Giant Tar Sands Lakes for Athabasca

Big Oil has figured out it's way too expensive to fill in their bitumen mines with soil and far, far cheaper to simply transform them into lakes.

Here's the kicker.   Big Oil says we'll have to wait for several generations to find out whether these lakes turn into pristine ponds or toxic pits.   They call it an industrial experiment.

It may take a century to find out what is left around Fort McMurray. Because the lakes, 30 of them, will be built by Canada’s oil sands industry. When the companies mining heavy crude from northeastern Alberta finish their work, they intend to pump water into old mine pits, some with toxic effluent at their bottoms, before leaving the area to biological processes to restore it to health.

If those plans go according to form, oil sands miners will leave behind broad stretches of new shore perched beside waters clean enough for fish and people. Success on this front would vindicate industry pledges to limit the mark it leaves on an area now home to sprawling open-pit mines.

But the coming lake district also highlights the scale of the ecological gamble under way in the province. The 30 bodies of water will be what are known as end pit lakes, left behind because it’s less costly to fill a mine with water than dirt. Their size and scale are laid out in a new document produced by Alberta’s industry-funded Cumulative Environmental Management Association.

“This is a total crapshoot, in the sense that no one has ever done this before. But really, what are your options?” said one person familiar with the report, which will be released this week.

Perhaps the only certainty is that the lake district will cover substantial ground. The exact size is subject to changing mining plans – including some from projects not yet built – but it seems likely they will take up, in aggregate, more than 100 square kilometres as part of a series of artificial watersheds spreading over 2,500 square kilometres. By comparison, Toronto occupies 630 square kilometres.

The lakes are a project that will engage several generations. Each stands to take a century of work to plan, mine out and establish into a functioning ecological feature. From the moment workers end mining and begin filling the lakes, it could take fully 40 years before governments begin certifying them as environmentally sustainable, the 436-page CEMA report estimates.

Now imagine if you could rob a bank and the tellers agreed to give you a hundred year head start before they called the cops.   And remember, these are the same companies that, until very recently, ran TV ads pledging to restore these pits to pristine condition, as good or better than they found them.

The Right Will Howl Tonight

Income inequality seems to have sprung up as a hot issue in the American elections.    With a consummate rent-seeker, Mitt Romney, carrying the Republican banner, America's crippling inequality - income, wealth and opportunity -  was bound to bubble to the surface.

Today's American Right (no, they're not conservatives) has reacted like junkyard dogs at the mention of inequality.  It sends them howling about "class warfare" and "unearned wealth."  We can expect to hear plenty of their growling tonight and for days to come.

Americans are taught to honour their flag, not to spit in church and to recoil in dread and panic at the utterance of the words "class warfare."  They're brought up to believe that class warfare = socialism = communism = totalitarianism and the destruction of private property.

But it's helpful to remember that it isn't Mitt's 47% or the entire 99% that are fueling class warfare.   In fact they've been on the receiving end of a powerful, divisive and destructive class war launched under Ronald Reagan that continues today.  Two years before Barack Obama was elected President, billionaire investor Warren Buffet got to the bottom of it:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

And that may just be what this election will be all about - whether Class Warriors like Romney manage to cement the work begun by Ronald Reagan.  That's not to say that Obama would make everything right again, he won't.   And, if he tried, America's "bought and paid for" Congress in both camps would thwart his efforts.

No, just as the neo-cons knew they needed a seismic event (9/ll) to springboard their perverted supremacist ideology, progressivism may need a similar scale, economic event to coalesce  blue and white collar workers in opposition to America's rentier class and the Congress that is in their service.  It's really just a matter of when.

Watts, Charlie Watts

This is about as close as you can hope to get to the Stones' epic drummer, Charlie Watts.  In Old Gods, Nearly Dead, the narrative goes on at some length how Richards, Jones and Jagger knew, like all their rivals knew, that the band that could score that great jazz drummer Watts would be the next great thing.

The Essence of Despair

I was going through my collection of internet photographs.  As a raw amateur myself I've become interested in looking for shots that really moved me.

Here's one that haunts.  It reveals how we treat the mentally ill today.  You feel the despair, the hopelessness, the helplessness that infests this young man's very being.

What have we become?

Would BC Sabotage the Enbridge Pipeline?

It's widely accepted that British Columbia lacks the authority to stop the Northern Gateway pipeline.  The argument goes that the pipeline proposal would be a matter of federal jurisdiction.

Maybe, maybe not.   British Columbia's unelected, unelectable and outgoing premier, Christy Clark, says Victoria could kill the pipeline by simply refusing to supply the operation with electricity.

“British Columbia’s power would be required to power up the pipeline, from B.C. Hydro – a Crown corporation,” she said while speaking to students from University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. “There are a whole number of different things the British Columbia government could do.”

Ms. Clark, who requested the opportunity to speak to the students, is trying to convince Albertans her five demands – three environmental, one tied to First Nations, and another linked to economic compensation – must be met if pipelines carrying heavy oil are to snake through B.C.

“The pipelines need power and the power would likely, would probably in British Columbia, have to come from B.C. Hydro,” she told reporters after the speech. “You know what, though? To me, all the speculation about how British Columbia would stop it is kind of silly. Because if British Columbia doesn’t give its consent to this, there is no way the federal government or anyone else in the country is going to be able to force it through. It just won’t happen.”

And, much as many of us await eagerly Clark's removal from office, her point stands.   Without the consent of the province and people of British Columbia, Harper would have a war on his hands if he tried to force this through.  He'd have to use muscle, a lot of it, and he would provoke a response in kind.   It's the sort of situation that would be out of his hands once it started.

Even Forbes Gets It. Why Can't Steve Harper?

Forbes, yes that Forbes, the business magazine understands the damage that income inequality is exacting on America's economy.

New research indicates that growing income inequality isn’t just unpleasant; it is seriously hurting the U.S. economy. And economists are figuring out just how the damage is done, according to a fascinating new article by the journalist Jonathan Rauch in National Journal. This challenges a long-standing consensus that, as Rauch puts it, “inequality is the price America pays for a dynamic, efficient economy. . . . As long as the bottom and the middle are moving up, there is no reason to mind if the top is moving up faster.”

...The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that between 1979 and 2007 the top 1% of households doubled their share of pretax income while the share of the bottom 80% fell. Then came the great recession. Economists including David Moss of the Harvard Business School noticed that “the last time inequality rose to its current heights was in the late 1920s, just before a financial meltdown. . . . In 2010, Moss plotted inequality and bank failures since 1864 on the same graph; he found an eerily close fit.”

 But does that imply a cause-and-effect relationship? It looks that way, Rauch writes. Economists have been tracing the following chain of causality. Those who make the least consume the most of their income; those who make the most tend to save a great deal, and for that reason, according to the economist Christopher Brown, at Arkansas State, “income inequality can exert a significant drag on effective demand.” Rauch writes that

 In a democracy, politicians and the public are unlikely to accept depressed spending power if they can help it. They can try to compensate by easing credit standards, effectively encouraging the non-rich to sustain purchasing power by borrowing. They might, for example, create policies allowing banks to write flimsy home mortgages and encouraging consumers to seek them. Call this the “let them eat credit” strategy.

Then “the economy, propped up on shaky credit, becomes more vulnerable to shocks. When a recession comes, the economy takes a double hit as banks fail and credit-fueled consumer spending collapses.” The instability this time was worsened by the fact that the ever-richer richest Americans “needed liquid investments into which to put their additional wealth. Their appetite for new investment vehicles fueled a surge in what Arkansas State’s Brown calls ‘financial engineering’—the concoction of exotic financial instruments, which acted on the financial sector like steroids.”

So as income inequality grew, the government propped up spending by promoting easy credit for less wealthy Americans, and much of the profit from that easy credit fed the wealth of the richest, widening the gap between rich and poor yet further. “Alas, when the recession struck, the financial sector’s gigantism and complexity helped turn what might have been a brush fire into a meltdown.”

There doesn't appear to be much new in the Rauch article that isn't already well chronicled in Stiglitz' The Price of Inequality and other works.  It's just that even the voice of business is now speaking out and accepting income inequality as a scourge on the economy.

When will the Conservatives, or the Liberals for that matter, finally get it?   This is a problem that, even in Canada, can rapidly get out of control and the more it grows and the further it damages the economy, the harder it will be to rectify.

A World Gone Mad

The ethical, philosophical and societal implications of this are truly mind-boggling.   Imagine getting your hands on a functioning, entirely lethal pistol a mere matter of downloading a file and running it through a 3D printer.



This is the future?

Remember When It Was America and Pakistan Versus the Soviets?

Now America's plans for a long-term presence in Afghanistan may be driving Pakistan into Moscow's arms.

Pakistan army chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, is headed to Moscow for talks.

The Pakistani military spokesman has confirmed the "historic" visit will take place on Wednesday. The spokesman said Kiani is expected to meet top Russian military and civilian leaders to discuss possibilities of military-to-military cooperation between the two countries.  

...To be sure, Moscow's priority will be to sit across the table with Kiani, as he is the fountainhead of authority in Pakistan on major foreign and security policy issues. Also, he is an unusual Pakistani general, having run into difficulties with the United States, while pushing for Pakistan's "strategic autonomy" on the geopolitical chessboard.

Indeed, the present moment is pregnant with possibilities. Russia and Pakistan in varying measure - for different reasons though - have come under US pressure. Both appreciate that the US has "lost" the war in Afghanistan, is pulling out of it and would have little choice but to negotiate with the Taliban; both sense a power vacuum could develop in Afghanistan but also feel uneasy that the US is yet keeping strategic ambiguity about its future military presence in the region. 

Like all developments in this region, the Russia-Pakistan entente has to be read in the context of endless subplots involving players stretching all the way from the Caspian Basin to the South China Sea.

We'll All Be Muslims Soon Enough - Chris Hedges

We're discrete about it, sometimes, but we treat Muslims amongst us differently.  We're suspicious of the way they dress, their religion, their culture and, well, just what they're really up to.  And we've worked out ways to keep tabs on them in the hope of being able to spot acts or words that suggest something is amiss.

Chris Hedges suggests the techniques we've developed to keep a state eye on Muslims will soon be used on you too.

"...violations of fundamental civil liberties will not, in the end, be reserved exclusively for Muslims once the corporate state feels under siege. What is happening to them will happen to the rest of us. 

“One of the misapprehensions of the last decade is that the government had to go outside the law to places like Guantanamo or Bagram to abridge the rights of suspects in the name of national security,” said Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College who has been an outspoken critic of the rights abridgement occurring in Article III courts. “But this is not the case. , but also—dismayingly—within the U.S. federal courts. A similar degradation of rights that has characterized the prison at Guantanamo has also affected the judicial system within the United States. The right to dissent, the right to see the evidence against you, the right to due process, the right to fair and speedy trial, the right to have a judge who will be impartial, the right to fair and not disproportionate punishment, and the right not to be punished before you are convicted have been taken from us in the name of national security. It is not just in special secret prisons that this occurs.”

...“Torture is legal in the United States in the form of years of solitary confinement and the use of special administrative measures,” Theoharis said when we spoke by phone. “The Obama administration has not only refused to hold Bush officials accountable for torture, but maintains torturous conditions in federal prisons. And the Obama administration willfully misled the European Court about the conditions these prisoners face.” 

Think a radical, right-wing government in Canada wouldn't follow suit, at least to the extent their actions could be concealed?  Stephen Harper had no qualms about establishing a secret police agency made up of Edmonton and Calgary police, the RCMP and our national spy agency, CSIS, to monitor pipeline opponents and identify those who were potential threats.   That is the state spying on our own citizens and it's drawn barely a whisper of protest from the Liberals or NDP.  Just where do you think people like Harper and Toews would draw the line?   Your opinion is as good as anyone's.

One Simple Truth that Reveals All Others

We need to accept one simple truth.   To avoid runaway climate change we can burn just one-fifth of already discovered reserves of fossil fuels.   One fifth, no more.

Fossil fuels have, for the survival of mankind, become sub-prime assets.   The higher-carbon the fossil fuel the more worthless it is.   That begins with coal and extends to unconventional fuels such as tar sand bitumen.   Within the context of salvaging civilization for our kids and grandkids, these fuels have no value, no worth.

Steve Harper, with his piggy little eyes focused greedily on vast stores of oil and gas on the Arctic seabed, is about as far away as you can get from accepting this one simple truth.  He wants to rapidly maximize Canada's fossil fuel production from wherever it can be found, however it can be extracted.   Stephen Harper is the arch-nemesis of mankind.  But, then again, so are many of the fossil fuelers that hold sway on both sides of the floor of our House of Commons and dominate our legislatures from coast to coast to coast.

These types won't refute that one simple truth.   They won't even acknowledge it.   Best, for their purposes, to ignore it altogether.  Pretend it doesn't exist.

If they were to accept this one simple truth so many other truths they instinctively circumvent, deny or ignore would begin, by themselves, slamming some doors shut and opening others.   Governments forged out of 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics would find these anchors no longer hold, their institutions having lost far too much of their utility to be helpful in guiding us through the 21st century.

We're still moving although not we're not moving forward as we have for so many generations.   We're instead ricocheting off walls at increasingly unpredictable velocities and angles, repeatedly reaching the limits of our very finite biosphere.   We try so hard to make it all bigger and, hence, better and we can indeed defy ecological gravity - for a while.   But it's a matter of eating our seed corn.   This takes many forms including draining our aquifers; collapsing global fisheries; overworking farmland to exhaustion, transforming it into useless desert, relentlessly contaminating our air, water and even our soil..   This is a global, 4-pack a day habit.

Whether it's Tom Mulcair or a future Liberal leader, you'll be quite easibly able to tell whether they're bent.   That will be when they get the courage to speak that one simple truth, the one that reveals all the others.

And now, this.  It's a video released this morning by WBGU, Angela Merkel's climate change advisory panel.  It contains highlights of speakers' comments at last May's symposium in Berlin on alternative energy prosperity.

A Greek Tragedy -

Its flag looks eerily like Hitler's swastika.  "It" is the far-right Golden Dawn party that has risen out of the turmoil of Greece's economic collapse.

And another eerie echo from the past is that Greek police, hard hit by government austerity, are reported to be sending crime victims to Golden Dawn for protection.

...Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group, analysts, activists and lawyers say.

In return, a growing number of Greek crime victims have come to see the party, whose symbol bears an uncanny resemblance to the swastika, as a "protector".

One victim of crime, an eloquent US-trained civil servant, told the Guardian of her family's shock at being referred to the party when her mother recently called the police following an incident involving Albanian immigrants in their downtown apartment block.

"They immediately said if it's an issue with immigrants go to Golden Dawn," said the 38-year-old, who fearing for her job and safety, spoke only on condition of anonymity. "We don't condone Golden Dawn but there is an acute social problem that has come with the breakdown of feeling of security among lower and middle class people in the urban centre," she said. "If the police and official mechanism can't deliver and there is no recourse to justice, then you have to turn to other maverick solutions."

Other Greeks with similar experiences said the far-rightists, catapulted into parliament on a ticket of tackling "immigrant scum" were simply doing the job of a defunct state that had left a growing number feeling overwhelmed by a "sense of powerlessness."

A spreading sense of helplessness, fear of outsiders, loss of confidence in government and its institutions, and the rise of a radical, hard-line movement - just add water and stir.

Ten Years Ago, Alarm Bells Would Have Rung. Today, Yawn.

Face it, we're becoming acclimated to environmental collapse.  "It's happening, so what?"  Especially when we learn of it in some distant, as in out of earshot, range.

A case in point, the Great Barrier Reef.   This heralded Wonder of the World has now lost fully half its legendary coral cover.   The culprits - acidified ocean waters, storms and swarms of coral-eating starfish.

At present rates of decline, the coral cover will halve again within a decade, though scientists said the reef could recover if the crown-of-thorns starfish can be brought under control and, longer term, global carbon dioxide emissions are reduced.

...Coral reefs are an important part of the marine ecosystem as sources of food and as protection for young fish. They are under threat around the world from the effects of bleaching, due to rising ocean temperatures, and increasing acidification of the oceans, which reduces the corals' ability to build their calcium carbonate structures.

The Great Barrier Reef is the most iconic coral reef in the world, listed as a Unesco world heritage site and the source of $A5bn (£3.2bn) a year to the Australian economy through tourism. The observations of its decline are based on more than 2,000 surveys of 214 reefs between 1985 and 2012.
  
...Two-thirds of the coral loss has occurred since 1998 and the rate of decline has increased in recent years, averaging around 1.45% a year since 2006. "If the trend continued, coral cover could halve again by 2022," said Peter Doherty, a research fellow at the institute.

David Curnick, marine and freshwater programme co-ordinator at the Zoological Society of London, said many of the most endangered coral species around the world were also under severe pressure from the aquarium trade.

"Corals are notoriously hard to propagate in captivity and therefore the trade is still heavily dependent on harvesting from the wild."

He said the results of the Great Barrier Reef survey were not surprising and the challenge for conservationists was to limit the localised threats to give reefs a chance to recover and develop resilience against the effects of climate change. "This is challenging but entirely achievable and there are many community-led projects around the world demonstrating this."

Corals can recover if given the chance. But this is slow – in the absence of cyclones, Cots [starfish] and bleaching, the Great Barrier Reef can regrow at a rate of 2.85% a year, the scientists wrote. Removing the Cots problem alone would allow coral cover to increase at 0.89% a year.

Reducing Cots means improving water quality around the rivers at the northern end of the reef to reduce agricultural run-off – high levels of nutrients flowing off the land feed and allow high survival of Cots larvae. Another option is some form of biological control of populations – Gunn said there were promising results from research on naturally occurring pathogens that could keep Cots in check, but it was not ready to be applied in the field.

He said the future of the Reef lay partly in human hands. "We can achieve better water quality, we can tackle the challenge of crown-of-thorns, and we can continue to work to ensure the resilience of the reef to climate change is enhanced. However, its future also lies with the global response to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The coral decline revealed by this study – shocking as it is – has happened before the most severe impacts of ocean warming and acidification associated with climate change have kicked in, so we undoubtedly have more challenges ahead."

How will Australia respond?   Agricultural runoff is feeding the exploding populations of starfish, a problem being experienced in other parts of the world also.   And, as for carbon emissions, Australia is on the verge of a massive increase in its coal exports to China that critics warn all but ensures our grandkids will face warming of 6C or more.   If the threat to the Great Barrier Reef isn't a wake-up call to the Australian government, and there's no sign that it is, then don't expect the rest of the world to fret much about it and what it means either.

A Huge Breakthrough for Renewable Energy

One serious drawback of some forms of renewable energy, such as wind or tidal power, has been that they don't conform to peak market demand.   Some are intermittent, some work best at off-peak, low-demand hours.  What's been missing is a viable means of storing surplus renewable energy production.

A Brit engineer seems to have come up with a solution, liquid air, that is nearly as efficient as conventional battery technology.   Water vapour and oxygen are removed from the air.  The remaining nitrogen is then super-cooled until it liquifies using off-peak renewable energy production.   The liquid nitrogen is later warmed, boiled in effect, as demand warrants, driving electrical generators.

The technology is said to be up to 70% efficient.

Will Afghan National Army Drive NATO from Afghanistan?

NATO countries may have had their fill of their soldiers being murdered by Afghan soldiers.   While most ISAF forces are scheduled to leave in 2014, NATO Sec-Gen, Anders Rasmussen, says the spate of "Green on Blue" killings could speed up their departure.

"From now until the end of 2014 we will see announcements of redeployments, withdrawals or drawdown … If the security situation allows, I would not exclude the possibility that in certain areas you could accelerate the process."

Rasmussen admitted that the killings of almost 50 allied troops this year in "green on blue" attacks – Afghan security forces turning on their trainers and mentors – had damaged the relationship between the international forces and the Afghan police and military.

"There's no doubt insider attacks have undermined trust and confidence, absolutely," he said.

Amid argument among analysts as to what has been behind the stream of "green on blue" attacks, Nato officers on the ground are reported to have ascribed them mainly to disgruntled and embittered Afghan security forces with grudges against their western mentors.

Our military leaders have worked tirelessly to spread the notion that these killings are the work of Taliban infiltrators but, then again, they've had a decade to perfect recipes for bullshit to feed the public at home.

Chris, a.k.a. "CRF", has provided a link to a recent study in which American and Afghan soldiers revealed the utterly dysfunctional relationship that exists between them and essentially dooms our "mission" in their country.   This has simply gone on for far too long.   This well is poisoned.

A "Green on Blue" Battle?

Has it really come to this?   A U.S. Army unit has engaged in a firefight with an Afghan Army unit resulting in two dead Americans and three Afghan Army fatalities.

Afghan officials say the Americans fired first.   The Americans claim the gunfight broke out after two Americans were killed by mortar fire from an Afghan Army checkpoint.

MacKay Marches on Asia

Chronic prevaricator and Harper DefMin Peter "Airshow" MacKay obviously got a double shot of testosterone while in Washington for meetings with his counterpart, Leon Panetta.   MacKay rushed from the meeting to the Canadian embassy where he got on the telephone to gushingly call for Canada to establish a "permanent, visible [military] presence" in Asia.

"We have to be there in quality and quantity in the coming years," MacKay told QMI Agency during a call from the Canadian embassy in the United States, following meetings with his American counterpart.

Now if there's one thing that region needs it's more military to stir up the already simmering pot.   South and East Asia are undergoing massive and potentially destabilizing arms races as India and China lurch unsteadily to economic, political and military superpowerdom.

True to form, MacKay offered no rational explanation of exactly why Canada needs a high-profile and permanent military presence in Asia, possibly because no such rationale actually exists.   Perhaps he feels that rattling a few sabres and banging away on drums would be a great way to distract Canadians from his government's utter inability, perhaps even disinterest, in securing Canada itself.

My guess is that MacKay fancies the notion of Canadian F-35s deployed to Asia as part of America's aerial Foreign Legion, proving, in his mind at least, that we're one of the Big Boys.

The Fifth Estate Shoots the F-35 Down in Flames

CBC's The Fifth Estate aired one of its all time best episodes tonight, "Runaway Fighter."   The programme laid bare the rank dishonesty and duplicity of the Harper government and its obsession with Lockheed's aerial "turkey."   Clips showed both Harper and MacKay lying through their teeth about fictional competitions and supposed contracts to order 65 F-35s. 



The episode takes a critical look at the deeply flawed warplane that suffers from substandard speed, agility, range and payload, all for the sake of supposed stealth invisibility that one retired U.S. Defense Department expert denounced as a "scam" technology.

Another point the programme brought out was the claim by the 35's Canadian boosters that it will serve our country for 50 years.   A half-century lifespan for a frontline "fighter" ranks right up there with immaculate conception.

If you missed the first airing, be sure to watch out for the next broadcast or visit The Fifth Estate web site and view it there.

Criminal Cartels Behind Global Trade in Illegal Timber

Organized crime may be behind 15 to 30% of global timber trade.

A U.N. report finds organized crime responsible for half to 90% of illegal logging in the Amazon basin, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Japan, the United States and the European Union remain targets of illegal wood trafficking but the lion's share is destined for China.

The much heralded decline of illegal logging in the mid-
2000s in some tropical regions was widely attributed to
a short-term law enforcement effort. However, long-term
trends in illegal logging and trade have shown that this was
temporary, and illegal logging continues. More importantly,
an apparent decline in illegal logging is due to more advanced
laundering operations masking criminal activities, and not
necessarily due to an overall decline in illegal logging. In
many cases a tripling in the volumes of timber “originating”
from plantations in the five years following the law enforcement
crack-down on illegal logging has come partly from
cover operations by criminals to legalize and launder illegal
logging operations. Other cases of increased illegal logging
involve road construction and the cutting of wide corridors,
which facilitates land clearing by impoverished settlers, who
are later driven away by ranchers and soy producers, such as
has occurred in the Amazon. 

Was Mitch Romney Another Rightwing Chickenhawk?

Dave Letterman refers to him as "Mitch" Romney.  I like it.  Think it should stick.

Jim Webb, a highly-decorated Vietnam Marine combat officer, has raised the notion that Mitch must have glommed on to a few deferments in his day to avoid getting called to Vietnam.

The former Marine and Navy secretary appeared to poke at Romney for receiving draft deferments during the Vietnam War.

"Gov. Romney and I are about the same age. Like millions of others in our generation, we came to adulthood facing the harsh realities of the Vietnam War," Webb said, adding that he didn't envy or resent choices people made about how to handle the draft as a long as they did so under the law.

"But those among us who stepped forward to face the harsh unknowns and the lifelong changes that can come from combat did so with the belief that their service would be honored and that our leaders would, in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, care for those who had borne the battle, and for their widows and their children."

The veterans of that war "are not bitter. They know what they did. But in receiving veterans' benefits, they are not takers. They were givers, in the ultimate sense of that word. There is a saying among war veterans: 'All gave some, some gave all.' This is not a culture of dependency. It is a part of a long tradition that gave this country its freedom and independence."

Oops Mittsy, Mitch, Mittens, whatever, that's gotta burn.   You gotta be careful when you mess with that 47%.   Some of them bite back.

Obama's "Double Tap" War Crimes

Barack Obama is very probably a war criminal.  As Commander in Chief of a military behemoth that kills without regard to international law, Obama should be on trial if that sort of thing was conceivable in a world run on Victor's Justice.

The Obama White House is big, very big on the use of heavily-armed drones to take out perceived enemies, particularly in Pakistan.  We don't hear too much about what actually goes on but the drone programme is structured that way, to minimize public scrutiny.

Gwynne Dyer has written an eye-opener on a favoured tactic of American drone operators - the "double tap" attack.

Double tap” is what mobsters do when they put somebody down. One bullet in the heart, one in the head. That way they stay down. It’s practically standard operating procedure among hitmen.

Then there’s a different, nastier kind of “double tap”. Suppose you live in some hill village in western Pakistan, and one of the families nearby has a boy fighting with the Taliban who has come home for a visit, bringing several friends with him. It’s worrisome, because you are always hearing American drones overhead—and sure enough, one day there is a terrifying explosion and his house is destroyed.

What do you do now? There was a whole extended family living in that house: children, old folks, a cousin or two. Some of them are probably still alive under the rubble, perhaps badly injured. Do you rush over and help to dig them out? Better not. The Predator or Reaper drone (lovely names) will wait until all the neighbours have gathered round, and then launch a second Hellfire missile onto the site. Double tap.

“These strikes are becoming much more common,” Mirza Shahbad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents the victims of drone strikes, told the Independent newspaper recently. “In the past it used to be a one-off, now and then. Now almost every other attack is a double tap. There is no justification for it.” 

Double Tap drone attacks are executions, plain and simple.  They're murder and smack of the punitive measures the Germans employed on uncooperative civilian populations during WWII.  They absolutely beggar the Americans' claims that drone strikes are surgical and minimize collateral deaths of civilians.   That's precisely what the second missile is intended to cause.

100,000,000 To Die by 2030 from Climate Change

And that's if we're lucky.   A study commissioned by 20-governments finds that, unless our leaders reverse course on climate change, it will claim the lives of 100-million people by 2030.

And, for those like our own miscreant government, that argue it would be economically unwarranted to move quickly to decarbonize our economy and our society, the report finds that, in addition to those 100-million dead, the world economy will take a 3.2 per cent hit in GDP as well.

As David Suzuki was reported to have quipped in Toronto recently, you simply can't have a healthy economy without a healthy biosphere.   It can't be done.

The report seems to embody the deficiencies that tend to prevail in these discussions.   Foremost of these is that it addresses global warming in isolation and doesn't factor in the gamut of associated and building threats and challenges including deforestation; desertification; air/soil/water contamination, especially across Asia; resource depletion and exhaustion, particularly the rapidly building freshwater crisis; overpopulation and population migration; disease and pest migration; species migration and extinction, particularly the collapse of global fisheries; sea level rise and salination of coastal freshwater resources; severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity; both cyclical and sustained floods and droughts often on a regional scale; and a host of resultant security threats including food insecurity, terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation and the intensifying arms races, notably in South and East Asia, two regions in the crosshairs of climate change.

Where the study is almost certainly correct is in the assertion that not acting effectively to propel ourselves into a low-carbon economy will be vastly more costly than action.   In other words, the path that Harper has set Canada upon is socially and economically perilous in the mid-range and devastating in the long-range.

Responding to the report, Oxfam International said the costs of political inaction on climate were “staggering.”

“The losses to agriculture and fisheries alone could amount to more than $500 billion per year by 2030, heavily focussed in the poorest countries where millions depend on these sectors to make a living,” said executive director Jeremy Hobbs.

British economist Nicholas Stern told Reuters earlier this year investment equivalent to 2 per cent of global GDP was needed to limit, prevent and adapt to climate change.

His report on the economics of climate change in 2006 said that without any action to tackle climate change, the overall costs and risks of climate change would be equivalent to a cut in per-capita consumption of perhaps up to 20 per cent.

What also tends to go unsaid is the deteriorating security situation  resulting from global warming sparking the likelihood of regional wars and perhaps even world war and the inevitable drag on GDP that will result from rearmament.

 

200 Reasons to Say No to the F-35

There were at least 200-instances since 1988 when CF-18 pilots had to shut one engine down and return to base on the remaining engine.

Put another way, the Canadian Air Force had two hundred examples over the past 24-years when, had they been flying the F-35, their aircraft might have been lost.   When you're talking a total buy of 65 F-35's Canada proposes, that means running out of air force awfully quickly.   Bad for the airplanes, worse yet for the poor buggers flying them.

If we have to chip in to save Lockheed Martin from disaster, shouldn't we be telling Washington to get off its high horse and agree to sell us the plane that makes sense, the F-22 Raptor?

The F-22 does everything the F-35 doesn't.   It's twin-engine.  It has a larger payload.   It is very fast and capable of super-cruise.  It is far more agile.  It's a bona fide fighter, not a light bomber passing itself off as a fighter.  And, it's far more stealthy than the F-35 can ever hope to be.

Sure the F-22 would cost more than the F-35, at least if you believe Lockheed's latest figures, but you can do so much more with far fewer of them.   And, unlike the F-35, you won't be writing them off when they lose one engine.

The Shocking Truth About Inequality in the U.S.

Brace yourself.   A report by two professors, one from U.C. Davis, the other from Harvard, contends that income inequality in the United States today is more severe even than it was during the Revolution - with slavery factored in to boot.

The conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Scraping together data from an array of historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than anywhere else in the world that we have record of. 

Suffice to say, times have changed.

Before we dive into their findings, a word of caution about the study. When economists reach back this far into the thinly recorded the past, they're not so much taking a snapshot of what life was like as they are making a messy collage, collecting the disparate bits and pieces of information we have available and fashioning them into a coherent picture. In this case, Williamson and Lindert use occupational directories, tax lists, post-revolutionary census documents, and earlier scholarship, among other resources to build approximations of what people earned when we were getting ready to start turning our muskets on the British. Inherently, such a process involves lots of conjecture.
  
In the end, the pair find that the colonies were an exceedingly egalitarian place, financially, if not politically.  read more here.

 

Well This is Certainly Awkward for Washington

A cabinet minister from America's close ally in the War on Terror, Pakistan, is offering a bounty of about $90,000 for the killing of the guy behind the  "Innocence of Muslims" film that has inflamed the Muslim world.

Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Balor said at a news conference in Peshawar that he would personally finance a bounty aimed at the maker of the crude, low-budget video that denigrates the Prophet Muhammad.

Mr Balor acknowledged that incitement to murder was illegal but said he was ''ready to be hanged in the name of the Prophet Muhammad''. And he invited the Taliban and al-Qaeda to be ''partners in this noble deed'', according to news reports.

 

Mr Balor did not name the target of his bounty, but it was widely presumed to be Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, who lives in California and has been linked to the 14-minute video, described as a trailer for a movie named Innocence of Muslims. Nakoula has not confirmed reports of his involvement but has been questioned by police near his home near Los Angeles.

 

Of course Balor isn't serious.   Anyone willing to put up a $90,000 purse would know you don't have to import al Qaeda killers to get a hit on someone in the U.S.

 

Houston Cops 1, Double Amputee 0

Imagine the horror.   You're being threatened by a double amputee (one leg, one arm) in a wheelchair brandishing a pen (presumably in the one hand he uses to propel his wheelchair).  

What are you going to do?   Well, if you're a heavily armed, Houston cop, all alone (except for your partner), you draw your gun and plug him.  Problem solved.

Houston police spokeswoman Jodi Silva said the man cornered the officer in his wheelchair and was making threats while trying to stab the officer with the pen.

At the time, the officer did not know what the metal object was that the man was waving, Ms Silva said.

 "Fearing for his partner's safety and his own safety, he discharged his weapon," Ms Silva said.

Police did not immediately release the name of the man who was killed. They had been called to the home after a caretaker there called and reported that a man in a wheelchair was causing a disturbance.

 The owner of the group home, John Garcia, told the Houston Chronicle that the man had a history of mental illness and had been living at the house about 18 months.

"He sometimes would go off a bit, but you just ignore it," Mr Garcia told the newspaper.

Wow, do the math - four arms, four legs, two guns, two truncheons, two Mace canisters versus one arm, one leg, a wheelchair and a pen.

The USDA Knows Global Warming When It Sees It

It's the U.S. Department of Agriculture's business to monitor climate change and changing conditions for agriculture in America.

That's why the USDA has released an updated plant zone map informing the public what plants can be grown in what areas of the country.   Unfortunately the latest map, the first update since 1990, is already obsolete.

The new USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, which predicts which trees and perennials can survive the winter in a given region, was a long time coming. Temperature boundaries shown in the latest version have shifted northward since the last one appeared in 1990. But the true zones have moved even further, according to [City University of New York] Professor [Nir] Krakauer’s calculations.

“Over one-third of the country has already shifted half-zones compared to the current release, and over one-fifth has shifted full zones,” Professor Krakauer wrote this summer in the journal “Advances in Meteorology.”

This means that fig trees, once challenged by frosty temperatures above North Carolina, are already weathering New York City winters thanks to changing temperatures and the insulating effect of the metropolis. Camellias, once happiest south of Ohio, may now be able to shrug off Detroit winters.

...“What is happening is that the winter is warming faster than the summer. Since [my] hardiness temperatures are based on minimum temperatures each year, they are changing faster than the average temperatures,” Professor Krakauer said. He found that these lowest yearly temperatures warmed roughly two and a half times faster than the average temperatures.

His analysis also showed that the country is changing unevenly; more warming is occurring over the eastern interior and less in the Southwest.

Mitt Romney - Class Warrior

Mitt Romney wouldn't be the first really rich man to enter the White House.   But, as Robert Reich points out, he'd certainly be a lot different.

America has had hugely wealthy presidents before — think of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt; or John F. Kennedy, beneficiary of father Joe’s fortune.

But here’s the difference. These men were champions of the working class and the poor, and were considered traitors to their own class. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the “malefactors of great wealth,” and he busted up the oil and railroad trusts.

FDR thundered against the “economic royalists,” raised taxes on the wealthy, and gave average working people the right to form unions — along with Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour workweek.

But Mitt Romney is not a traitor to his class. He is a sponsor of his class. He wants to cut their taxes by $3.7 trillion over the next decade, and hasn’t even specified what “loopholes” he’d close to make up for this gigantic giveaway.

And he wants to cut benefits that almost everyone else relies on — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and housing assistance.

He’s even a warrior for his class, telling his wealthy followers his job isn’t to worry about the “47 percent” of Americans who won’t vote for him, whom he calls “victims” and he berates for not paying federal incomes taxes and taking federal handouts.

...Money means power. Concentrated wealth at the top means extraordinary power at the top. The reason Romney pays a rate of only 14 percent on $13 million of income in 2011 — a lower rate than many in the middle class — is because he exploits a loophole that allows private equity managers to treat their income as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent.

...So much wealth and power have accumulated at the top of America that our economy and our democracy are seriously threatened. Romney not only represents this problem. He is the living embodiment of it.

It's time Americans busted this myth of the "self-made man" Romney and his clan steadfastly hide behind.   Nobel laureate economist Joe Stiglitz in his recent book, "The Price of Inequality", traces how government policies, not normal market forces, have created the inequality that plagues today's America and has resulted in the undeserved transfer of wealth and power from the middle classes to the richest of the rich.   The government "of the people, by the people, for the people" turned its back on the people, lining its pockets richly in the process.


The frightening thing is that there a great many Americans, especially the prominent and affluent, who don't think this is corrupt.

Angry White Men Go Crazy, Keep Aged Leader, Lose Sole MLA

The Gods must be smiling down on Crispy Clark.  Her right of centre rivals, the B.C. Conservatives, have imploded.  After the Cons' leader, Geriatric John Cummins, was backed by a 71%  vote, the party's sole MLA, former Lib John van Dongen got into a car and sailed off into the sunset.  JvD says he'll sit as an Independent but won't return to the B.C. Libs u so long as Clark is premier.

If the B.C. Cons can't attract viable candidates to run an effective campaign next year, the Libs will be in a much better position to fight the NDP challenge.

Only in B.C.

Homer Votes - 2012

You might as well laugh

The One Reform that Enables All Others

Bill Moyers has the key to restoring democracy to his United States of America. 

This is a racket, plain and simple. A new report from Moody’s Investor Service says that all that spending by the parties, corporations, super PACs and other outside groups will push political ad spending up this year by half a billion dollars — 25 percent higher than 2010 – the biggest increase in history. That prompted the CEO of CBS, Leslie Moonves, to lick his chops and tell an investors conference last December, “There’s going to be a lot of money spent. I’m not saying that’s the best thing for America, but it’s not a bad thing for the CBS Corporation.” Yes, the media giants and the TV stations they own are in on the racket.

So are all those highly paid political consultants who as part of their fees skim a percentage of the cost of local TV airtime, usually around ten percent. The pickings are better than ever, thanks to all the dark money being thrown around since the Citizens United decision. One Democratic consultant has called it “the greatest windfall that ever happened for political operatives in American history.” You bet it is: By the time the primaries were over this year, the top 150 political and media consultants already had raked in an estimated $465 million — or more. When Election Day finally rolls around, chances are that number will have at least doubled.

So we can’t stop reporting on this, even though we’re often told: “Please change the subject. Everyone’s tired of this one.” Don’t be so sure. There’s a groundswell for rooting the money out of politics, as Americans come to see that this is the one reform that enables all other reforms. Two polls released in the last few days report large majorities — as many as eight in ten — are in favor of clamping down on the amount of money that corporations, the super-rich, and those shadowy outside groups are pouring into the campaigns. It’s up to all of us to put a sign on every lawn and stoop in the land: “Democracy is not for sale.”

Naomi Wolf's Eulogy for the American Dream

Naomi Wolf saw something horrid in the Mitt Romney "behind closed doors" video - the last gasp of the American Dream.

...I find [Romney's] remarks fascinating and important to deconstruct because they affirm – as insider discourse captured for the public often can – the fact that a new kind of narrative for America has taken over from one of our oldest and most cherished national myths. What Romney's comments reveal is that the American Dream is dead, killed off by skepticism from the bottom up – by the 99% of lower-income and middle-class people who no longer believe in it – and by cynicism from the top down – by the 1%, top-earning people who don't believe in it.

...now, the injunction to "work hard and play by the rules" is more likely to elicit a cynical cough of derision than a rush to the polling station. Post Tarp,  post Libor scandal, post Madoff scheme, post justice department's pass for Chase, post HSBC money-laundering, post Occupy, post the ever-widening income gap in this country, and post the evisceration of civil society and public institutions that protect the middle class, the entire underpinning of the American Dream has been uprooted. And everyone knows it.

...What Romney's remarks show is that the wealthy are handling the corruption of a system that benefits them by assigning blame for the destruction of the American Dream to the have-nots. In the Reagan years, only "welfare queens" and the small percentage of people actually on food stamps were targeted as drains on the system – needing "government handouts" and failing to "take responsibility for their lives". Now, as Romney admits, the wealthy deem virtually half the voting public as irredeemably shiftless moochers. Notable, too, is Romney's use of an Occupy-echoing phrase, "the 47%", whom he feels free to objectify and dismiss.

...I have been noticing, with sadness, that politicians do not even bother invoking the American Dream anymore. They know that we know that everything is rigged against it now, and that the language no longer persuades even the most naive and idealistic; the best you'll get from a politician is a pledge, playing to nostalgia, to restore its lost promise. But what is striking about Romney's remarks is that they have replaced that commitment with a willingness to blame a vast swath of striving, middle-class Americans for their plight.

We thus see a turning-point in American conservative philosophy. This was the moment when the wealthy elite stopped believing its own PR, the self-affirming myth of that economic success can always be had for those who want it and are willing to work. Mitt Romney has told us that it's now simply class war: a struggle to stop the other half getting what "we" have. Thank you for your candor, Mr Romney.

A Brit MD Blows the Whistle on Big Pharma

The allegation is simple.   Pharmaceutical companies provide doctors with studies favourable to their products but don't publish studies that show the drug to be worthless or worse.

I did everything a doctor is supposed to do. I read all the papers, I critically appraised them, I understood them, I discussed them with the patient and we made a decision together, based on the evidence. In the published data, reboxetine was a safe and effective drug. In reality, it was no better than a sugar pill and, worse, it does more harm than good. As a doctor, I did something that, on the balance of all the evidence, harmed my patient, simply because unflattering data was left unpublished.

Nobody broke any law in that situation, reboxetine is still on the market and the system that allowed all this to happen is still in play, for all drugs, in all countries in the world. Negative data goes missing, for all treatments, in all areas of science. The regulators and professional bodies we would reasonably expect to stamp out such practices have failed us. These problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they're too complex to capture in a soundbite. This is why they've gone unfixed by politicians, at least to some extent; but it's also why it takes detail to explain. The people you should have been able to trust to fix these problems have failed you, and because you have to understand a problem properly in order to fix it, there are some things you need to know.


Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.

In their 40 years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works ad hoc, from sales reps, colleagues and journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are, too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it's not in anyone's financial interest to conduct any trials at all.

It's a disturbing article, one that deserves to be read in its entirety.   The article alleges this is happening in every country.   I could easily see it going on in the United States where Big Pharma and its teams of lobbyists hold such sway on Capital Hill but it's somewhat harder for me to believe that it goes on at Health Canada.   If it does, then it must be stopped, now.

Herman Cain Says Even He Would Be Doing Better than Romney

Former Republican presidential contender Herman Cain doesn't like what he sees in his party's nominee, Mitt Romney.

Cain told members of the media after the speech that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's recent “47 percent” comment was a “non-story” being blown out of proportion by the media. But Cain said he would have been doing better if he was the nominee, saying that he'd probably have a “substantial lead” on President Barack Obama at this point.

“The reason is quite simple: I have some depth to my ideas,” he said.

Sounds like Herman got word there'll be no plum spot for him in a Romney administration.   Remember when he told Barbara Walters he thought he should get Defense Secretary?

The Third Man in America's Presidential Election

You might have thought the contest was between Obama and Romney.  Wrong.   It's actually between Obama, on one side, and Romney and Israeli thug Benjamin Netanyahu on the other.

Netanyahu has abjectly failed at pressuring Obama into attacking Iran.   Romney, it seems, doesn't share Obama's qualms and is therefore Netanyahu's BFF.   It's a high stakes gambit but, if Obama wins, it could rewrite America's relationship with Israel.

Israel’s blow-hard right-wing prime minister, the US-raised zionist Benjamin Netanyahu, openly trying to topple Obama, has propelled Israel directly into US politics, and has also been trying to push the US into a  war against Iran,  and he’s been doing all this in a manner so clumsy and overt that he may have fundamentally undermined the long-standing “special relationship” between the US and Israel.

As the long-respected American newspaper of American Jewish opinion, the Jewish Daily Forward, editorialized a few days ago:

It’s difficult to recall a time when an Israeli prime minister has inserted himself into a presidential election campaign in the way that Benjamin Netanyahu has. It’s even harder to recall a time when a trusted ally openly urged the American president to undertake a questionable, unpopular and highly risky war. We sure hope Netanyahu knows what he’s doing, because the stakes for him — and for the two nations he professes to care about the most — could not be higher.

The editorial goes on to note:

He may be overplaying his hand. Americans are deeply wary of another military involvement in the Muslim world. Most Americans oppose a military strike against Iran. Most even oppose coming to Israel’s aid should it be attacked by Iran. A recent poll by the nonpartisan Chicago Council on Global Affairs posed this hypothetical situation: Israel attacks Iran, Iran retaliates and and the two nations go to war. Only “38 percent say the United States should bring its military forces into the war on the side of Israel. A majority (59%) says it should not,” the poll showed.

 ...Obama and the Democrats, increasingly dependent upon the votes of Latinos and African Americans, younger people, women and left-leaning people of all races, are recognizing that slavish support of Israel, and particularly for an Israeli desire to launch a disastrous war against Iran, are not positions that are likely to win national elections. Polls show that the American people are tired of endless wars in the Middle East, as the Daily Forward editorial correctly notes. They are also troubled when they hear American politicians say that Israel’s policies are America’s policies.

...If Obama, as looks increasingly likely, manages to win re-election while continuing to resist Prime Minister Netanyahu’s blistering criticism and blustering calls for war, the longtime unseemly grip of AIPAC on US Middle East policy will likely be broken, and with it will go the influence of the neocons who have been pushing relentlessly for American imperial domination of the Middle East.  Once a presidential candidate successfully stands up to AIPAC and to Israeli political threats and succeeds in nonetheless winning election, the lobby’s power to threaten and intimidate dissolves.

But Bibi may have a lot of hard work ahead of him.   Recent polls
show Obama with a substantial and apparently growing lead over Romney with American Jewish voters.

According to the polling data culled between July 1 and September 10, 70 percent of registered Jewish voters planned to vote for President Obama. Only 25 percent of voters said they were planning to vote for Mitt Romney, with 5 percent undecided.

These results indicate a decline from earlier this spring, when 64 percent of registered Jewish voters said they would vote for Obama and 29 percent said they would support his Republican contender.

...The rise in Jewish support for Obama, seems to indicate that American Jews are less concerned with Israel than might be thought. Accusations that Romney has been making, such as accusing Obama of "throwing allies like Israel under the bus," and failing to deal with Iran's nuclear program, don't seem to be helping garner Jewish support for the Republican candidate.

With numbers like this, Netanyahu's gambit acquires an air of fear and desperation.

Ralph Nader Weighs In on Mitt Romney - "A Corporation Running for President Masquerading As an Individual"

Ralph Nader isn't pulling any punches when sizing up Mitt the Twit Romney.

Hey, Mitt, why start with the 47 percent? Fully 100 percent of the nation’s 500 biggest corporations are dependent on various kinds of corporate welfare – subsidies, giveaways, bailouts, waivers, and other dazzling preferences – while many pay no tax at all on very substantial profits (see their familiar names – General Electric, Pepco, Verizon etc. – here)

Are the corporations that receive this corporate welfare going to vote for President Obama? (Mr. Romney has declared that corporations are people.) Of course they’re not. Nor are all of the 47 percent of people who are “dependent upon government.”

Mr. Romney doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” Romney has lost control of his self-consciousness. Here is a man who talks about 47 percent of American households paying no income taxes (more on this later) while he has refused, unlike his father, to release back years of tax returns because they’ll show he has parked much of his wealth and income in foreign tax havens like the Bahamas precisely in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Indeed, as tax expert and former New York Times Pulitzer prize-winner David Cay Johnston said on Democracy Now, Romney has maneuvered the tax laws so that his five sons will continue to receive millions of tax-free dollars from their parents’ enormous pot of wealth.

...either ignorance, callousness or both infected Mitt Romney’s pejorative characterizations of the “government dependent” 47 percent with victim mentalities who believe that they are entitled to the government providing them the necessities of life without paying income tax. Let’s see who these people are in these recessionary times. Unemployed Americans. Americans who are too poor to pay income taxes. Elderly Americans who live on their social security checks from money for which they spent their decades of working years paying. Americans using the “earned income tax credit,” so vigorously supported and extended by President Ronald Reagan. And disabled Americans who have no dollars for any income tax.

...The avarice of Romney and his buddies at the strip-mining, job-exporting, bankrupting private equity company called Bain Capital has no bounds. He thinks it’s perfectly fine for companies like Verizon, Boeing, Duke Energy, Navistar, Wells Fargo and Pepco to use all of our country’s government funded public infrastructures and services, and yet not only pay no income tax but actually rig the tax system so they can get billions back in “benefits” from the U.S. Treasury, as General Electric has done for years. At the same time, Romney never speaks out against 35,000 super-wealthy Americans who also do not pay any federal income tax. He rarely questions crony capitalism, wants to maintain an even bigger bloated military budget, and spearheads the many-sided supremacy of corporations over real people throughout our entire political economy. He is, essentially, a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.

How Safe Are Genetically Modified Products?

The French government has directed its scientists to verify a study that found a genetically modified corn developed by Monsanto could be toxic.

Even at low doses, the GMO studied was highly toxic and even fatal for rats, to the point where if it was a medicine, it would be immediately suspended pending further investigation. It is this same GMO that ends up on our plates, when it is used to produce meat, eggs and milk.

In the 13th month of the experiment […] the incidence of tumours in rats of both sexes fed on GMO corn was two to three times higher than it was in rats on a GMO-free diet.  

...The French government has demanded that the study be verified by the French National Food Security Agency, while the European Commission has instructed the European Food Security Agency (EFSA) to do likewise.

Some Americans Are Living Longer. Not So for Uneducated White Americans.

Maybe that's why they joined the Tea Party.   America's least educated white population is not faring particularly well.   A study has shown their life expectancy has fallen by four years since the 1990's. 

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive. 

 The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008.

We Need More Andrew Weavers, A Lot More

Leading Canadian climate scientist, Andrew Weaver, will be running for the British Columbia Green Party in next year's election.

Here's hoping Dr. Weaver inspires his colleagues to follow his lead.  It would be great if the Greens could put up a scientist in every riding, federal and provincial, to put the environment and global warming on the debate agenda and to discuss these issues intelligently with the voting public.

It would be terrific to see other candidates, not just Conservatives but also Liberals and NDP, squarely under the gun defending their parties' climate change policies against a credible member of the scientific community.   We get plenty of electoral greenwashing these days, far too much, and our nation is running out of time and options.

The Tories have already taken Mulcair to the woodshed over his carbon policy and the Libs seem divided, wobbly and unable to present a coherent, meaningful climate change policy.   The Conservatives, despite EnviroMin Peter Kent's poorly manicured denials, is in league with Big Oil in the creation of a true petro-state.

We'll have to wait until next year to see how effective Professor Weaver proves to be in shaping the debate in the riding he contests.
Even if he doesn't win, campaigning for the Greens and shaping the debate can be a genuine victory for the Greens and for Canada.

Even if the Greens can't get enough scientists to run everywhere they could run strategically.   Imagine having Andrew Weaver run in Calgary against Harper and challenge him to debate his government's record on climate change and its policies for the future.   Target Harper, target Kent, target Mulcair and whoever winds up leading the Libs.     Get into their ridings.   Force them to deal with reality.

Biggest Threat to World's Biggest Economy? Republican "Cranks and Crazies"

It took an Australian to state the obvious but Aussie treasurer and deputy prime minister, Wayne Swan, sees Republicans as the greatest threat to America's economy.

"Let's be blunt and acknowledge the biggest threat to the world's biggest economy are the cranks and crazies that have taken over the Republican party."

"Despite President Obama's goodwill and strong efforts, the national interest was held hostage by the rise of the extreme Tea Party wing of the Republican party," he said.

Nobel laureate economist, Paul Krugman, added his own observations about Republicans today, noting that the remarks that landed Mitt Romney in such controversy were mainstream Republican sentiments.

...the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn’t have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party’s affection is reserved for “job creators,” a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families — who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans.

Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day — a holiday that specifically celebrates America’s workers. Here’s what it said, in its entirety: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.

Lest you think that this was just a personal slip, consider Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did he have to say about American workers? Actually, nothing: the words “worker” or “workers” never passed his lips. This was in strong contrast to President Obama’s convention speech a week later, which put a lot of emphasis on workers — especially, of course, but not only, workers who benefited from the auto bailout.

Needless to say, the G.O.P.’s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party’s policy priorities. Mr. Romney’s remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as “lucky duckies.” .

Definitely Worth a Listen

One of the greatest guitar solos you may ever experience.    Keith Richards, Sympathy for the Devil.



I may be biased.   I will, however, pass up concerts to go out of my way to watch this:  The self-styled "World's Greatest Bar Band" - George Thorogood and the Destroyers.



If you don't like this, get used to it.   Ten, twenty years max and this is what people will listen to.

The Difference Between a CF-18 and the F-35

If Canada had been operating the F-35 since 1988, we'd probably be hard pressed to find any still flying.   Over the past 24-years, the twin-engine CF-18 has racked up plenty of bird strikes.   In fact the amazing fighter, selected by the Trudeau government, has, during that period, had 67-instances where its engines ingested birds.

A bird in the burner is always serious business.   But a bird in the engine of a single-engine airplane such as the F-35 is a far different thing than a bird in one engine of a twin-engine fighter like the CF-18.  Let's do the math.   Two minus one equals one.   One minus one equals game over.  One fighter has a chance of getting its pilot safely home.   The other - not so much.

And, since we can expect these bird strikes to continue, and the government and its military shills are talking of the F-35 as meeting Canada's needs for thirty years or more, and as we're buying just 60 of the overpriced, overdue and under-performing aerial White Elephants, logic and math suggest we can expect to be making do with a rapidly dwindling force once they actually become operational.

But, of course, when attrition sets in and we begin writing off the 35 in big numbers, we'll either be going back to Lockheed to buy ever more or maybe, just maybe, we'll come to our senses and cast about for a replacement suited to Canada's needs and purposes.  Maybe.

Cops For Pot

Police officers gathered with judges and prosecutors in Denver today, coming out to support Colorado's marijuana legalization initiative.

Tony Ryan, a 36-year veteran Denver police lieutenant and LEAP, told reporters that the marijuana-related calls his department received were rarely threatening, and more likely the result of an axe to ground than serious concern. Marijuana use, he says, is not related to crime, and legalizing it would reduce the strain on officer resources.

“Beyond just being ineffective, these laws waste important law enforcement resources that could instead be going to things that actually protect public safety, like solving and preventing murders, rapes and robberies," said Ryan.

In a sign-on letter, law enforcement explained how legalizing marijuana would have positive consequences. They write that Amendment 64, which legalizes and regulates marijuana for adults over 21, would:

• Put our police priorities where they belong, by ending the arrests of non-violent marijuana users and enabling police to focus instead on preventing violent crime
• Cut off funding to violent gangs and drug cartels, who generate the majority of their revenue from illegal marijuana sales
• Protect the lives of police officers now in the line of fire in the "drug war"
• Reduce marijuana access to children by instituting strict age-limits and public safety controls
• Restore mutual respect and good relations between law enforcement and communities bearing the brunt of the current marijuana laws

The Colorado Center on Law and Policy estimates that by taxing weed and saving law enforcement resources, Amendment 64 would generate $60 million in tax revenue and savings annually. The initiative states that the first $40 million raised each year will be spent improving education.

A close friend of nearly 40-years is a recently retired Detroit cop with a PhD in criminology.  He has always advocated decriminalization of pot.  He talked of going into homes and finding one family member shot dead and a nearly empty bottle of whiskey on the table but he never saw that with anyone who had been smoking weed.

Jon Stewart - Chaos on Bullshit Mountain

Jon Stewart elegantly dismembers FOX News



Stewart hits this right out of the ballpark.

Texas Republican Symbolically Lynches Obama

A Texas Republican has strung up an "empty chair" from a tree in his front yard.   That the chair symbolizes Obama, a la Clint Eastwood,

The homeowner was contacted about the gruesome display and responded,  "I don't really give a damn whether it disturbs you or not. You can take [your concerns] and go straight to hell and take Obama with you. I don't give a shit. If you don't like it, don't come down my street."

Looking Inside Mitt Romney

It may be a bit premature but New York Times columnist Charlie Blow offers an elegant autopsy of Mitt Romney.

Romney is trapped by a desperate desire for legitimacy. He is a square — in more ways than one — trying to squeeze himself into the conservative circle of trust.

In so doing, he says all the right things the wrong way. His facts are off. His timing is off. His pitch is off. He’s just off. Try as he may, he just doesn’t fit in. But he’s now so lost in his thirst for high office that he has also lost himself. Co-opted convictions will always betray you.

Romney, whose economic plan is titled “Believe in America,” demonstrated with brutal efficiency that he doesn’t in fact believe in America.

I once wrote the following:

I have no personal gripe with Romney. I don’t believe him to be an evil man. Quite the opposite: he appears to be a loving husband and father. Besides, evil requires conviction, which Romney lacks. But he is a dangerous man. Unprincipled ambition always is. Infinite malleability is its own vice because it’s infinitely corruptible by others of ignoble intentions.

But Romney’s taped comments open the door to doubt. I’m no longer confident in the basic goodness of his constitution.
One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.