now a more prosperous country than it had been under Saddam Hussein. "I have a great respect for Archbishop Tutu's fight against apartheid – where we were on the same side of the argument – but to repeat the old canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown.

Yeah, sure, Tony.

U.S. "Suspends" Afghan Police Training

Apparently yielding to the Taliban, American forces in Afghanistan have suspended training of Afghan Local Police recruits.   The Afghan recruits, it appears, have become too heavily infiltrated by the Taliban leading to too many "green on blue" deaths of Western soldiers.   The Americans have called time out in order to "re-vet" the ALP ranks to try to ferret out other infiltrators.

Despite the stated goal of having a 350,000 Afghan security force (police and army) trained and ready by the end of the year, it's obvious the whole business has turned into a shambles.   Recent reports indicate of the 170,000 now notionally on the books, the actual number of effectives may be barely over 100,000 with desertion rates topping 30%.   At this rate Afghanistan's own security personnel may be gone before we are.

How America's Job-Creator-In-Chief Actually Made his Fortune

In a much overlooked piece from Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi chronicled how Mitt Romney actually made his mega-fortune and, here's a hint, it wasn't a process of job creation.   No, Romney became super-rich by, "borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back."

"This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

"By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House."

Robert Reich has this great video explanation of the Romney scam.

And This is Democracy, the Greatest Democracy?

From the HBO series, The Newsroom



And then there's Clint

That's It, We're Done - Sorry Guys

Women may soon not need men to procreate.   Welsh scientists have managed to create sperm from a female human embryo and figure they may do even better using female bone marrow.   The breakthrough suggests it may become possible for lesbian couples to have their own biological children, sans the standard male sperm donor.

But wait, that means that any woman, regardless of gender orientation, would be able to have children without the need for a male participant.   We're done.   We'll be as obsolete as mechanical typewriters or horse-drawn ploughs.   And, once we're seen as redundant, how long before we're seen as outcasts?   Then it will be women who only want us for one thing, maybe.

The Elusive Reality of Afghanistan

Now, after more than a decade of accomplishing astonishingly little, Western military leaders are working hard on polishing the narrative for their war in Afghanistan.  It's unclear who they plan to finger as the fall guy but it will undoubtedly begin with, "we won all the battles."

Yes, we won all the battles - the battles that didn't really matter.   How could we not have won?  We had our enemy outnumbered.   We alone had the artillery, tanks, armoured vehicles, attack helicopters, jet fighters and drones.   They were outnumbered farmers armed with Korean War vintage assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades plus masses of high explosive left over from the Soviet days.

Now we're supposedly packing up, getting ready to hand the war back to the Afghans.   We're supposedly training a new, effective Afghan army to continue the battle against the Taliban.  All's well that ends well, right?   Apparently not.

EVERY night, as the evening call to prayer ends its slow passage across the dusty Afghan army training centre on the outskirts of Kabul, hundreds of Afghan army recruits tread a weary path from the drill fields to the prefabricated barrack houses where they sleep. Once inside, a senior Afghan National Army officer goes from dormitory to dormitory locking the doors. From the outside.

The soldiers, who spend 10 weeks undergoing basic training before being posted into service, are sealed inside their barracks to try to stop them slipping off during the night. It is all part of the frantic effort by NATO-led forces to bolster the ranks of the Afghan National Army (ANA) in the lead-up to the withdrawal of most of the Western military troops by 2014.

Yet, the nightly lockdown lays bare the many uncertainties and contradictions that underlie the confident rhetoric of Western political leaders that they are building up the Afghan army to be the primary bulwark against ''re-Talibanisation'' of Afghanistan.

...Several senior ISAF officers in Kabul have recently confirmed to The Saturday Age that the issue of ''insider threat'' is the top priority for international forces during this fighting season.

All combat deaths are harrowing, but those caused by firefights and the now infamous improvised explosive devices do not sap morale in quite the same way as attacks from the people who are meant to be on your side.

What is worrying seasoned observers is that insider attacks are becoming, it seems, the latest tactic of choice for the Taliban, which cannot prevail against the vastly better-equipped Western forces in conventional combat. Last year green-on-blue attacks claimed the lives of 35 foreign soldiers under ISAF command.

This year, there have been 48 such deaths, including those on Wednesday - and there are still four months of the year to run.

 ...the evidence is mounting that the spike in green-on-blue casualties is all part of a deliberate strategy by the Taliban, backed by its allies in Pakistan and Iran's intelligence services.

Leading defence and strategic analyst Professor Alan Dupont, a former army intelligence officer now at the University of New South Wales, says the use of Afghan soldiers to attack the West is a ''thought-through strategy and program'' by the Taliban.

''It is supported by the intelligence services of, I believe, Iran and Pakistan as a way of inflicting the most psychological and political impact on the Western forces there,'' Dupont told The Saturday Age.

''And it's a clever strategy. There is no question that the Pakistani [intelligence service] is covertly supporting the Taliban and to some extent strategising and directing a lot of it.''

A former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp, believes there is much more to come.

''It's a horrible thing to say, but it's just another insurgency tactic,'' he told ABC Radio yesterday. ''I think they [green-on-blue attacks] will increase. They [the Taliban] are determined to make sure that we appear to leave with a bloody nose.''

...it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that the Afghan army is progressing with anything like the speed ISAF desires.

Recent data published by the Pentagon suggests the attrition rate in the ANA in the 12 months to November last year was a staggering 32 per cent, of which the overwhelming majority were soldiers deserting their posts.

And while the Afghan army has a listed strength of about 175,000 and must reach 300,000 soldiers by 2014, senior officers in Kabul suggest the reality is that there is probably something like 100,000 Afghan soldiers actually on duty.

If we can't even leave behind a functioning, reliable Afghan Army capable of defending the country into the foreseeable future, what have we achieved?  

We owe it to the men and women who served Canada so well in Afghanistan to get to the bottom of where this all went so wrong.   We need to explore and understand the utter failure of our civilian and military leadership and that is going to mean accepting the unvarnished truth and rejecting the spin that's already being readied to spoon-feed the folks at home.   We went there to achieve something, or did we?

What Romney-Ryan Might Mean to Canada

What would a Romney/Ryan win mean for the U.S. and for Canada?   No one can tell for sure, of course, but we can probably get a rough idea of what might lie in store.

Romney-Ryan might see a power-sharing between POTUS and VPOTUS even more powerful than under Bush-Cheney.   Today's radicalized Republican party insiders know an easy mark when they see one and they're going to be holding plenty of Romney's markers.   With Ryan as VEEP they don't just have the camel's nose under the tent, they've got the whole camel inside.

Romney's patented fecklessness would be challenged to defy Ryan radicalism backed by an equally radicalized Republican Congress.   Romney, by most accounts, is easy meat when faced with internal insurrection.  He chose Ryan to quell the doubts of Republicans who viewed him as weak and unreliable.   If he wins in November, Romney may reap the whirlwind of that decision.

Ryan is the unabashed agent of oligarchy.   The lie-riddled speech he delivered to the Republican convention demonstrated conclusively the ease with which he flies false flags even before the home crowd.   His purposes are effectively matched to those of the richest of the rich.   He would gut Medicare and Medicaid, grant further tax cuts to the rich and increase the tax burden of blue and white collar workers, slash government programmes and, if he ever got the chance, exempt dividends and capital gains from taxation altogether.   In effect he would create an America in which Romney and his kind would flourish, tax free.

Ryan and his Congressional allies would also accelerate global warming by blocking any and all initiatives to curb or tax carbon emissions or to promote alternative, clean energy.    There will be no global treaty on climate change from a Ryan-Romney administration.

In other words, Romney-Ryan could be expected to shackle American democracy; gut the country's already flimsy social safety net; sharply increase the already massive gap between rich and poor; worsen inequality in wealth, income and opportunity; nurture and expand America's hyper-militarism; alienate what remains of America's allies and grievously set back any hope for action on climate change.

Some hope that Romney, once elected, would revert to the moderate Republican of the past.   That would mean, however, standing up to the very interests that delivered him the White House and doing that with Paul Ryan at his back.   That would be a Herculean challenge for a man of great integrity and courage, a man decidedly stronger than Willard Mitt Romney.

The sort of social engineering and nation dismantling we might expect from Romney-Ryan would likely wreck the already wobbly United States and inflict incalculable damage on the international community.   None would find this more challenging - and dangerous - than Canada.

Harper would have to choose between following his heart and base ideological instincts, which would mean bringing Canada into compliance with an American lurch to the radical right as a dutiful branch plant operation or doing the right thing by Canada and the Canadian people and breaking from this madness, something Harper would probably find unimagineable.   With Canada already tightly lashed to the United States, it's almost inconceivable that Harper would take an axe to those ropes and cut us free.

The forces of corporatism in Canada would secure a powerful boost from a Romney-Ryan victory in Washington.  It would be much harder to resist the radical right's pull to conform with Harper holding power.  

In Defence of Alarmists

It goes something like this:

"Hey, what's with that smoke coming from the kitchen?"

"Oh, relax. Don't be an alarmist. We're only halfway through the second period with the score tied.   We can deal with the smoke after the game."

The old denialist crowd, the Fossil Fuelers and their fringe sidekicks, have finally had the outright denialism beaten out of them but they're not finished yet.   Their second line of defence is the "alarmism" argument.   Yeah, okay, global warming is happening and it may be largely man-made but so what?  It's really nothing to get worked up about.    Don't listen to the other side, they're alarmists.

They may be down to scraping the bottom of the barrel but those scrapings can still have a useful impact on delaying meaningful action on arrest global warming.   Every child can play "is too, is not."

Striking the alarmism chord is appealing to a good many people, including plenty of intelligent types.  It gives them badly needed reassurance, however tenuous, that what they keep seeing and reading about really isn't as bad as it looks, as it is.

In the northern hemisphere it's only been the past few years that we've been experiencing a lot of really severe impacts of climate change.   Russia's drought, wildfires and crop failures.   Britain's sustained drought followed by sustained flooding.   Europe's deep freeze winter that reached south far enough to freeze Venice.   North America's super mild winter, early spring and summer mega-drought.   Heat waves, flash floods and cluster tornadoes but we're just getting the first taste of our new climate reality.

Besides, linking all these is, well, alarmist.   And there the flat-earthers are right on the money.   It is pretty damned alarming what's unfolding, deservedly so.   Then again, isn't everyone who spots the smoke and flames and pulls the fire alarm an "alarmist?"

Meanwhile, George Monbiot proclaims that yesterday marked the day the world went mad. 

Now Imagine, Thousands of These Being Dropped On Your Town Overnight

They call it a "huge" bomb but it was nothing of the sort.   Just an ordinary 500-pounder of the type dropped by the thousands in bombing raids over Germany in WWII.  But, because there aren't many remaining who experienced that sort of mayhem, here's a video of a bomb the Germans had to detonate in Munich.   Remember, this is just one bomb, detonated under controlled conditions.  

Our Prime Minister's Warped Vision for the Arctic

When Stephen Harper looks at the ice-free Arctic Ocean he sees opportunity.   In the stunted mind of our petro-addled prime minister, no ice means one thing - access to untapped reserves of oil beneath the seabed and he means to have at it.

But what's really important to Canada and the future of our country is what Steve doesn't see, what he refuses to see and will not accept.   That is what's going on above his head in the skies over the newly ice-free Arctic.

It took the boffins at Britain's Hadley Meteorological Centre to figure out that something way up north must be causing global weirding across the northern hemisphere.   The droughts and wildfires that swept Russia.   The sustained drought followed by massive flooding that beset once climatically benign Britain.   The severe winter ice storms that pummeled Europe as far south as Venice.   The megadrought that struck America's breadbasket this summer.

The science types at Hadley put two and two together and realized that an ice-free Arctic would be a substantially warmer Arctic and that the warmer surface would then significantly warm the Arctic atmosphere and its usually docile jet stream.   And, as the northern jet lurched about like a loose cannon on deck, it would mess up seasonal conditions across the northern hemisphere.   So, like it or not, climate change has landed on our doorstep, big time, and so long as we continue to worsen our inputs, primarily greenhouse gas emissions, what we're experiencing will worsen.

As George Monbiot points out, we're now expecting to see changes by the end of this decade that the IPCC recently forecast to arrive, in its worst case scenario, by the end of the century.

Maybe, as Steve dreams of seabed petro-riches, he assures himself that we'll geo-engineer our way out of this mess somehow.   Well, he's almost ensuring that we'll eventually resort to some sort of "last resort" geo-engineering.   And, as we break the geo-engineering taboo, so will plenty of others in distant corners of the world in forms supposedly suitable for their local conditions.   And then we'll learn that geo-engineering doesn't offer a global fix to a global problem but merely shifts problems from one place onto others.  Worse yet, the mix of geo-engineering "solutions" may well make overall conditions more severe in short order.

Over the years I have come to accept that a problem of this magnitude cannot be tackled when it remains well down our priority list.  It's simply too big for that approach and it's getting much bigger faster than we had ever imagined.   So, how does it get moved to the top of the pile?   Who dares give it the priority without which our best efforts are doomed to fall far short?   How bad will conditions on the ground have to get before we finally act?   How far will we have fallen behind by then?  Who will pay for our neglect?  I'm pretty sure it won't be Steve.

Look, It's Here, Now Get Off Your Ass and Demand Action

The Guardian's lead enviro-scribe and author, George Monbiot, offers a realistic but troubling assessment of how mankind has allowed itself to become overrun by global warming.  Even progressives, probably out of feelings of haplessness, have remained largely passive.

What we are seeing, here and now, is the transformation of the atmospheric physics of this planet. Three weeks before the likely minimum, the melting of Arctic sea ice has already broken the record set in 2007. The daily rate of loss is now 50% higher than it was that year. The daily sense of loss – of the world we loved and knew – cannot be quantified so easily.

...This great dissolution, of ice and certainties, is happening so much faster than most climate scientists predicted that, one of them reports, “it feels as if everything I’ve learned has become obsolete.” In its last assessment, published in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that “in some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century.” These were the most extreme forecasts in the panel’s range. Some scientists now forecast that the disappearance of Arctic sea ice in late summer could occur in this decade or the next.

...The melting disperses another belief: that the temperate parts of the world – where most of the rich nations are located – will be hit last and least, while the poorer nations will be hit first and worst. New knowledge of the way in which the destruction of the Arctic sea ice affects northern Europe and North America suggests that this is no longer true. A paper published earlier this year in Geophysical Research Letters shows that Arctic warming is likely to be responsible for the extremes now hammering the once-temperate nations.

The north polar jet stream is an air current several hundred kilometres wide, travelling eastwards around the hemisphere. It functions as a barrier, separating the cold, wet weather to the north from the warmer, drier weather to the south. Many of the variations in our weather are caused by great travelling meanders – or Rossby waves – in the jet stream.

Arctic heating, the paper shows, both slows the Rossby waves and makes them steeper and wider. Instead of moving on rapidly, the weather gets stuck. Regions to the south of the stalled meander wait for weeks or months for rain; regions to the north (or underneath it) wait for weeks or months for a break from the rain. Instead of a benign succession of sunshine and showers, we get droughts or floods. During the winter a slow, steep meander can connect us directly to the polar weather, dragging severe ice and snow far to the south of its usual range. This mechanism goes a long way towards explaining the shift to sustained – and therefore extreme – weather patterns around the northern hemisphere.

...Our governments do nothing. Having abandoned any pretence of responding to the environmental crisis during the earth summit in June, now they stare stupidly as the ice on which we stand dissolves. Nothing – or worse than nothing. Their one unequivocal response to the melting has been to facilitate the capture of the oil and fish it exposes.

The companies which caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday, Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk. After turning its Arctic lands in the Komi Republic into the Niger Delta of the north (repeated oil spills are left unremediated in the tundra), Russia wants to extend this industry into one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, where ice, storms and darkness make decontamination almost impossible.

...Is this how our children will see it: that we destroyed the benign conditions which made our world of wonders possible, then used the opportunity to amplify the damage? All of us, of course, can claim to have acted with other aims in mind, or not to have acted at all, as the other immediacies of life seemed more important. But – unless we respond at last – the results follow as surely as if we had sought to engineer them.

In a sane world, progressives would see global warming as their dominant concern.   It eclipses reproductive rights, gender equality, the lot for it determines whether our world will remain capable of sustaining any civilization and not just in Africa or equatorial regions.  Climate change will be the defining factor for the world our children and our grandchildren will inherit.  We are writing their future today and it's being written indelibly.   Our political classes, the opposition included, are, at their best, catatonic.   The very notion of recognizing the enormity of this threat much less doing anything meaningful about it is utterly beyond them.   Meanwhile subordinate governments, provincial and municipal, are focusing on battening down the hatches, half-heartedly preparing to meet looming climate change impacts.   Our targets are set at slowing the spread of this malignancy, not beating it back, even as our parliamentary petro-pols work furiously to push through the export of the filthiest petroleum in the world, bitumen.

Yes, we have acted as though climate change was something we could simply export to the Third World.  Why should we worry too much when they endure the droughts and the floods, out of sight - out of mind?   Yet as we saw in the deep freeze that hit Europe last winter, the widespread flooding of Britain in the spring and in the scorching drought that hit North America this summer, we're suddenly in this right up to our necks.   Sure we're not at the point yet where 2012's mega-drought and agricultural collapse will recur constantly but it doesn't have to.   The impacts from this drought will be felt for at least one, possibly two more years.  If these droughts begin appearing every few years the effects will be cumulative and could become catastrophic.   Should that happen we might well wish we could take back those subsidies and direct investment Ottawa has poured into the Tar Sands.

Fortunately for us, the denialist community is now utterly discredited.   They waged their delaying action all too well but they relied on public relations, not science, and thus could never prevail.  But there's one denialist sector that's still holding out, the one we elect.

BIC for Her - You Ladies Love'em

BIC has released a special, "Cristal for Her" ball pen.   Some of the reviews on Amazon.com have been hilarious.   Here are just a few:

"Someone has answered my gentle prayers and FINALLY designed a pen that I can use all month long! I use it when I'm swimming, riding a horse, walking on the beach and doing yoga. It's comfortable, leak-proof, non-slip and it makes me feel so feminine and pretty! Since I've begun using these pens, men have found me more attractive and approchable. It has given me soft skin and manageable hair and it has really given me the self-esteem I needed to start a book club and flirt with the bag-boy at my local market. My drawings of kittens and ponies have improved, and now that I'm writing my last name hyphenated with the Robert Pattinson's last name, I really believe he may some day marry me! I'm positively giddy. Those smart men in marketing have come up with a pen that my lady parts can really identify with."

"...when I saw these, I had to get them. The normal black pen casings are just so hard on the eyes. It was like a breath of fresh air to see lady colored pens. For once, I don't have to grip a giant, man-sized pen just to sign receipts at Saks. And the ink just hits the paper so smoothly, not at all like the rough, gritty man ink in Bic's normal pens. My only complaint is that they are a bit finnicky. When I was copying down recipes from my neighbor, it worked just fine, but as soon as I sat down with the bills, nothing. It wouldn't work! But that's okay, my woman brain gets all muddled trying to figure out finances anyway."

"I love BIC Cristal for Her! The delicate shape and pretty pastel colors make it perfect for writing recipe cards, checks to my psychologist (I'm seeing him for a case of the hysterics), and tracking my monthly cycle. Obviously, I don't use it for vulgar endeavors like math or filling out a voter application, but BIC Cristal for Her is a lovely little writing utensil all the same. Ask your husband for some extra pocket money so you can buy one today!"

"First of all I'm a male. I picked a pink one up by mistake to write a quick note... Next thing I know I'm sitting down to take a pee. Be careful."

"This product is fantastic for those days when my prose is suffering from that not-so-fresh feeling. It even fits conveniently in my purse, and I don't have to feel embarrassed if it accidentally falls out when I'm searching for the tight white pants I'm going to wear while horseback riding on the beach. If I could count that high, I'd give this product SIX stars."