Since Steve Is Selling Out to Beijing, You Might Want to Look at These Numbers

When it comes to foreign investment and takeovers, China is only getting started.

According to Professor Yiping Huang of Peking University, writing in the September 2012 issue of East Asia Forum, what we have seen to date is only the beginning:

Chinese outward direct investment is a relatively new phenomenon. In 2002, the first year after China's accession to the World Trade Organization, China's total ODI [outward direct investment] was less than US$3 billion. By 2010, however, it had already increased to more than 20 times this amount. According to forecasts by economists at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, if China does liberalize its capital account, Chinese ODI stock could rise from US$310 billion in 2010 to US$5.3 trillion by 2020. If this prediction turns out to be correct, then China may well become the world's largest outward direct investor by this time.

To put this enormous number in context: US$5.3 trillion in overseas direct investment by China during the next seven years is roughly equal to the last three years' worth of private nonresidential fixed investment in the United States. Not all of this will acquire technology, to be sure. There isn't $5 trillion of tech companies worth buying. A great deal of China's foreign investment will reflect portfolio diversification by individual Chinese, who still cannot acquire foreign assets directly, and much of it will buy raw materials.

And China's youth are keeping up with their country's economic growth.

...In 2008, I observed that 35 million young Chinese were studying classical piano, not counting the string players, and almost entirely with private tuition. "The world's largest country," I wrote, "is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today's world - surely not the overbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills - can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers."

Another Burr for Netanyahu's Saddle

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has directed his government to start issuing passports, drivers licenses and ID cards bearing "State of Palestine" in place of  the current "Palestinian Authority."

Israeli officials declined comment, including whether Israel would prevent Palestinians with new ID cards and passports from crossing borders and checkpoints.

"Whether the changes are really implemented is unsure because of the political situation right now," said Al Jazeera's Jane Ferguson, reporting from Jerusalem. "But the move is to regain momentum after the UN vote."

In late November, Abbas won UN recognition of a state of Palestine in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, overriding Israeli objections to the largely symbolic step.

The UN bid gave the Palestinians new diplomatic leverage by affirming the borders of a future state of Palestine in lands Israel captured in 1967, but changed little in the day-to-day lives of Palestinians.

Life In a Box

One bright idea that has received almost no attention in North America is Britain's ShelterBox.   Yet these compact little lifesavers in their thousands are beginning to make their way to relief zones around the world.    Here's what a ShelterBox looks like unpacked:

It's survival for ten people.  Tools, shelter, blankets, stove and cookware, water containers and purification products all in one neatly stackable, easily transportable box.

It doesn't look like much except to anyone who doesn't happen to have any of these things, someone who has lost everything to conflict or natural disaster.   Then it looks like a lot.

The ShelterBox kits even come with activity packs for children and the contents can be specifically geared to the nature of the disaster or conflict they're being sent to.

The Security State Ramps Up

Newly extracted FBI documents show that, under Barack Obama, it's business even worse than usual for the American security state.  Chris Hedges, writing for TruthDig.com, warns that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have been unleashed on ordinary Americans,  "to silence the voices and obstruct the activity of citizens who question corporate power."

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the [Partnership for Civil Justice Fund], said in a written statement about the released files: “This production [of information], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protesters organizing with the Occupy movement. These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.” 

The FBI documents are not only a chilling example of how widespread this surveillance and obstruction has become, they are an explicit warning by the security services to all who consider dissent. Anyone who defies corporate power, even if he or she is nonviolent and acting within constitutional rights, is a suspect. These documents are part of the plan to make us fearful, compliant and disempowered. They mark, I suspect, a government attempt to end peaceful mass protests by responding with repression to the grievances of Americans.

And what of our country?  What of Harper's unaccountable secret police?   We know that he's created a task force of officers from the RCMP plus the Calgary and Edmonton police forces together with our national spy agency, CSIS, to monitor opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline.   What are they up to?  Who are they watching?

This blog has attracted periodic attention from US Navy intelligence, US Army intelligence, the FBI, Homeland Security, Lockheed Martin.   Who else is watching, and for what?  Maybe that's all part of the game.   Hit the site and hope they'll notice you stopped by just to let them know you're keeping an eye on them.

It is truly difficult to see how the right to privacy can ever be restored today.    So much personal information is so readily available to strangers and flies through so many hands (or computers) at the speed of electrons.   Perhaps we should stop fighting a lost battle and focus our energies, instead, on those who most abuse our privacy.   You know who they are.   Chances are you even voted for one of them.

What Is It With Bubbles?

There's something about bubbles we must find enormously comforting or somehow rewarding.   Look at the Americans.  They had the Savings & Loan fiasco.   Then it was Enron and a gaggle of similar cooked companies.   Who can forget the Dot.Com bubble where billions in notional wealth were conjured out of thin air to snare unwary pensioners.  And of course the housing/sub-prime mortgage bubble that rocked markets around the world.

Now, still very much reeling from the Great Recession of 2008, we're drifting about inside this fossil fuel bubble that, by some accounts, could be ready to burst any time.

This litany of bubbles proves, convincingly, that people and those who govern them are prepared to believe almost anything if it's what they want to hear.   If it sounds good enough, reason and caution can go straight out the window.   And experience shows once they're out the window you don't get them back either.  At that point, you're along for the ride.

What makes the current fossil fuel bubble particularly troublesome are its complexity and enormity.   Put most simply, fossil fuel resources are being carried on corporate books and being traded at prices wildly above their actual value.   They are today's sub-prime assets.

That point was made to the Governor of the Bank of England a year ago in an open letter from a blue ribbon panel of financiers, scientists and former politicians.

"These high-carbon assets pose significant strategic challenges for the future prosperity of Britain that just can't be ignored," said investment manager James Cameron, who is a member of the prime minister's business advisory group. "Investors continue to pour cash into unsustainable assets without understanding the risks associated with these investments, such as climate change,  local pollution, fossil fuel price volatility, political risk  and catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon."

Many other voices since then have warned that, if we're to have any chance of limiting warming to 2C, 80% of known fossil fuel reserves will have to be left where they are, safely underground.  That would mean abandoning all of the higher-carbon fossil fuels including coal and bitumen.

In recent months the United States has been abuzz with with grand pronouncements of fossil fuel self-sufficiency due to the bounty of unimagineable amounts of shale oil and shale gas to be had by fracking.  It has been enough that it stampeded Harper and the Calgary Petroleum Club into a panic over where they were going to flog bitumen one Americans began unpacking their cornucopia of cheaper oil and gas.   All heads turned to the far west and China.

Now that the fracked fossil fuel markets may have been gamed by Wall Street much as they manipulated sub-prime mortgages just a few miserable years ago.   They've been bundling gas leases and transforming them into the same sorts of ersatz securities they contrived for sub-prime mortgages and buyers have been snapping them up.

Only now it's turning out that these securities, like those before them, may be dodgy.   Reserves, estimated to be good for thirty or forty years of production, may peter out in just seven or eight.  In other words they too are sub-prime assets wildly inflated above actual value.   Shit, oh dear.

If our biggest trading partner, the United States of America, to whose economy ours is lashed like a dinghy, is facing the convulsive recoil of yet another bubble why are we all ignoring it.   If fossil fuels generally have become sub-prime, why are we investing so heavily in expansion of the Tar Sands, carrying on the taxpayers' backs, all the deferred royalties and taxes, all the unfunded environmental calamity?   Worse yet, why are we doubling down on such a bad bet?

What is it with bubbles?


Update - for anyone interested in learning more of shale fracking in Canada, Andrew Nikiforuk has written extensively on the subject at The Tyee.

It's That Season Again. Might As Well Find the Humour

Vancouver and other parts of B.C. are falling victim to widespread norovirus.   Plenty of Vancouverites are "down" with the highly infectious bug and they're not alone.  There's plenty of it in the U.K. at the moment which led The Guardian's Charlie Brooker to offer up this not so whimsical take on norovirus:

Everyone hates the norovirus, with the exception of two distinct groups. First: scientists. Professor Ian Goodfellow, who has spent the past decade studying it, has lovingly dubbed the norovirus "the Ferrari of the virus world", not because it makes the contents of your stomach accelerate from 0-60 in 3.4 seconds, but because it's so ruthlessly efficient. Requiring a mere 20 particles to seize command of its victims, the norovirus is 200 times more infectious than Daydream Believer by The Monkees. Consequently many scientists claim to be "impressed" by the thing – a bit like admiring Nazi architecture, if you ask me.

It must be brilliant being a scientist during an outbreak like this because if you get infected yourself, you can at least take the edge off your suffering by admiring the sheer force of your symptoms. The fascinating pitter-patter of stomach contents against the back of your teeth as a fearsome torrent of spew erupts from within like a liquid poltergeist fleeing an exorcism. The impressive way your backside emits high-pressure jets of hot fluid, like the Hulk squeezing silty boiled water from a Fairy Liquid bottle by clenching it abruptly in his fist. The searing aftermath, as your throat rages as though sandpapered and your anus screams like a scalded button. This is nature in all its raw majesty. Film it in HD, get David Attenborough to record the soundtrack, and you've got a Sunday evening treat for millions.

The other group of norolovers are newspaper editors, who get to fill their front pages on the quiet post-Christmas news days with headlines like PALACE "FULL OF VOMIT" and BILLIONS DEFECATE. If, like me, you're an emetophobe – someone with an irrational fear of vomiting – such headlines are on a par with MADMAN ON LOOSE AND STANDING BEHIND YOU. 

Brooker's tip on dodging norovirus?   Don't touch anything at least not with your bare hands.   Learn to open doors with your elbows.  Find creative ways to operate a bathroom with your hands clad in tissue.   But soon you're bound to come around a corner headlong into a sneeze anyway.

Another MacKay-Fantino Love Child?

They could've stuck with the ships Paul Martin had on the books when he left office, but nooooo.

The ships, three of them, were to replace the navy's 45-year old supply ships only they were to be supply ships and more.    That deal was scrapped by the Tories.

Now we're told to expect an announcement that the navy will get two, possibly three, replacement ships but they won't measure up to what was promised.

What followed, (after Martin's plan was scrapped) according to the series of internal briefings, was a drastic scaling back of the navy’s design concept, overseen by senior civilian defence and political officials.

The $2.6 billion program relaunched in 2010 is expected to deliver two — maybe three — ships.

But with the program delayed until 2018 and accounting for inflation — currently running at seven per cent in the shipbuilding industry — it will likely cost taxpayers more than if the government had stuck with the original plan.

The new proposal will see the joint ships carry fewer helicopters, drastically less cargo, no space for a joint mission headquarters or a full-fledged hospital, as mandated in the original concept.

The Harper government has assigned the task of building the ships to Seaspan Shipyards in Vancouver and is expected to select from two specific designs sometime this year.

Unlike the troubled F-35 fighter proposal where capabilities such as stealth were hardly questioned, the briefings on the joint support ships suggest civilians played a large role after 2008 deciding what the military could live without in the new vessels.

...The initial concept was for a joint ship that could act as floating supply base for the navy, carrying vast amounts of army equipment to trouble spots, and act as offshore command post and hospital for humanitarian missions. It was well-researched and thought out by the navy.

...The ships, as they are envisioned now, almost entirely give up the sealift role.

Gwynne Dyer Also Gets Gassy

Wow, a week past just jam packed with reality.

TruthDig came out with an explanation of how America has slipped into a fracked gas bubble in which bundled gas leases were substituted for bundled sub-prime mortgages and flogged by the usual suspects at wildly inflated prices.

And Gwynne Dyer also took a hard look at fracked gas and concluded it's all sizzle and no steak:

Production of shale gas has soared in the United States (still the home to most shale plays) in the past 10 years, but it is only compensating for the decline in conventional gas production in the same period. Moreover, while the operators’ calculations assume a 40-year productive lifetime for the average shale gas well, the real number is turning out to be around five to seven years. 

That means that in the older shale plays they have to drill like crazy just to maintain current production—and since drilling is very expensive, they aren’t making a profit. As Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told a private meeting four months ago: “We’re making no money. It’s all in the red.”

They are hoping to make a profit, of course, once the gas price recovers from the ridiculous level of $2 per million BTU that it fell to in 2009, when a great many people believed this really was a miracle. Four dollars per million BTU would do it for most operators, and even the highest-cost ones would be making a profit at $7. But it’s clear that shale gas is no miracle that will provide ultra-cheap fossil fuel for the next 100 years.

In that case, the prediction that the United States will be the world’s biggest oil producer by 2017 is nonsense.  Even on an ultra-optimistic estimate of how much “unconventional oil” it can eventually get out of the shale formations, it will still be importing a large proportion of its oil in 2035.

And the whole Middle Eastern business is a red herring, because the United States does not depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil. Most U.S. oil imports come from the Western hemisphere (Canada, Mexico, Venezuela) or from Africa (Nigeria, Algeria, Angola). Only 15 percent of its oil comes from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait, and virtually none from anywhere else in the Gulf. Whatever America’s various wars in the region may have been about, they were not about “security of oil supply”.

Which leaves the business about shale gas and oil pushing the world’s greenhouse gas emissions over the top. They can’t do that, because we are already over the top. We need only continue on our present course, without any growth in “unconventional” oil and gas production, and we will be irrevocably committed to 2 degrees C of warming within 10 years. Within 25 years we will be committed to +4 degrees C.

So why are we fed a daily diet of misinformation about energy in general, and shale gas in particular? Because a lot of people have something to sell.

What, then, are we to make of this?   Did Harper panic in flogging Athabasca assets to China because, dimwit that he so persistently is, he misread America's energy bonanza?   Did Harper, in effect, swallow the hype?   That message was circulating throughout Canada's corporate media.   China was our market of last resort.  We absolutely needed China to save the Tar Sands.   Ottawa must order the serfs to kow tow to Beijing.   China must have their pipeline to Kitimat.

That was then, this is now and now it appears that the United States will be staying at Alberta's bitumen trough, especially when the reality of its fracking binge sets in and that bubble becomes the latest to collapse.

So, as Gwynne Dyer says, "why are we fed a daily diet of misinformation about energy in general?   Because a lot of people (in Edmonton and Calgary and Ottawa) have something to sell."

When Rallies, Flyers and Public Forums Won't Work

They call themselves Deep Green Resistance Vancouver.    They're a group of local environmental activists calling "for militant action - including sabotage - to defend the environment."

Although they emphasize that as an aboveground organization they’ll only engage in nonviolent actions, one of the group’s stated objectives is to “shift public opinion toward supporting an underground resistance that exists or may come to exist”.

“It was born out of necessity,” Jason Doherty said about the concept of “deep green resistance” during a phone interview with the Straight. “A lot of environmental groups play a vital role in protecting the environment. However, if you look back at the track record of these organizations, you’ll find that a majority of them are dealing with a fairly dismal track record in terms of the actual destruction that they’ve prevented.”

 Joe Foy has been involved in the Canadian environmental movement since the mid ’80s, and the national campaign director of the Vancouver-based Wilderness Committee is familiar with the thinking behind direct action.

“I understand the philosophy and, certainly, when one looks at the loss of species, the decline of the oceans, the destruction of farmland, and especially the changing climate, an argument can be made that environmental protection would necessitate actions that may damage equipment or put people at risk,” Foy told the Straight in a phone interview. “I disagree with that. I think that if we are trying to build a society worth having, we should maintain the peaceful and respectful society that we have here in Canada and try to improve on it, not go the other way and create a society where decisions are made by who can wreak the most damage on the other. I reject that notion.”

But according to Daniel Whittingstall, an organizer with Deep Green Resistance Vancouver, the mainstream environmental movement has “only put a Band-Aid” over the deteriorating health of the planet.

It's not difficult to grasp the frustration that fuels the Deep Green movement but it can only play straight into the hands of unprincipled charlatans like Harper and Oliver who will hold them up as proof that those who oppose their bitumen scam are eco-terrorists.

The time to act will arrive plenty soon enough and that will be a time for truly large-scale but non-violent civil disobedience.   As plenty of native and non-natives alike have shown in British Columbia and elsewhere, we can close roads, we can stop trains from running, we can stop ferries from sailing.   We can keep trucks from rolling, excavators from digging.   We can shut the whole damned thing down and make Harper be the one to resort to violent confrontation.   Even then there'll be nothing to lose and much to gain if we refuse to respond in kind.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, Sadly

Ah'm fixin to git me one of them thar assault rifles.

Seriously, how did this guy, James Holmes, ever get his hands on an assault rifle?  He's the accused shooter who killed 12 and wounded 70 after opening up on a movie theater of people in Aurora, Colorado last July.

U.S. Coast Guard Probes Ottawa-Beijing's Tanker Scheme

The U.S. Coast Guard has been ordered to investigate and report on the implications of large scale bitumen supertanker trafficking out of Vancouver.

A legislative amendment proposed by Washington state Sen. Maria Cantwell and signed into law by President Barack Obama a couple of weeks ago gives the U.S. marine safety agency six months to conduct a risk assessment of the planned expansion of oil pipeline capacity to the West Coast.

While several proposed projects would see oil from the Alberta oil sands brought to the B.C. coast for export primarily to China, the legislation deals specifically with tanker traffic out of the Vancouver area.

"According to reports, Canada is poised to increase oil tanker traffic through the waters around the San Juan Islands and the Juan de Fuca by up to 300 per cent," said a statement issued by Cantwell's office.

"A supertanker oil spill near our shores would threaten Washington state's thriving coastal economy and thousands of jobs," the Democratic senator said in the statement. "This bill will provide crucial information for Washington coastal communities by requiring a detailed risk analysis...."

The Coast Guard will study the risk of transporting oil via supertanker, tanker and barge through the Salish Sea waterways, which encompasses U.S. and Canadian territorial waters between southern Vancouver Island and the mainland. It includes Juan de Fuca Strait, the Strait of Georgia, Haro and Rosario Straits and Puget Sound.

No word yet on when or even if the U.S. Coast Guard will be looking into the Kitimat proposal which could pose a similar threat to Alaska.

The Royal Society of Canada Tells Harper to Unshackle Our Scientists

The President of the Royal Society of Canada, Yolande Grise, warns that the relationship between public policy and science is broken within the Harper regime.

Policy and science are in a mutual relationship based on the importance given by government to scientific advice in policy development, and the recognition by scientists that government decisions are made democratically and must take into account evidence beyond that provided by the scientific community.

For this relationship to work, scientists have a responsibility to act ethically and to communicate their findings to the broader community. Science works only when discoveries made in the lab or in the field are communicated and debated, not only to other researchers but to all stakeholders. Governments, in turn, have to respect scientific advice and not impede the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Scientists and the federal government can be at odds when government policy does not appear to be well-aligned with the best scientific advice. That tension is often constructive: For example, a 2010 report by scientists providing evidence that oil sands activity was polluting the Athabaska River led to several levels of government taking a fresh look at the monitoring practices and activity of the industry in the region.

This relationship is now at risk in Canada. Unreasonable limits are being placed on the ability of government-employed scientists to communicate their findings, whether through publication of their research results or attendance at scientific meetings. These restrictions seem particularly severe in topics related to the environment, where several government scientists have been denied the opportunity to discuss their work.

Canada will only succeed as a country if it’s able to harness the best scientific advice to make decisions. The federal government should immediately unshackle government scientists and let them do their jobs. The integrity of evidence-based public policy development is at stake.

Americans' Forever Blowing Bubbles, This Time It's Gassy

Is America caught in a shale fracking bubble?

An article from TruthDig.com claims it is and that it's set up the same way as the last one only with bundled gas leases replacing subprime mortgage-based derivatives and peddled to hapless investors by the usual suspects for wildly inflated values.

Although hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) is in the media’s hot seat, the prospect of a drilling bubble coupled with the underreported problem of methane leakage may be the most destructive qualities of natural gas in the United States.

From commissioning false field reports to flooding television with commercials, natural gas companies are convincing Americans that gas will save the U.S. market; it will not.

As time passes, data on natural gas production, which goes back only a few years, indicate that shale gas is an unreliable energy source. Reserves are declining up to 70 percent per year. Where corporate reports show that decline leveling off through the use of theoretical models, figures point to an unrelenting decline that predicts the reserves will dry up in a few years.

Financial backers such as Goldman Sachs and AIG are hurriedly funding the development of the natural gas sector to attract other investors before reality sets in. If they fail, the billions of dollars spent from 2006 to 2008 will have been wasted.

These firms are financing energy companies to buy up cheap land, quickly drill wells, label the fields as profitable, and then bundle up those leases and sell them for up to $30,000 per acre to clueless investors. The average acre, according to the founder of Energy Policy Forum and former investment banker Deborah Rogers, is sold to developers for no more than $1,200, and sometimes as low as $100.

These industries are doing the same thing they did leading up to the 2008 crash, only swapping out subprime mortgages for unproved shale gas reserves.

Just as in 2008, companies control the ratings agencies. They “guide” them, arguing that these deals are too complex for the agency to rate by itself. 

“Public policymakers need to be very aware of the promotional aspect of shale gas,” petroleum geologist Art Berman says. “This is a very efficient public relations and business machine. They have done a really good job of convincing public policymakers that shale is revolutionary.”

The industry’s reach, many say, infects the Department of Energy and its Energy Information Agency. 

The article links to the eye-opening, 2011 Cornell report into gas fracking that concluded so much methane, the main component of natural gas, is inadvertently leaked from fracked gas wells as to make fracked gas energy up to 20% more carbon intensive than burning coal.

Unless We Act Soon, There's Not Much Reason To Act At All.

We're in the battle of our lives and we're almost as indifferent to it as our adversary, the science of physics.

Bill McKibben, writing at tomdispatch.com, says time is not on our side.

We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn't care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.

Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets.  Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.

We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible -- all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.

Unless you understand these distinctions you don’t understand climate change -- and it’s not at all clear that President Obama understands them.

That’s why his administration is sometimes peeved when they don’t get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in his first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase in average mileage for automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over the next decade.

It’s precisely the kind of gradual transformation that people -- and politicians -- like. ...But here’s the terrible thing: it’s no longer a measure that impresses physics.  After all, physics isn’t kidding around or negotiating.  While we were discussing whether climate change was even a permissible subject to bring up in the last presidential campaign, it was melting the Arctic. If we’re to slow it down, we need to be cutting emissions globally at a sensational rate, by something like 5% a year to make a real difference.

...At his post-election press conference, [Obama] announced that climate change was “real,” thus marking his agreement with, say, President George H.W. Bush in 1988. In deference to “future generations,” he also agreed that we should “do more.” But addressing climate change, he added, would involve “tough political choices.” Indeed, too tough, it seems, for here were his key lines:

“I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”

 

The president must be pressed to do all he can -- and more.  That’s why thousands of us will descend on Washington D.C. on President’s Day weekend, in what will be the largest environmental demonstration in years. But there’s another possibility we need to consider: that perhaps he’s simply not up to this task, and that we’re going to have to do it for him, as best we can.

If he won’t take on the fossil fuel industry, we will. That’s why on 192 campuses nationwide active divestment movements are now doing their best to highlight the fact that the fossil fuel industry threatens their futures.

If he won’t use our position as a superpower to drive international climate-change negotiations out of their rut, we’ll try.  That’s why young people from 190 nations are gathering in Istanbul in June in an effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won’t listen to scientists -- like the 20 top climatologists who told him that the Keystone pipeline was a mistake -- then top scientists are increasingly clear that they’ll need to get arrested to make their point.

Those of us in the growing grassroots climate movement are going as fast and hard as we know how (though not, I fear, as fast as physics demands). Maybe if we go fast enough even this all-too-patient president will get caught up in the draft. But we’re not waiting for him. We can’t.

Idle No More Probably Defies Convenient Definition

Idle No More doesn't speak to a grievance.   It doesn't speak to two or three.   What it speaks to is defined solely by how broadly and deeply it resonates both within the First Nations community and beyond into the greater society.

That's probably what most vexes our autocratic government.  Despite their resistance, even the best efforts of the talking points they have distributed for circulation throughout the rightwing (i.e. corporate) media, we are siding with INM if for no other reason that it validates our own distrust, contempt and alienation from our government.

We have had it UP TO THE TITS.

We don't rely on the hapless New Democrats or Liberals any more.  Both of them, yes even the NDP, are only slightly less corporatist than the Tories.

I wish I could be conveniently disingenuous enough to say that we support Idle No More in its own right.  That would be too much.  We support it mainly as another coal for the fire of our own discontent.  When we're content and placid we're all too willing to turn indifferent to First Nations and their problems.

But they're here now and so are we and perhaps now it's time to find what connects us and to fix what has for so long been left neglected, broken.

We're on the verge of a fight for the country that, in a few aspects, recalls an earlier fight two centuries past.  It's time non-native Canada stood alongside First Nation Canada and stood our ground, together, resolute.

If we stand together they can't hope to win and they know it.  They will stop at nothing to keep that from happening.   We may have to wage this battle in British Columbia but the war is for the future of Canada.

When Is a Public Hearing Not a Public Hearing?

Can you call something a "public hearing" when you refuse admission to the sitting Member of Parliament for the area you're holding your meeting?

Newly-minted Victoria NDP MP Murray Rankin was left wondering just that after he was denied access to the Northern Gateway hearings now underway in Victoria.

Rankin wasn't elected yet by the time the deadline for submissions to the Potemkin Village environmental hearings closed.

Vic Times Colonist columnist Les Leyne said the whole security thing was a bit much:

The federal review hearing into the Northern Gateway pipeline at the Delta Ocean Pointe was just like going back to first-year university at Carleton.

It was full of attractive communications women and all they did was say no — in both official languages.

“Can I interview the panel?”

“No.”

“Can I sit here?”

“Non.”

“Can Victoria MP Murray Rankin come in?”

“No.”

Even their hotel room number was kept confidential for a while (which triggered more flashbacks). The fear was that the public hearing would be interrupted by members of the public — specifically, the anarcho-enviro fringe that sometimes hangs around the edges of such things.

The exercise is a joint effort between the National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

They’ve staged hearings the length and breadth of B.C. and Alberta. But the Victoria show was the most clenched, uptight production so far.

A Recipe for a New, Healthy Canadian Economy for 2013

Ann Dale, Canada research chair in community sustainability at Royal Roads has formulated a recipe for a new and healthy Canadian economy for 2013.

Among other things, Dale argues we need to break our fixation with constant growth in Gross Domestic Product and replace that with more meaningful goals.  As The Guardian's enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, wrote recently, "sustainable growth" and "sustainability" are now polar opposites.

While others are going low-carb, Canadian political leaders should go low-carbon and start measuring some other metrics as well to slim down environmental risks and reduce ecological scarcities.


As Canada research chair in sustainable community development at Royal Roads University, I am exploring more sustainable development pathways. Along with my team, we brought together more than 100 researchers, practitioners, civil-society leaders and policymakers from across the country to participate in a workshop in the spring of 2012. Our objective was to look at what is working and not working with our current economic model based on growth, and there was unanimous consensus on what Canadian decision-makers need to act on.


We need to expand our measures of progress from a simple growth metric, the king of all indicators, the gross domestic product (GDP), to human well-being.


The evidence is very clear that the present economy based on perpetual growth, rising levels of debt and continuing ecological deficits cannot continue.

 Read Ann Dale's recommendations for action here.

What Is Your Favourite State Best, or Worst, At?

Most Canadians have a favourite U.S. state, usually the best known to them or the one they feel most comfortable with.  Yet you might be surprised to discover what your pet state is best (or worst) at:

h/t BusinessPundit.com

Here's What We're Up Against

There are a number of differences between the grounded Royal Dutch Shell oil drilling platform ship, Kulluk, and the sort of supertankers the Chinese are planning to run into and out of Kitimat.   That said the Kulluk does provide a useful glimpse into what can go wrong in northern coastal waters and how hard it is to control when something like that happens.

The Kulluk was being towed to its new site when the tow cable parted.   Tug boats were right there but they couldn't get it back under tow and so it drifted onto the rocks.

Now it turns out the Kulluk, which still hasn't breached, will probably remain grounded (and grinding away) on the rocks 40-miles from Kodiak City until spring.

What's the holdup?   It's being blamed on the "fury of the north Pacific winter."

That's what it's like in the northern coastal waters shared by Alaska and British Columbia.   The conditions can be furious, and those conditions are so bad that tugs can't salvage ships and oil spill ships can do nothing.   Even the outfits Enbridge has lined up for its oil spill vessels freely admit they can operate only in calm waters and are designed and equipped to respond to spills of conventional crude oil, not bitumen.

And, yes, in case you're wondering.   That picture is of the Kulluk, snagged on the rocky bottom, in a remarkably calm moment, off the equally rocky Alaska shoreline awaiting its fate until spring.

Not Exactly a Confidence Builder

For reasons I don't understand I often read the Times Colonist online before I go out to the front porch and pick up the morning's print edition.

This morning the online paper had this headline, "Tsunami warning for B.C. coast and Vancouver Island cancelled after 7.5 magnitude quake."

Once again I'm left wondering "what tsunami, what quake? What is it this time?"  The only conclusion I can draw is that if, when, we do get hit by the Big One I won't know about it until my house starts hopping around or gets swept away on some mega-wave.

Deep sleepers are at some disadvantage.   Many times I've been in line at the grocery store and heard locals going on about the latest quake.   I try to turn away if they start looking at me for my input.  I never have any nice anecdotes to add.   Some talk about their furniture moving.  Another had her baseboards pop off.  Pictures fall off walls.   Windows rattle.  They wake up to feel the room quivering a bit.   Sorry, nothing here, even my old beagle doesn't wake up any more.

It could be I'm finally getting immunized with Andean Fatalism although I do keep a good stock of first aid supplies, food and water as well as fishing and hunting gear.   Many of us do at least some disaster preparedness in our homes.  

Still, there's something about always finding out about these quakes and waves long after they're over.

Jack Knox It Straight Out of the Park

Victoria Times Colonist scribe Jack Knox has it right.   It's not eco-hippies who will stop Harper's Northern Gateway pipeline, it's the heart of middle-class Canada who will do that job.

The panel reviewing Enbridge’s proposal to build a 1,150-kilometre pipeline from Alberta to a terminal at Kitimat will spend until Jan. 11 hearing presentations from more than 270 Victorians, all of whom signed up for the opportunity at least 15 months ago.

First up was [Bill] Eisenhauer, with a message echoed throughout the day: Northern Gateway represents a rush to sell off a precious resource in a reckless fashion, the threat to the environment outweighing the benefit. “There are many, many other less risky and less toxic ways to generate economic growth,” he testified.

Eisenhauer is not an eco-hippie. He wore a suit and tie, no hackey sack in sight. He’s a solid community guy: a 45-year-old dad who has his own communications business, sits on the Victoria Hospice Foundation board, coaches a Bays United soccer team and helped organize the local leg of the Olympic torch relay.

In other words, he’s mainstream, the kind of voter whose opinion carries weight with politicians. His is the voice — or at least a voice — of Middle Canada. “That is one of the reasons I thought it was important that I make the effort,” he said later.

He’s not alone. While the list of speakers is liberally sprinkled with environmental activists, Friday’s Ocean Pointe waiting room looked more like a United Church service than a Grateful Dead concert.

That’s not the image they get across the Rockies, where a different narrative is told. The conventional Albertan perspective is that the world needs oil, we have it, we just need to get it to market. Our traditional customers are in the U.S. heartland, but the Americans have rejected the Keystone pipeline that would take it there. Besides, the oil companies can get a much higher price from the Asians, so let’s build a pipeline to the coast and sell to them instead.

Alberta and Ottawa freely malign British Columbians opposed to their damned bitumen pipelines as eco-radicals, extremists.  Many, perhaps even most, of us are grey-haired, lifelong law-abiding, middle class citizens for whom the British Columbia/Alberta border is a pipeline Rubicon.   It endangers us, our province and our way of life.  That can't be allowed to happen.

One Fish. One Point Seven Million Dollars. Adios, Blue Fin.

It's a record.  A 222kg blue fin tuna was sold for $1.7-million (155m yen) at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market.

 High bids traditionally mark the year's first auction at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market.

Even the buyer, sushi chain owner Kiyoshi Kimura, who also paid out the record price last year, said the cost was "a bit high".

The sale came amid continued warnings from environmentalists that tuna stocks are dwindling and overfished.
'Encourage Japan'
This year's record-breaking fish was caught off north-eastern Japan and weighed in at 222kg (489lbs), some 47kg lighter than last year's prize-winner, which fetched 56m yen.

Averaged out, that's $3,500 a pound.  Imagine what the last blue fin will fetch.  It's only a matter of time.

Fantino's Foot-In-Mouthitis Flares Again

Harper loose cannon Julian Fantino is at it again.   Now safely distanced from the F-35 fiasco, Fantino has been unleashed on the International Cooperation portfolio.

His diplomatic prowess was demonstrated in La Presse where Fantino announced Canadian aid to Haiti was being frozen.  It turns out that nobody notified the Haitians or, for that matter, Canada's ambassador to Port-au-Prince either.

Haitian ambassador to Canada Frantz Liautaud said the first he heard of Mr. Fantino’s freeze on aid to Haiti was through this morning’s news. He’s already contacted the Canadian International Development Agency, the government aid organization that Mr. Fantino oversees, seeking clarification.

...He said he called Canada’s ambassador to Port-au-Prince, who didn’t know about it either. “He also learned about it from the press,” Mr. Liautaud said.

In his interview with La Presse, Mr. Fantino said Haitians have to take charge of their own problems, and was quoted in French saying Haitian aid is “on ice at the moment.”

“Are we going to take care of their problems forever? They also have to take charge of themselves,” he was quoted as saying by La Presse.

Yep, Fantino is all class.  How this joker ever got beyond beat cop is a complete mystery.

Could We Become Ungovernable?

Is Canada's federal government losing its connection with the Canadian people?   Are Canadians becoming estranged from those who govern them?   Two reports from December, one by Environics, the other from Samara Canada, suggest that Harper no longer governs but merely rules an increasingly unruly and disdainful populace.

"Not only is voter turnout decreasing, but every year fewer Canadians are getting involved in other kinds of political activities, like joining or donating to political parties, signing petitions
or attending protests. If nothing is done to reverse this disturbing trend, those in power will no longer hear the voices of the majority of Canadians."

It could be as easily said that "those in power" have long ago lost all interest in the voices of Canadians.  The Environics research showed that, while the Canadian people remain consistently progressive, their political parties have drifted away from them to the right.

Almost without fail, the disengaged we spoke to described themselves as political outsiders. On the basis of their experiences, they described government, bureaucrats, politicians and the media as working for someone else and, therefore, irrelevant to their needs. Some went so far as to say that the political system makes
them outsiders on purpose. For those who feel like outsiders, there is little reason to engage in politics when politics does not engage with them.
 
In contrast, those who identified themselves as politically engaged describe an insider relationship with politics, believing that the
political system works for them. 

The third and final finding of this report proposes that disengaged people become outsiders through their daily experience and interactions with the political system. This finding is a far cry from conventional wisdom that holds that the disengaged simply do not care or that they lack knowledge.
 
Some became outsiders after seeking assistance from elected representatives and civil servants in government, but ultimately receiving little help. Others, especially younger Canadians,
came to understand very early on that the political system disregards their concerns. Despite these two different pathways to outsider status, there is a common destination: the disengaged
have learned from personal experience that engagement is futile.

Both of these reports, Environic's and Samara's are well worth reading.   Both are warnings we need to hear about the disease in Canadian governance.   The Environics study found that already a solid majority of Canadians see protest and civil disobedience as an effective and worthwhile vehicle for compelling political change.

So far we've had skirmishes - the Occupy movement, the Montreal students' protests - but we haven't had the sort of head-on confrontation in which the public at large stands defiant against their government.   Yet this is one possible outcome from the Northern Gateway pipeline scheme about to be forced on British Columbians.   Will Harper be able to maintain the legitimacy of the federal government if he's confronted, and compelled to subdue, a large resistance of otherwise law-abiding British Columbians?

Fifth Generation, Maybe, But It's Still Gen 5.0

Harper DefMin, Peter MacKay, like a trained seal smacking its flippers, constantly barks about the Lockheed F-35 being a "Fifth Generation" fighter and, hence, oh so much superior to all the Gen 4.5-fighters on today's market.

As The Fifth Estate noted in its expose on the stealth light bomber, the "Fifth Generation" business was a term coined by Lockheed's marketing/PR branch.

But if the F-35 is a 5th Gen warplane, it's very much a Beta issue.  It's prototypical, a complicated, hyper-expensive, gremlin-riddled, aerial experiment that is still years away from its testing completion target.

Even when Lockheed finally completes testing, years of trial and error lie ahead for the F-35 as participating air forces (and their potential adversaries) explore its true strengths, its limitations and even its emerging flaws.   You won't know what you've got until you have a few airframes with a thousand or two thousand hours service on them.

And then?  By then Gen 5.2 or 5.3 will be out.   It will embody the learning curve that resulted from all the F-35's delays, testing, cost overruns, glitches and fixes.   And that Gen 5.2 or 5.3 will be where buyers begin to see value for their money.   They won't have to buy all the prototypical mistakes and glitches and fixes.   They'll have a far better idea what they're buying, what it will do and won't and what it's really worth, especially the supposed stealth advantage.

It's not like we haven't experienced this generational troubleshooting/learning curve thing before.  We have.   It's happened in the transition from open-cockpit wood and fabric biplanes to all metal, closed-cockpit, high-performance monoplanes.  It happened again from that era in the transition to early jet powered planes and, again, from rudimentary jet power to bigger, more powerful jets with radar and missiles and, again, with the introduction of really powerful (excess thrust to weight ratio), highly maneuverable and electronically sophisticated multi-role warplanes that we're currently operating.

Each of those previous generational shifts tended to bring advancements albeit usually with cost impacts.   More speed, greater maneuverability, more and better weaponry and systems.

This time, however, we're being asked to take several steps backward in order to get the shiny, new (and unproven) thing - stealth.   Less speed, lower agility, less range and payload, less reliability and very limited redundancy.   Those Gen 4.5 warplanes that we're turning our noses up at will do most things better than the F-35 can except they're not as stealthy.  Typhoon, Rafale and the others are true air combat warplanes that can dogfight, intercept, patrol and take care of ground support missions also.   We won't be getting much of that in the F-35 but that's par for the course for prototypical technology.

A big sacrifice the F-35 imposes in exchange for questionable, frontal-aspect stealth, is the "supercruise" capability of Gen 4.5 fighters.   This is the ability to fly supersonic without use of fuel-guzzling afterburner power.  The F-35 doesn't have it.  Seen from head-on, the F-35 is as wide as a barn door, something apparently necessary for stealth masking.  Because it's wide it suffers from high drag that makes going fast possible only on afterburner.  That's a problem when it comes to a limited fuel load in a warplane designed to operate behind enemy lines.  You could add external tanks but there goes your stealth and, presumably, the aircraft's already mediocre agility.  Is giving up supercruise for limited one-directional radar concealment a viable trade-off?  In other words, the F-35 might force users to give up more than they're getting, potentially a lot more.

The F-35's shortcomings, or at least many of them, don't exist in its F-22 Big Brother and they probably won't be shared with the opposition's stealth warplanes either, Russia's PAK 50 or China's J-20 and J-31.   Nobody wants to talk about it but the F-22 Raptor's maker, Lockheed, designed the F-35 to be inferior to the F-22, including far less stealthy.   The F-22 is Lockheed's Chrysler Imperial.   The F-35 is Lockheed's basic Plymouth even if it is being flogged at F-22 prices.

So, if Peter MacKay and the rest of the Harper Cons are going to insist on branding the F-35 a 5th Generation warplane, maybe they should be honest and call it Gen 5 Beta.

Chris Christie Bares His Fangs at Boehner and Congressional Republicans

New Jersey's popular Republican governor, Chris Christie, has turned on the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and House majority leader John Boehner is reeling.

"Americans are tired of the palace intrigue and political partisanship of this Congress, which places one-upmanship ahead of the lives of the citizens who sent these people to Washington DC in the first place," Christie said.

He added: "America deserves better than yet another example of a government that has forgotten who they are there to serve and why." Referring specifically to the failure to act on the hurricane Sandy package, he said: "Shame on you. Shame on Congress."

Christie said that, historically, lawmakers in Washington did not play politics with disaster relief, but in the present atmosphere, everything was the subject of gamesmanship. "They are so consumed with their internal politics, they've forgotten they have a job to do," Christie said. "Everything is the subject of one-upmanship. It is why the American people hate Congress."

"Last night, the House of Representatives failed that most basic test of public service and they did so with callous indifference to the suffering of the people of my state," he said.

"There is only one group to blame for the continued suffering of these innocent victims: the House majority and their Speaker John Boehner," he added. He described Boehner's decision to cancel the vote on the aid package as disappointing and "disgusting".

Boehner, stung by Christie's remarks, got the Hurricane Sandy relief bill on the floor for a vote on Friday.

The Right Just Doesn't Get It

Two prominent Rightwing bobble heads, PostMedia's John Ivison and the Ottawa Citizen's Terry Glavin have both written surly op-eds dismissing the Idle No More movement as frivolous, simplistic and disingenuous.

Their columns reveal more about the state of rightwing minds than the Idle No More movement itself.   To them, the native protest is to be taken in isolation, whittled down to something they can digest, spun and misconstrued,  and then dismissed as irrelevant, insincere carping.

What they refuse to see is Idle No More in the larger context.   They don't see it as merely one expression of a broad-based and growing discontent that is building within the Canadian people.

Perhaps they were too busy with last-minute shopping to read the piece in their own Edmonton Journal on December 24th about the deep fracture that has developed between a majority of Canadians and their political parties.   We don't trust the bastards any more, none of them, they're all a bunch of sods.   A solid majority of Canadians now see protest and civil disobedience as the most effective vehicle for achieving political change.

We, the majority, support the Montreal students' protest.   We support the Occupy movement.   By an overwhelming majority we support the BC referendum to force the provincial government to scrap the HST.   Soon we may have a majority of the country willing to actually stand behind us to thwart the Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline.

Yes we support the Idle No More movement and a good deal of that is based on our deep distrust of our federal government and, indeed, of our entire Parliament.   We now, almost instinctively, want to throw a wrench in their gears, the dirty rat bastards.   That goes for Harper and his Tories.   It goes for the Liberals and their heir apparent, Trudeau, and that goes for Mulcair and his opportunistic NDP to boot.

I understand why the Right doesn't get it.   This has never happened before.   Read the Edmonton Journal story.   They don't even try to serve the Canadian public any more.   To them it's enough to win a small fragment of the public and befuddle enough of the remainder to wrest control of the levers of power.   They don't speak for us any longer, they speak down to us these days.

And the conditions that nurtured our discontent aren't going away anytime soon.   The rot of corporatism is too broadly invested in our Parliament.

It could just be that Canada will be saved - or irreparably shattered - in northern British Columbia.   That is where this government will have to betray and resort to force against ordinary Canadians, native and non-native alike.   Most of us will be cool-headed and non-violent.   Most of us but not all and we know that Harper already has a secret police force, a Canadian Stasi that includes the RCMP and CSIS, preparing to weed out and deal with troublemakers.   Harper has many promises to keep to his colleagues in the Beijing Politburo, the Communist saviors of his cherished Tar Sands.  I'm sure he means to keep them.

Learned Hand on Liberty

One of America's greatest judicial philosophers was Judge Learned Hand.   Among his legendary achievements he is remembered for his discussion of liberty given in Central Park, New York, on May 21st, 1944.   Here are some of his remarks:

What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few - as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty?
 
I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of those men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten - that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be - nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it - yet in the spirit of America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America so prosperous, and safe, and contented, we shall have failed to grasp its meaning, and shall have been truant to its promise, except as we strive to make it a signal, a beacon, a standard to which the best hopes of mankind will ever turn; In confidence that you share that belief, I now ask you to raise you hand and repeat with me this pledge:
 
How many Canadians today would recognize Learned Hand's notion of liberty?   That's a question I would never want to be forced to answer.

Take Learned Hand's words, these words, and use them as a measure of our own prime minister.
 
"The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of those men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias."

Can there be a more telling proof that the spirit of liberty does not exist within Stephen Harper? Harper's is "the ruthless, the unbridled will."  Harper's is the "freedom to do as [he alone] likes."  Harper's is the "denial of liberty [for others]."   In Harper's society, "freedom is the possession of only a savage [and unprincipled] few."

All of these things stand as a powerful proof that Harper is a despot.

De Touqueville's Insights on War and Democracy

For your contemplation, a few observations of Alexis De Touqueville (1805-1859) on war and the democratic state.

"There are two things that a democratic people will always find very difficult, to begin a war and to end it."


"No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. Not indeed that after every victory it is to be apprehended that the victorious generals will possess themselves by force of the supreme power, after the manner of Sulla and Caesar; the danger is of another kind.

"War does not always give over democratic communities to military government, but it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of civil government; it must almost compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of all things in the hands of the administration. If it does not lead to despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by their habits. All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it."

America's Drones - a Cautionary Tale for F-35 Customers

American drones have an enormous vulnerability, their absolute dependence on computer code that can be easily hacked.   This is suspected to have resulted in Iran's capture of a Lockheed RQ-170 stealth drone in December, 2011.

Something even more code dependent is the F-35.  It requires no less than 9-million lines of code to operate, more than double that of its stealth Big Brother, the F-22.   A considerable portion of that code is believed to have already been hacked out of Defense Department and contractor computers and the Chinese are the prime suspect.

The control algorithms for these crucial machines are written in a fundamentally insecure manner, says Dr. Kathleen Fisher, a Tufts University computer scientist and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There’s simply no systematic way for programmers to check for vulnerabilities as they put together the software that runs our drones [or F-35s], our trucks or our pacemakers.
In our homes and our offices, this weakness is only a medium-sized deal: developers can release a patched version of Safari or Microsoft Word whenever they find a hole; anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems can handle many other threats. But updating the control software on a drone means practically re-certifying the entire aircraft. And those security programs often introduce all sorts of new vulnerabilities. “The traditional approaches to security won’t work,” Fisher tells Danger Room.
Fisher is spearheading a far-flung, $60 million, four-year effort to try to develop a new, secure way of coding — and then run that software on a series of drones and ground robots. It’s called High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.
Drones and other important systems were once considered relatively safe from hack attacks. (They weren’t directly connected to the internet, after all.) But that was before viruses started infecting drone cockpits; before the robotic planes began leaking their classified video streams; before malware ordered nuclear centrifuges to self-destruct; before hackers figured out how to remotely access pacemakers and insulin pumps; and before academics figured out how to hijack a car without ever touching the vehicle.
“Many of these systems share a common structure: They have an insecure cyber perimeter, constructed from standard software components, surrounding control systems designed for safety but not for security,” Fisher told a group of researchers earlier this year.
It’d be great if someone could simply write some sort of universal software checker that sniffs out any program’s potential flaws. One small problem: Such a checker can’t exist. As the computer science pioneer Alan Turing showed in 1936, it’s impossible to write a program that can tell if another will run forever, given a particular input. That’s asking the checker to make a logical contradiction: Stop if you’re supposed to run for eternity.

The F-35 stealth technology is threefold.  It comprises radar absorbing materials, radar deflecting shapes and a highly complex electronics suite.   The F-35 also has an ultra-sophisticated sensor suite to enable it to monitor the battle space in a 360-degree arc without resorting to active, telltale emitters.   The Chinese, who have filched so much F-35 code and the electronics from the drone Iran captured, figure they can use the bomber's sensor windows to hack the aircraft's computers and crash them to the ground.   And we'll probably never know about it until they begin falling out of the sky.

But, never fear, the military will remain vigilant against that sort of thing, won't they?  Well, maybe not.

Officials at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada knew for two weeks about a virus infecting the drone “cockpits” there. But they kept the information about the infection to themselves — leaving the unit that’s supposed to serve as the Air Force’s cybersecurity specialists in the dark. The network defenders at the 24th Air Force learned of the virus by reading about it in [Wired.com's] Danger Room.
 
The virus, which records the keystrokes of remote pilots as their drones fly over places like Afghanistan, is now receiving attention at the highest levels; the four-star general who oversees the Air Force’s networks was briefed on the infection this morning. But for weeks, it stayed (you will pardon the expression) below the radar: a local problem that local network administrators were determined to fix on their own.
 
“It was not highlighted to us,” says a source involved with Air Force network operations. “When your article came out, it was like, ‘What is this?’”

What Do British Columbians Know that the Rest of Canada Doesn't - Yet?

What we know is that the RCMP is rotten, from the top down.   The good news is that an increasing percentage of Canadians across the rest of the country is figuring out the same thing.

Perhaps British Columbians know the RCMP better because we have to put up with a lot more of them - over 10,000 in fact, about the same number as in a WWII army division.    In effect, we're occupied by a gang of federal thugs with some very nasty tendencies.

From the unexplained bullet in the back of young Ian Bush's skull to the execution of Robert Dziekanski, from a litany of acts of brutality to sexual harassment and other peccadilloes, to the failure of the RCMP to track down Robert Picton, many British Columbians have had their fill of these officers and their ways.

Darryl Plecas, a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley, said the RCMP is still trying to change the work culture of a force with “so many bullies.”

“There seems to be this incestuous relationship in different places in the RCMP; you look at certain units and they’re filled with people who have been friends forever,” said Plecas. “People have recognized this; you dare not cross them, otherwise they’re going to come after you.”

Plecas said B.C., with several large detachments, has more RCMP officers than anywhere else in the country, which means a larger sample size and therefore more “bullies.”

The anger and distrust we have for the RCMP didn't happen overnight.    The plummeting numbers reported by Ipsos Reid happened during Harper's tenure as prime minister.   There were troubling signs that Harper had co-opted the force when former Commissioner Zaccardelli seemed to wade into electoral politics, with a dubious mid-campaign corruption investigation into Ralph Goodale that he refused to explain afterward.   Who can forget when Harper appointed a life long Tory insider, Bill Elliott, to serve as the RCMP's first civilian Commissioner?   With Harper's hands all over it, it's probably no wonder so much rot set in among the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

 

Russia's Sanctuary for Deposed Leaders

You've probably never heard of Barvikha, Russia.  It's a posh little village on the A105 out of Moscow.   And it might soon be the new home of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.

The village hosts a luxury sanitarium popular with Russian presidents and top drawer nobs.   It also serves as a refuge for several deposed bad guys, the type who understood when they absolutely had to get out of Dodge.

This improbable small town of villas and luxury boutiques, built around the sanitarium, is home to half a dozen or so deposed leaders and members of their families.

In its snowy tranquillity, it offers one strange, possible future for the embattled president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, as Western governments have been pressuring Russia since the northern summer to smooth his departure with an offer of asylum.

 ''The Russians have experience with getting heads of state out in the nick of time,'' said Mark Katz, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University in Virginia. ''They could be trying to signal to Assad there is an offer, but the window of opportunity is not going to remain open for a long time.''

Leaders' hurried packing and just-in-time flights to this place from angry street crowds or the nearing sound of gunfire brought measures of resolution to conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere.

 

All in all, Barvikha, is for people who aren't accustomed to doing without - anything.   Among other things, it has its own Ferrari dealership and you're quite apt to spot a Bugatti Veyron and plenty of run-of-the-mill Rolls Royces parked on the high street.

And here's what a dascha in Barvikha can look like, this humble 1400 sq. m. retreat:

Monbiot, 2012 - The Year of the Great Polishing

To The Guardian's enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, 2012 was the year we did our best to abandon the natural world.

In 2012 governments turned their backs on the living planet, demonstrating that no chronic problem, however grave, will take priority over an immediate concern, however trivial. I believe there has been no worse year for the natural world in the past half-century.

...Their indifference was distilled into a great collective shrug at the Earth Summit in June. The first summit, 20 years before, was supposed to have heralded a new age of environmental responsibility. During that time, thanks largely to the empowerment of corporations and the ultra-rich, the square root of nothing has been achieved. Far from mobilising to address this, in 2012 the leaders of some of the world's most powerful governments – the US, the UK, Germany and Russia – didn't even bother to turn up.

But they did send their representatives to sabotage it. The Obama administration even sought to reverse commitments made by George Bush Sr in 1992. The final declaration was a parody of inaction. While the 190 countries that signed it expressed "deep concern" about the world's escalating crises, they agreed no new targets, dates or commitments, with one exception. Sixteen times they committed themselves to "sustained growth", a term they used interchangeably with its polar opposite, "sustainability".

...Our leaders now treat climate change as a guilty secret. Even after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy and the record droughts and wildfires that savaged the US, the two main presidential contenders refused to mention the subject, except for one throwaway sentence each. Has an issue this big ever received as little attention in a presidential race?

...This contributes to what I have come to see as a great global polishing: a rubbing away of ecosystems and natural structures by the intensification of farming, fishing, mining and other industries. Looking back on this year a few decades hence, this destruction will seem vastly more significant than any of the stories with which the media is obsessed. Like governments, media companies have abandoned the living world.

 ...If there is hope, it lies with the people. Opinion polls show that voters do not support their governments' inaction. Even a majority of Conservatives believe that the UK should generate most of its electricity from renewables by 2030. In the US, 80% of people polled now say that climate change will be a serious problem for their country if nothing is done about it: a substantial rise since 2009. The problem is that most people are not prepared to act on these beliefs. Citizens, as well as governments and the media, have turned their faces away from humanity's greatest problem.

To avoid another terrible year like 2012, we must translate these passive concerns into a mass mobilisation. Groups such as 350.org show how it might be done. If this annus horribilis tells us anything, it is that action, in the absence of such mobilisation, is simply not going to happen. Governments care only as much as their citizens force them to care. Nothing changes unless we change.

While Monbiot didn't write directly about Canada, everything he wrote very much speaks to Canada and the hapless Parliament that besets the Canadian people.   All the opinion polls in the world won't make our tri-partisan petro pols change.   If we want change we'll have to force it out of them.

If you're a Liberal, supporting Garneau, Hall-Findlay or Trudeau, is supporting the perpetuation of the Canadian petro-state.   Is that the Liberal Party you want for Canada?   If it's not, don't support it.  Withdraw.  Defect to the Greens.   The GPC policies are far more progressive than anything you'll ever get from today's shabby remnant of the once great Liberal Party.

Go to the Green Party web site.   Unlike the other parties that cower in obscurity awaiting an election that's still years off, the Greens have clear, understandable and cogent policies that speak to the very ills that vex our society.

Look at it this way.   It's probably going to take something of the scope of an uprising to force change out of Harper.   But we don't have to wait for that day.   We can first force change out of the opposition parties.   They're weak, poor, vulnerable - everything that translates into a dire need for support.  It's time to tell them you're not buying what they're selling any more.

Happy New Year

And may 2013 exceed your highest expectations.  This, from Neil Young.



And just a bit of vintage John Hiatt.



And here, because there really is only one way forward.



And, on a brighter note, here's my New Year's Day