Is Trauma Counselling Actually Harmful?

 It seems standard these days that survivors of traumatic incidents of man-made or natural disaster are quickly whisked into trauma counselling.   It seems pretty intuitive - people are traumatized, people get counselling.

A report from The Observer claims new studies show counselling can actually worsen mental health outcomes for trauma victims.

One of the largest earthquakes ever recorded hit on Boxing Day 2004. The resulting tsunami devastated huge swaths of the Indian Ocean coastline and left an estimated quarter of a million people dead across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. Aid agencies quickly arrived to help battered and traumatised survivors.

...the World Health Organisation promptly did something it has never done before or since. It specifically denounced a type of psychological therapy and recommended that it shouldn't be used. The therapy was a single session treatment called "psychological debriefing", which involved working with disaster victims to encourage people to supposedly "process" the intense emotions by talking through them in stages. It was intended to prevent later mental health problems by helping people resolve difficult emotions early on. The only trouble was that it made things worse. Studies had shown that people given post-disaster psychological debriefing were subsequently more likely to suffer mental health problems than people who had had no treatment at all.

Guidance from the world's most influential health authority had little effect, and the therapy was extensively used. The reluctance to do things differently was tied up with some of the least-appreciated facts about our reactions to disaster. In our trauma-focused society, it is often forgotten that the majority of people who experience the ravages of natural disaster, become the victims of violence or lose loved ones in tragedy will need no assistance from mental health professionals.

Most people will be shaken up, distressed and bereaved, but these are natural reactions, not in themselves disorders. Only a minority of people – rarely more than 30% in well-conducted studies and often considerably less – will develop psychological difficulties as a result of their experiences, and the single most common outcome is recovery without the need of professional help. But regardless of the eventual outcome, you are likely to be at your most stressed during the disaster and your stress levels will reduce afterwards even if they don't return to normal. Your body simply cannot maintain peak levels of anxiety.

It's a thought-provoking article.  It wouldn't be the first time that conventional wisdom made things worse while thinking it was making them better.   Remember blood-letting?

But Would It Still be "Royal"?

This is what can happen when Conservatives become too full of themselves.

Britain's Conservative government is openly talking about privatizing the Royal Mail, a crown corporation, and not just going private with it but selling it to offshore buyers.

[Britain's business minister, Michael] Fallon said the government would sell Royal Mail to sovereign wealth funds or other foreign buyers if postal workers' campaign against a flotation in London makes an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market difficult. 

He said numerous overseas buyers had already expressed "significant interest" in snapping up the 497-year-old postal service. "It's a great British brand with the Queen's head on it," he told the Observer. "We have already had quite a lot of interest in it."

He revealed that Royal Mail's boss, Moya Greene, had already embarked on a global roadshow promoting the postal service to sovereign wealth funds and foreign trade buyers as well as institutional investors based in the UK and overseas.

"Royal Mail have been testing investor appetite here, in Canada and the United States," he said. "There has been a lot of interest both at home and abroad."

Makes you wonder what Henry VIII, who established the Royal Mail in 1516, would make of the idea of it being sold to foreigners?

Climate Sensitivity in a Nutshell

There's a very useful, and usefully concise, primer on climate sensitivity in The Guardian.  It runs through the major ambiguities, probabilities and mere possibilities and deserves a quick read.

To pique your interest, here are the final three paragraphs.

So far we're about 40% of the way to doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide compared to levels before the Industrial Revolution, and rising fast. If we continue on our current track, we'll reach the doubled carbon dioxide mark around mid-century; even sooner when the warming from other human greenhouse gas emissions like methane is included.

That's bad news, because it's internationally accepted that more than 2°C surface warming would be very dangerous. So we're on pace to commit ourselves to 2 to 4.5°C warming by mid-century, and 2°C is considered too dangerous: the math doesn't look good. It tells us that even if climate contrarians are right and climate sensitivity is relatively low, our current emissions path is still unacceptably dangerous.

So while there is still a lot of uncertainty about the Earth's exact climate sensitivity, and while it's an important question to resolve, from a policy standpoint, it really doesn't matter. Whether climate sensitivity is 2°C or 3°C or 4.5°C, we're not doing enough to avoid very dangerous climate change in any case. From a policy standpoint, climate sensitivity will only be a relevant issue once we start to take serious steps to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

On the Cusp of Mankind's Century of Mass Migration

 There's nothing magical in reaching a record 400 ppm concentration of atmospheric CO2 but it's not symbolic either.  It's a benchmark of how far we've come and where we're headed.  It allows us to examine the changes in our environment, to our biosphere, for example that have occurred since we hit the 350 mark or the 300 mark that existed in our pre-industrial days.  It also allows us to get a reasonably good idea of what is coming in the near future as greenhouse gas accumulations rapidly increase.

The near future is what occupies the minds at the London School of Economics' Grantham Research Institute.  Now brace yourself because the future they foresee is not even close to what you're going to hear about from your own leadership, government or opposition.  From The Guardian:

Massive movements of people are likely to occur over the rest of the century because global temperatures are likely to rise to by up to 5C because carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated for 50 years, said Stern, who is head of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.

"When temperatures rise to that level, we will have disrupted weather patterns and spreading deserts," he said. "Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. That will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth."

The news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached 400ppm has been seized on by experts because that level brings the world close to the point where it becomes inevitable that it will experience a catastrophic rise in temperatures. Scientists have warned for decades of the danger of allowing industrial outputs of carbon dioxide to rise unchecked.

Instead, these outputs have accelerated. In the 1960s, carbon dioxide levels rose at a rate of 0.7ppm a year. Today, they rise at 2.1ppm, as more nations become industrialised and increase outputs from their factories and power plants. The last time the Earth's atmosphere had 400ppm carbon dioxide, the Arctic was ice-free and sea levels were 40 metres higher.

This is a deservedly stark warning.  A few years ago Gwynne Dyer wrote Climate Wars in which he outlined military responses already in planning that mirror Lord Stern's warning.   Dyer wrote of the Americans basically gunning down climate refugees fleeing out of Central America because the U.S. will have no other choice save to be overrun.  By that time, he points out, the United States will already be struggling to cope with tens of millions of internally displaced Americans driven from the coasts by sea level rise, severe weather events, storm surges and salination of freshwater supplies and out of the south by persistent drought and the collapse of groundwater resources.

When the U.S. arrives at this situation notions of a border between Canada and the U.S. will become somewhat irrelevant.   It's the sort of thing we should be having an adult conversation about but that is seemingly taboo for Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats alike.  Our political classes, it seems, would prefer to wait until talking and planning and action are too late.

Europe is already confronted by a major and growing climate refugee problem coming out of Africa and that's going to worsen.  Indeed northern Europe is now beginning to see southern Europe as a potential migration challenge in the not distant future.

Oh well, it's not as though we haven't been warned, repeatedly, for years, even decades and the changes we're already seeing are confirming those warnings.   Are we really going to support political leadership that would sooner just shove their heads (and our kids' future) into the sand?
 

Truer Words - Governments Hide in Silence

Today's Times Colonist editorial goes straight to the heart of the darkness that lurks within the Harper government.

A group of professors at the University of Victoria has asked the federal information commissioner to investigate the muzzling of government scientists. The university’s Environmental Law Centre is concerned that experts employed by the federal government have been prevented from speaking about their work.
A brief filed by the centre notes that media calls to federal agencies are routinely diverted to a central communications office. Scientists themselves are not allowed to talk with reporters.
The complaint is entirely accurate. That is indeed what happens.

...By imposing a code of silence on public servants, politicians make themselves unaccountable. By ensuring that only their version of events is heard, they stifle meaningful inquiry.

And they imply that the basic working mechanisms of government are wholly within their command and control. This is a subversive doctrine. It turns a public interest — the running of programs we all own and pay for — into a political franchise.

The editorial laments that this contagion is spreading and has been adopted by the neoconservative B.C. Liberal government and institutions beyond government.

The policy of silence is not confined to Ottawa, and scientists are by no means the only ones being muzzled.

Phone any branch of the B.C. government from a newspaper desk, and the inquiry will be routed to a media-relations specialist. If by chance you get through to ministry program staff, you will be told they can’t speak to you.
Even if the matter is purely factual and devoid of political ramifications, the rule has no exceptions. Public servants may not speak to reporters. Other provinces also enforce this policy, and it extends much further than government.

 Our politicians value their curtain of silence: They won’t give it up without a fight

Who Cut Duffy Slack and Why?

A more than curious omission in just one of the Senate standing committee reports on Senators Mac Harb, Patrick Brazeau and Mike Duffy and their housing expense claims.

What distinguishes these three?  Well, Harb and Brazeau claimed expenses for residences that were actually within the provinces they were appointed to represent, Ontario and Quebec respectively.

Duffy, by contrast, claimed living expenses for  a "secondary residence" in the Ottawa area while purportedly being resident in and representing Prince Edward Island.   Duffy's living allowance claims, if he was truly resident in Prince Edward Island, should have been allowed without the slightest question.

All three reports acknowledged the auditors from Deloitte found that criteria for determining primary residence, which must be at least 100 kilometres away from Parliament Hill for senators to be eligible for up to $22,000 in annual living expenses, to be lacking in the rules and guidelines.

Two of the reports — the ones addressing the expenses of Harb and Brazeau — disagreed with that finding and concluded the forms senators sign when declaring their primary and secondary residences in order to receive the living allowance is clear enough for them to have known better.

“Your subcommittee considers this language to be unambiguous and, plainly, if a senator resides primarily in the (National Capital Region), he or she should not be claiming living expenses for the (National Capital Region),” read the reports for Harb and Brazeau.

The report tabled on Duffy does not express any disagreement with this finding of ambiguity by Deloitte and even goes so far as to say that the committee is addressing the issue.

"The issue" when it comes to Duffy is far more complicated.  To be a senator from Prince Edward Island he must be resident in PEI.  Were Senator and Mrs. Duffy actually resident in PEI that housing allowance would have been fully justified.  But Duffy isn't resident in PEI.  He resides, as he has for more than 30-years, in the Ottawa environs.  He has Ontario healthcare.   He votes in Ontario elections.  He doesn't have PEI healthcare.   He doesn't vote in PEI.  His supposed neighbours in PEI have never seen him there.  He gets a seasonal deal on garbage collection and the muni doesn't clear his street - because he's not resident.   He doesn't even get the lower property tax rate available to PEI residents.

Duffy is not resident in the province he's appointed to represent and he has no intention of residing there either.   The Duffys could have packed their bags and fired up the wood stove at their Cavendish cottage when this controversy erupted but, no, they're staying put in Ottawa.

The whole thing is just a fraud.

Bill Maher Gets Taken to the Mat on Islamophobia

On Bill Maher's RealTime show last night, journalist Glenn  Greenwald stood up to Maher on Muslims, Islam, and American foreign policy.



It's a long clip.  Greenwald's retort comes in around the 7-minute mark.

What is particularly irksome about Maher's Islamophobia is the shallowness of his historical view of Islam and the Middle East's rocky road to democratic reform.    Those of the Anglo-Saxon tradition usually recognize our own democracy as anchored in the Magna Carta Libertatum signed by King John in 1215.

Within our own culture we have been wrestling, often violently, with democratic reform for almost eight centuries.  Eight hundred years.  Now remind me, when did we extend the vote to half our citizenry, our women?   Was that several hundred years ago?  No!  Was it about one century ago?  Yes!   So it took us, with our great and noble democratic tradition, about seven centuries to enfranchise half our population who had been denied the vote on nothing more than their gender.   Think there weren't any religious influences in that sorry state of affairs?

You would think that, with our centuries of democratic traditions, we would have been instrumental in bringing the concept of political rights and freedom to the Middle East.  Did we?  Apparently not.

We're Still Kissing Saudi Ass

 In the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire post WWI, we carved the place up into colonial fiefdoms ignoring religious and ethnic realities on the ground and appointing whatever bunch of stooges we thought would best serve our interests.

Rumsfeld Greets Saddam - Better Times

Iraq is a perfect example.  Britain and France betrayed the Kurds, who had been promised an independent Kurdish homeland at war's end, and instead began drawing straight lines that marked the new state of Iraq - Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs in the centre, Shiite Persians in the south.  And then they chose the Sunni minority to rule the place because they thought them the most reliable and complacent.   The Brits, under the orders of then foreign secretary Winston Churchill, even used chemical warfare on the northern Kurds when they balked at paying taxes.   And all this eventually begat America's former buddy, Saddam Hussein.

Remember this evil Son of a Bitch?

 But our undying love for democracy was demonstrated next door to Iraq in Iran.  Post WWII Iran held genuinely democratic elections.  Prime minister Mohammed Mossaddegh was in charge when the Iranians thought it really wasn't a good idea that the Brits should be taking Iranian oil (under what is now called B.P.) for next to free.  So, in 1951, Iran's democratically elected Parliament voted to nationalize the country's oil reserves.  Not steal, nationalize.  Britain wasn't interested in negotiating compensation.   Instead the U.S. and Britain supported a coup d'etat in 1953 that brought their stooge, the brutal and bloody Shah Pahlavi to power, ending all that democracy nonsense.   That eventually begat the rise of the Mullahs and the theocratic revolution that toppled America's puppet.

Bill Maher and Company at this point like to get into the link between today's Arab political unrest and Islam.  To Maher, it's not democracy that's emerging but theocracy and the dreaded Sharia law.

Brothers in Arms

Maher conveniently overlooks the role that religion has played in ousting Middle East dictators.  The case of Hosni Mubarak is a good example.  Mubarak, propped up by first the Soviets and then America, ruthlessly and brutally suppressed every effort at democratic reform.   Such is the way of tyrants.   The very moderate "Arab Street" was oppressed but the West would offer them no assistance.  The group that did stand up to Mubarak was the Muslim Brotherhood and they paid dearly for that.  It was absolutely predictable that the Muslim Brotherhood should be the favoured choice once Egyptians were permitted to vote.

Theocracy?  Look at the centuries of struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe.  That's a saga richly littered with blood and death.  Britain wound up with its own church and the monarch was the head of that church.  They even had plenty of religious laws.   For something in the order of four centuries (although it might have actually been six) it was a capital offence for a Jew to be found in the realm.

And look at the restoration of theocratic influence next door in the United States.   Everyone from Chris Hedges to Andrew Bacevich to Chalmers Johnson and many more are chronicling the rise of a form of American fascism rooted in religious fundamentalism.

Too Much, Too Soon?  Yeah, Fair Enough

Gwynne Dyer has pointed out that, yes, there's bound to be an Islamist tone to the introduction of democracy in the Middle East and we've played a major role in that outcome.   But the Muslim people are not the bloody-fanged monsters that we choose to see them as either.  They want to be able to live their lives much like the rest of us.  They want peace and security for their children.  Dyer predicts the Islamist influence will be laundered out of Middle Eastern democracy in a matter of several electoral cycles.

The Muslim people are just beginning their journey to democracy and it is more than disingenuous for us, with our eight tumultous centuries of still fragile and uncertain progress, to measure them against us or at least our wishful illusions of ourselves.

Monbiot - You Can't Win on Climate Change Without First Vanquishing Plutocracy

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, took the arrival of a record, 400 ppm concentration of atmospheric CO2 to deliver a few thoughts on our losing battle against climate change and what really stands in the way of our hope for progress.

"The data go back 800,000 years: that's the age of the oldest fossil air bubbles extracted from Dome C, an ice-bound summit in the high Antarctic. And throughout that time there has been nothing like this. At no point in the preindustrial record have concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air risen above 300 parts per million (ppm). 400ppm is a figure that belongs to a different era.

"The only way forward now is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350ppm, as the 350.org campaign demands. That requires, above all, that we leave the majority of the fossil fuels which have already been identified in the ground. There is not a government or an energy company which has yet agreed to do so."

"Practical measures to prevent the growth of global emissions are, by comparison to the scale of the challenge, almost nonexistent.

"The problem is simply stated: the power of the fossil fuel companies is too great. Among those who seek and obtain high office are people characterised by a complete absence of empathy or scruples, who will take money or instructions from any corporation or billionaire who offers them, and then defend those interests against the current and future prospects of humanity.

"This new climate milestone reflects a profound failure of politics, in which democracy has quietly been supplanted by plutocracy.   Without a widespread reform of campaign finance, lobbying and influence-peddling and the systematic corruption they promote, our chances of preventing climate breakdown are close to zero."

Aerial Castro's Hard Case

It's an old legal adage that, "hard cases make bad law."   What it means is that when law is made in response to monstrous crimes, the sort that truly shock the public conscience, it can often result in inappropriate and unintended consequences for ordinary or lesser crimes.   In some circumstances it can even create crimes where none previously existed.

Alleged kidnapper rapist Aerial Castro will apparently face capital punishment should he be convicted of five counts of murder.  The supposed murder was the killing of a fetus through beating one of his victims to induce miscarriage.  He is said to have done this five times.

If the prosecution prevails it will have established the offence of fetal homicide which would probably extend to manslaughter and murder of the unborn.   Criminal sanctions normally associated with offences against a person would possibly now apply to the fetus in similar circumstances.

Castro is a hard case.  He abducted three girls and held them captive and sexually abused them over a 10-year period.   That's pretty monstrous by any standard.   Then you cap that off with five, brutally induced miscarriages.

If a third party causes a murder by inducing the death of a fetus, how is that to be distinguished from a woman obtaining an abortion or the attending physician for that matter?   Even if we create an exception for a woman's choice, would she still not be a murderer in the eyes of society - just one who, by some technicality, isn't facing a death penalty?   That would not only wreak havoc on the woman and her physician but it could tear a deep rent in the social fabric.

Aerial Castro has inflicted extreme damage on three young women.  It remains to be seen whether Cleveland prosecutors will inflict even more damage - on society.

It's Dead Motorcyclist Season Again

Late spring to early summer marks Dead Motorcyclist season.  It's the time of year when fatal encounters between motorcyclists and motorists are particularly apt to happen.

Many bikers are seasonal riders.  They put their machines away in the fall and over the winter and only get back on the road once the weather warms.  If someone is away from something that is skill-intensive for any extended period their skills will naturally degrade.  They won't be as sharp, as quick and probably not as alert either while they get into form.

Car and truck drivers experience something similar.   They're coming off a several months-long stretch in which motorcycle traffic is extremely light to non-existent.    They're not accustomed to looking for motorcyles, anticipating them.

And into this mix comes the "lethal left-hand turn."   You're in your car or truck and you're waiting for an opening in oncoming traffic to make a left hand turn.  You might have been waiting quite a while.  You might be frustrated, anxious.   You might be in a hurry to get somewhere.

Up ahead you see what appears to be a gap in the oncoming traffic, an opening in which you can nip through and make your left-hand turn.   You begin to key on the front vehicle to time your turn.  As it nears your foot comes off the brake and onto the gas pedal and you turn the wheel.

Only once you've moved off and are committed to your turn do you discover that the apparent gap wasn't an opening after all.   There's a vehicle there, a motorcycle that you hadn't noticed.  At this point there's probably not much you or the motorcyclist can do about it.  You're going to collide and there's every chance the biker will get the worst of it.  In fact this is the by far leading cause of motorcycle fatalities, the lethal left-hand turn.

The driver making the left-hand turn is at fault.  It's their responsibility not to enter oncoming traffic until they know the way is clear.  It's no excuse that they didn't see the motorcycle.

A lot of motorcyclists, while not strictly at fault, do little to improve their chances.   These days really low-slung bikes are quite popular.  The lower the machine the easier it is for the car or truck in front to mask it from oncoming drivers.  This can be made worse by riders who position their motorcycles in the very centre of their lane, in effect tucking their bike in behind the vehicle in front.  That can make it harder, even impossible, for the motorcyclist to spot the left-hand turner ahead.

For the next month or two especially, if you're waiting to make that left-hand turn across oncoming traffic, don't budge until you're absolutely sure that the gap that seems to be an opening is actually open.  Don't assume there's not a motorcycle in that apparent gap until you can see that with your own eyes.

Photograph - the accident shown in the photo above happened this morning just outside the Nanaimo airport at around 8:15.   The female motorcyclist was northbound.   A pickup truck was in the southbound lane, waiting to make a left turn.  The truck driver turned in front of the motorcycle and they collided.  The woman was airlifted to hospital in Victoria, her condition currently unknown.

Volkswagen's Too Cool Autostadt

If you live in certain parts of Europe, you can get a Volkswagen directly from the factory.   Your car is built to order and then stored in one of these 60 metre/200 feet silos where it awaits your arrival to take delivery.  Among other things you get your car with "zero" on the odometer.

There are two of these silos at the VW car store or Autostadt near the factory in Wolfsburg.   This video shows how the lift fetches a new car for a waiting customer.

Coming Soon to Canada, "Fortress B.C."

The CBC's Stephen Smart sees rough waters and rocky shoals ahead for Ottawa-B.C. relations after Tuesday's provincial elections.

Perhaps for the first time in his reign our eastern ruler may be confronted by a province spoiling for a fight.

Most of the past dozen or so years can be seen as the golden era in B.C.’s relationship with the rest of the federation.
Former premier Gordon Campbell went to exhaustive lengths to maintain good relations with other provinces, especially Western provinces, and also with the federal government.

...But that was then, this is now. That golden era had already started to tarnish in the run-up to this election and, depending on the outcome of Tuesday’s vote, it could come to a complete end with much more of an us-versus-them mentality dominating B.C.’s attitude toward some of its key provincial and federal partners.

...While playing nice might get B.C. more in the long run, British Columbians have often rewarded past leaders who are seen to stand up for their province.
Given the positions of both Clark and Dix recently, they seem to be very aware of that reality.
The stakes are, arguably, higher this time, given the commercial importance of Alberta’s “landlocked” oil and the Western political base of the Harper Conservatives.

Fortress B.C.?  Sure.  Never in this province's history have the people had such good cause to feel imperiled and set upon by their distant, federal government.   Canada has morphed in to a petro-state and Parliament is full, on both sides of the aisle, with petro-pols whose only vision for the future entails sacrificing our coast and our way of life to peddle bitumen to Asia.

Ottawa wants to force British Columbia into submission, a state of  political occupation where the overwhelming view of the populace is suppressed and subordinated to the will of that distant authority.

We are confronted with a government whose henchmen have already dismissed the views of a solid and growing majority of our people as "extremist" and who have branded us as "inimical" (hostile to/enemies of) to Canada.   They have proclaimed our disagreement a "battle."   And now they're intent on political occupation of our homeland.

Any people subjected to occupation are moved to resistance.  Fortress B.C., perhaps, but only if Ottawa leaves us no other choice.

Too Stupid for Satire?

Is political satire too risky for American consumption?  Luke O'Neil argues in The New Republic that fake news has to go.

Did you hear the one about the racist NRA president? You probably did if you've been on Facebook or Twitter in the last forty-eight hours. A widely shared article from the website the Free Wood Post headlined, “NRA President Jim Porter: ‘It’s Only A Matter Of Time Before We Can Own Colored People Again,’” has been making the rounds (44,490 shares and 66,000 likes on Facebook), and rightfully so. It's an inflammatory, attention-grabbing hook that plays right into the stereotype liberals have about the people who join the NRA. The only problem here is it's obviously fake, which anyone who spent more than thirty seconds reading the article should have surmised. Even worse, the obvious fakery, so easily forgotten once you get the not-so-subtle gag, has gotten much more attention than the actually creepy things that Porter has really said about the Civil War.

“People on the Internet Are Gullible!” would probably be a much less successful headline, and this wouldn't even be worthy of mentioning if it didn't happen so often. The satire site The Daily Currant, has been pulling the same bait and switch over the past year to a similarly facepalming effect: Remember the bit about Todd Akin suggesting that breast milk could cure homosexuality? And then there's Literally Unbelievable, the Tumblr that pulls together incredibly credulous reactions to The Onion stories as if they were real. It's not just average people falling for those stories either; the list of actual news gathering organizations throughout the world being played for suckers is genuinely embarrassing. The Drudge Report galumphed its way into the media news last week, making its top link a Daily Currant story about New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg being denied a second slice of pizza at a restaurant. Back in February, The Washington Post picked up another Currant yarn about Sarah Palin joining Al Jazeera America.

I think O'Neil overstates his case.  If The Washington Post is conned by political satire the problem is with the newspaper, not the satire.  WaPo needs to up its game.  But the point O'Neil overlooks is that the American public isn't endangered by the satirical fake news sources but from mainstream fake news and opinion outlets, the powerful misinformation industry, with names like FOX News, Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage and so many others.   The damage they do to the American public renders utterly insignificant the few hundreds who may actually be too gullible for political satire. 

 And, after all, isn't that what satirical fake news does, attack the mainstream misinformation industry?   Who else calls out Fox News and Limbaugh and all these other charlatans and absolutely shreds them but The Daily Show and Jon Stewart?  You won't find that scathing dissection in The New York Times or anywhere else but in satirical fake news sites.

No Warts, No Boils - Yet

No boils.   Not a wart to be seen.

I was a little worried about what I might discover when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning.   Yesterday I voted NDP for the first time ever.  For this guy.

Now, in fairness,  I didn't have a lot of choice.  The B.C. Greens were not running a candidate in my riding.   But still, the NDP and, to top it off,  I had to vote in a church hall, fundamentalist at that!

I didn't really have a lot of choice, none at all in fact.  Even if the NDP seem a bit wobbly, the alternative party is steeped in dishonesty, deceit and corruption.   If you re-elect a party with the chequered recent history of the the B.C. Libs what can you expect but more of the same?

As I went to mark my ballot I kept going through a list - B.C. Rail, B.C. Hydro, B.C. Ferries, H.S.T., coastal fish farms - and from that I knew what I had to do.

Done.

"Untermensch" Enters the American Right's Political Dialogue

The Heritage Institute -   neo-conservative America's premier think tank - is warning Americans that Hispanics are way too intellectually inferior to be accorded U.S. citizenship.  In High German I think the word is untermensch. 

Earlier this week, the Heritage Foundation released a new report, “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,” that confounded nearly everyone who read it. Using some preposterous methodology, its two authors, Jason Richwine and Robert Rector, concluded that providing undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship would cost the U.S. government $5.3 trillion.

...Trying to comprehend how Richwine and Rector could have reached such a conclusion, Wonkblog's Dylan Matthews found a clue in the dissertation Richwine wrote for his 2009 Harvard Ph.D. in public policy. “Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races,” Matthews explained. “While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics—‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ’—he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.’”

 

What Must Prince Charles Think of Canada's Prince of Darkness?

If there's one bunch of Canadians who adore the monarchy it has to be Conservatives.   That's why it was no end of fun to see the Royal next in line for the throne set fire to the coat tails of the climate change "forces of darkness" which has to include our own Steve Harper and his minions.

Hosting a two-day conference for forest scientists at St James's Palace in London, Prince Charles – who is taking over from the Queen at this year's meeting of the Commonwealth in Sri Lanka – savagely satirised those who stand in the way of swift action on the climate.

He characterised them as "the confirmed sceptics" and "the international association of corporate lobbyists". Faced with these forces of opposition, "science finds itself up the proverbial double blind gum tree", he said.

Prince Charles lambasted the skeptics and corporate lobbyists for turning the planet "into a dying patient."   Why, I think the Prince has aptly renamed the PMO.  It should now be known as the International Association of Corporate Lobbyists, Bitumen Peddlers and Climate Change Foot Draggers.  Perfect.

When You Think Bitumen, Think of the World's Poor and Needy

Who knew?   It seems the Harper government's support for the high-carbon, Athabasca Tar Sands is actually compassionate, even altruistic.  We're just doing our best to help out the world's poor and needy.

A gaggle of Canadian academics and science types just sent Ol' Joe Oliver a letter asking him to be an adult about our bitumen trafficking.

"...some of your recent comments give us significant cause for concern. In short, we are not convinced that your advocacy in support of new pipelines and expanded fossil fuel   climate change into account in a meaningful way. 

Avoiding dangerous climate change will require significantly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and making a transition to cleaner energy. 

The infrastructure we build today will shape future choices about energy. If we invest in expanding fossil fuel production, we risk locking ourselves in to a high carbon pathway that increases greenhouse gas emissions for years and decades to come."

Joe is hotfooting it through Europe this week, trying to convince those ungrateful Euros that it wouldn't be right to label bitumen dirtier than other fossil fuels but his spokesman, Chris McCluskey, wasted no time plucking the heart strings.

 "Cutting off oil production would create great economic hardship, especially for the poorest nations who already suffer from an energy deficit.  Indeed, one and half billion people are now without electricity. We have an obligation to responsibly develop our resources, protect the environment, create economic growth for Canadians and share our energy with the world."

Now you might not have known that we were going to "share" our energy with the world, especially not with the people of the poorest nations like the United States and China.  And that's why guys like McCluskey get paid the big bucks - to open your eyes.

Opium - "A Source of Stability" Says U.S. Army

If the mightiest military in the world is okay with the opium trade then what are we doing busting kids for pot?

The current opium policy of American forces in Afghanistan is strictly "hands off."   You don't destroy it, you don't trample through opium fields, you don't even encourage the farmers to plant something else.

“They’re a source of stability,” Maj. Charles Ford, the bookish operations officer at 3-41 Infantry, says of Afghanistan’s poppies. Sitting in a plywood-walled office at a Forward Operating Base in Kandahar city in early April, Ford cites all the people in Afghanistan who rely on poppies for some or all of their income: the Taliban, granted, but also millions of everyday farmers and their families as well as all levels of corrupt Afghan government from the subdistricts up to Kabul.

Fortunately for all these groups, there are some 400,000 acres of poppies in Afghanistan — “enough to go around,” according to Ford, who is responsible for devising his battalion’s combat strategy. Plentiful and lucrative — 15 pounds of poppy paste, the output of a typical acre family plot, sells for around $600 in a country where $.25 buys bread for a day — the illicit crop offers “access to prosperity” for much of Afghanistan. And that access is all that most Afghans really want.

Leave the poppies alone, and most Afghans will happily go about their business farming and selling the colorful crop — or so Ford’s line of thinking goes. Granted, once processed into heroin and distributed in Russian and European cities, heroin can become a pretty serious danger to public health. But that, frankly, is not the U.S. Army’s problem, whereas Afghan security is.

Conversely, attempting to eradicate poppies — as has been the Army’s policy in the recent past — could mean destitution for countless Afghans. Sure, destroying the flowers might deprive the Taliban of one of its major revenue streams, but the violent popular backlash against eradication would probably represent a net victory for the insurgent group.

Too Hot to Handle

When we think of nuclear screw ups it's usually the Soviet Union/Russia that comes to mind -  Chernobyl, submarine accidents, old nuclear reactors jettisoned at sea, that sort of thing.

It turns out the United States has its own nuclear quagmire, the 586-square mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Benton county, Washington, hard alongside the Columbia River.   They've been accumulating nuclear waste at Hanford going back to the Manhattan Project in WWII.   From the early 40s until the last reactor was shut down in 1987, some 208 million litres of nuclear waste was held in now-decaying underground tanks on the site.

Big plans have been underway for years to relocate all that dangerous nuke waste and store it for centuries at something called the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.   There's a snag.  Officials now think the waste has become way too dangerous to handle.   They're a little twitchy over potential chain reactions, hydrogen explosions and leaks caused by metal corrosion.

Time is not on their side.   About 60 of the 177-underground tanks are already leaking and the rest are considered in danger of following suit.

Overall, the tanks hold every element in the periodic table, including half a ton of plutonium, various uranium isotopes and at least 44 other radionuclides—containing a total of about 176 million curies of radioactivity. This is almost twice the radioactivity released at Chernobyl, according to Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, by Kate Brown, a history professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The waste is also physically hot as well as laced with numerous toxic and corrosive chemicals and heavy metals that threaten the integrity of the pipes and tanks carrying the waste, risking leakage.
The physical form of the waste causes problems, too. It’s very difficult to get a representative sample from any given tank because the waste has settled into layers, starting with a baked-on “hard heal” at the bottom, a layer of salt cake above that, a layer of gooey sludge, then fluid, and finally gases in the headspace between the fluid and the ceiling. Most of the radioactivity is in the solids and sludge whereas most of the volume is in the liquids and the salt cake.

As Bart Simpson would say, "Ay, Carumba!"   But wait, there's more!   This time the focus is on the men and women who hold the launch keys for America's nuclear missile arsenal.   In Minot, North Dakota, 17 of them have been pulled off alert duty and sent for retraining.

The Air Force is putting a brave face on the incident, downplaying its significance.   But the official account doesn't square with an internal e-mail from the deputy commander of the operations group who wrote,

"We're discovering such rot in the crew force that your behavior while on alert is accepting of  [violations in weapons safety directives, possible compromises in launch codes and other shortcomings] all in the name of not inconveniencing yourselves."

Keeping Population In Perspective

Mankind now numbers well in excess of 7-billion and we're expected to reach 9-billion before long.   Here are a few stats to help you keep that in perspective.

When Columbus "sailed the ocean blue" and in American myth discovered the New World, 1492, the world population stood at around 500-million people.

Somewhere in the early 1800's that doubled to a billion people.

In the 1920's we hit the two billion mark for the first time.

By 1959 we upped that to three billion.   Less than one lifetime later we're well past seven billion.

Now let's go back to the death and resurrection of Christ.  In 1 A.D., the planet's population was roughly 250-million.   We're now adding over a million more people every five days.

So, where do we stand?  Well we all stand atop 57-million square miles of land of one sort of another of which about 12-million square miles is arable land.

In 1959 there were 12-acres of land for every human being, about 3-acres of arable land.   That was enough to meet all our needs quite comfortably.   Now we're down to 5-acres per person or about one acre of arable land.   By 2039 that could be down to 2-acres of land per capita, roughly .4 acres of arable land.   And that's without factoring in arable land lost to sea level rise; salination of coastal freshwater resources;  desertification from our exhaustion of once fertile farmland; cyclical floods and droughts resulting from our broken hydrological cycle.

Anybody see how this ends well?  If you do, send your ideas to your government and the U.N. and don't delay.   In the meantime maybe we should sit down and have a grownup chat about growth, starting right here in Canada.

Why here?   Because, according to researchers at the Global Footprint Network,  Canada is one of less than a handful of northern hemisphere countries (four, max) that retain a biomass surplus.   That means our ecological pants aren't too tight for us just yet.   And that means we have options, very important planning options, that almost no other countries have and all of them only wish they had.

Most countries fell into ecological deficit at a time when they didn't know better.  We didn't truly grasp the relationship between biomass sufficiency and ability to maintain a healthy economy and society.  Canada still has options that other countries lost years ago but we'll lose them in the very same way if we don't decide to safeguard our ecology for the future.

Strange Bedfellows Indeed

The British government's energy and climate change secretary, Ed Davey, is fighting back against climate change skeptics within the ranks of his own coalition government.   Davey is a Liberal Democrat.  His party wants action on climate change.  The LibDems, however, prop up the Cameron Conservatives where, true to course, the rightwing climate change skeptics lurk.

Ed Davey, the energy and climate change secretary, is to use a major speech at Clarence House on Wednesday afternoon to fight back against the increasingly vocal climate change scepticism of other sections of the coalition.

His uncompromising speech, seen by the Guardian, promises stronger action on global warming and follows the admission by his party leader Nick Clegg that green issues are now some of the most serious flashpoints between the coalition partners. The Liberal Democrats have long sought to be seen as strong on the environment, a core issue for the party's voters. But they have suffered setbacks in government as the Treasury has cut renewable energy support and an increasingly vocal number of Tories oppose windfarms, money for low-carbon projects and tougher targets for UK emissions cuts, all of which the Lib Dems support.

Living Within Our Skin

It's a core tenet of our Western industrial/capitalist/democratic orthodoxy that something in the range of 3% annual economic growth is the benchmark of a healthy society.   That's 3% compounded growth.

Now let's take a span of 50-years, roughly one adult lifetime.  Let's say the economy stood at 100X at the beginning of that period and grew at 3% over that interval.   By the end of that 50-years, what began as 100X would have grown to 438X.

This is all great stuff if only our world, our planet, our biosphere was as expansive and elastic that it could grow 4.38X every half century.   But it isn't expansive or elastic and it doesn't grow.  It's finite, fixed, very precisely limited.  It's no bigger than it was when the Pharoahs built their pyramids.  We've rearranged the molecules and chemical properties of some of it.   For example, we have transformed long sequestered underground fossil fuels into atmospheric carbon compounds but everything is pretty much still around in some form.

One thing that has grown is us, the human race.   We have grown like crazy.  In 60-years we have grown by almost 3X but along with there being so many more of us we have also seem a massive increase in the amount of stuff - resources - each of us consumes, uses up and emits, transformed in one manner or another.

When I was a child my parents would buy our shoes in a slightly bigger size than we actually needed.   They knew we would "grow into them" quickly enough and, sure enough, we did just that.  If they calculated right we would wear those shoes out at about the same time as we outgrew them.   Those of us in larger families also became accustomed to "hand me downs" from older sibs.

Our problem at the moment is that we've "grown into" the earth but there's no store where we can buy a bigger one, no older brother to hand us down a bigger size.

We can't get a bigger planet but we've been reluctant to accept that reality.  Our stubborn refusal to face reality is evident just about anywhere we look.   Spreading deforestation is visible to the naked eye from space.  So too is desertification - the exhaustion of once productive land and its transformation into sterile desert.  Satellite-borne radars can now measure surface subsidence caused by draining of ancient aquifers.   We don't need manned spacecraft or satellites to reveal the collapse of global fisheries as our industrial fleets "fish down the food chain" pursuing one fish stock after another.

These events have little or nothing to do with climate change.   They're mainly the product of overpopulation and increased per capita consumption.   Yet, even the most advantaged people of the industrialized nations, keep questing for 3% annual growth from a world that's already sagging under the weight of our wildly excessive demands.

In a nutshell, we're defying gravity.  Years ago I watched a black and white film clip that showed a U.S. Navy balloon that was being controlled by dozens of sailors holding mooring lines.   Suddenly it broke free and climbed.  Most sailors simply let go of their lines.  Others held on until they were five to ten feet off the ground and then let go.  There was another bunch of sailors that couldn't let go and clung to their mooring lines as the balloon climbed higher and higher until they fell, one by one, to their deaths.

For us, that 3% annual growth target is our breakaway balloon.  That's the bad part.   The good part is that we're still within a safe landing distance of the ground.  We can still let go of the lines on our terms.

Arctic Ocean Acidifying Rapidly

Oh well, we probably won't even think about this once the oil spills begin but it turns out that cold sea water is especially absorptive of CO2.  And, that is why the Arctic Ocean is rapidly acidifying.

Scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme report widespread changes in the ocean chemistry.   They conclude that even if emissions stopped today it would take tens of thousands of years for Arctic waters to return to their pre-industrial state.

Chemical effects related to acidification have also been encountered in surface waters of the Bering Strait and the Canada Basin of the central Arctic Ocean.

Scientists estimate that the average acidity of surface ocean waters worldwide is now about 30% higher than before the Industrial Revolution.

The researchers say there is likely to be major change to the Arctic marine ecosystem as a result. Some key prey species like sea butterflies may be harmed. Other species may thrive. Adult fish look likely to be fairly resilient but the development of fish eggs might be harmed. It is too soon to tell.

Insanity is Not Funny, Until It's Political

At times having to watch America's seemingly endless death spiral becomes utterly depressing.   These are crazy people who have somehow been allowed to rise to positions of authority - people like Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachmann.   And then there's this guy, Virginia Republican nominee for governor, Ken Cuccinelli.

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Check Out Solar Impulse, Live, Online

Think of it as an aerial solar panel.   The aircraft, Solar Impulse, is now winging its way across the United States.   It's currently on the San Fransisco to Phoenix leg of the trip.   You can watch it live at live.solarimpulse.com  

Right now it's at 15,900 feet with an airspeed of 26 knots that translates, with tail wind, to 42 knots groundspeed.   Onboard batteries enable Solar Impulse to fly at night but the lightweight airframe is fragile and heavy weather must be avoided.

The Face of Globalization

When you're racing for the bottom dollar, it eventually costs some people their lives.

Why Bother With Climate Change? The World is Ending Soon Anyway.

Apparently an awful lot of Americans have embraced "End Times Theology".   As they see it, the world is ending soon anyway so there's no point worrying about trivialities like climate change.

A study by David Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David Bearce of the University of Colorado concludes there is simply too much resistance to hope for effective action by Congress to deal with climate change.

“[T]he fact that such an overwhelming percentage of Republican citizens profess a belief in the Second Coming (76 percent in 2006, according to our sample) suggests that governmental attempts to curb greenhouse emissions would encounter stiff resistance even if every Democrat in the country wanted to curb them.”

“[I]t stands to reason that most nonbelievers would support preserving the Earth for future generations, but that end-times believers would rationally perceive such efforts to be ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised.”

"...because of institutions such as the Electoral College, the winner-take-all representation mechanism, and the Senate filibuster, as well as the geographic distribution of partisanship to modern partisan polarization, minority interests often successfully block majority preferences.”  

“Thus, even if the median voter supports policies designed to slow global warming, legislation to effect such change could find itself dead on arrival if the median Republican voter strongly resists public policy environmentalism at least in part because of end-times beliefs.”

And before we get too self-righteous, let's remember we have one of these heel-dragging, do-nothing fundamentalist jackasses running our country too.

The truly frustrating part is that their End Times nonsense could turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy at least for countless millions of unfortunates around the world for whom the ravages of climate change will be their personal End Time only without that Rapture bullshit.

The White House Ponders an Ice-Free Arctic Ocean

The domestic and international security implications of an ice free Arctic ocean will be briefed at the White House this week.

The meeting is bringing together Nasa's acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.  

Senior scientists advising the US government at the meeting include 10 Arctic specialists, including marine scientist Prof Carlos Duarte, director of the Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia.

In early April, Duarte warned that the Arctic summer sea ice was melting at a rate faster than predicted by conventional climate models, and could be ice free as early as 2015 - rather than toward the end of the century, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected in 2007. He said:

"The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train."

It is finally sinking in that the warming Arctic is creating a new atmospheric reality for the northern hemisphere.   The polar jet stream now loops far to the south in slow moving Rossby waves that can bring sustained weather extremes - floods and droughts - to North America, Asia and Europe with crippling impacts on global food production.

US national security officials have taken an increasing interest in the destabilising impact of climate change. In February this year, the US Department of Defense (DoD) released its new Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, which noted that global warming will have:

"... significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to greater competition for more limited and critical life-sustaining resources like food and water."

And all Alberta and Ottawa can think about is how to move millions of barrels of dilbit a day to Asian markets, no matter the perils to B.C. and the environmental havoc of burning high-carbon fossil fuels.   They can't bother with the Arctic.   That would only contradict their energy superpowerdom narrative.

Naomi Klein Attacks Big Enviro

There's dissension in the ranks of the environmental movement.

Naomi Klein has written a piece in The Guardian attacking some A-list environmental groups that, she claims, have been of more help than harm to the fossil fuelers.

...some of the most powerful and wealthiest environmental organisations have long behaved as if they had a stake in the oil and gas industry. They led the climate movement down various dead ends: carbon trading, carbon offsets, natural gas as a "bridge fuel" – what these policies all held in common is that they created the illusion of progress while allowing the fossil fuel companies to keep mining, drilling and fracking with abandon. We always knew that the groups pushing hardest for these false solutions took donations from, and formed corporate partnerships with, the big emitters. But this was explained away as an attempt at constructive engagement – using the power of the market to fix market failures.

Now it turns out that some of these groups are literally part-owners of the industry causing the crisis they are purportedly trying to solve. And the money the green groups have to play with is serious. The Nature Conservancy, for instance, has $1.4bn (£900m) in publicly traded securities, and boasts that its piggybank is "among the 100 largest endowments in the country". The Wildlife Conservation Society has a $377m endowment, while the endowment of the World Wildlife Fund–US is worth $195m.

plenty of green groups have managed to avoid this mess. Greenpeace, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, and a host of smaller organisations such as Oil Change International and the Climate Reality Project don't have endowments and don't invest in the stock market. They also either don't take corporate donations or place such onerous restrictions on them that extractive industries are easily ruled out. Some of these groups own a few fossil fuel stocks, but only so that they can make trouble at shareholder meetings.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is halfway there. It has a $118m endowment and, according to its accounting team, for direct investments "we specifically screen out extractive industries, fossil fuels, and other areas of the energy sector". However, the NRDC continues to hold stocks in mutual funds and other mixed assets that do not screen for fossil fuels. (The Fossil Free campaign is calling on institutions to "divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years".)

Hannah Jones, one of the student divestment movement organisers, told me: "Just as our college and university boards are failing us by not actively confronting the forces responsible for climate change, so are the big corporate green groups. They have failed us by trying to preserve pristine pockets of the world while refusing to take on the powerful interests that are making the entire world unliveable for everyone." But, she added, "students now know what communities facing extraction have known for decades: that this is a fight about power and money, and everyone – even the big green groups – is going to have to decide whether they are with us, or with the forces wrecking the planet."

Ouch, burn.   Now that Klein has put them under a microscope it should be interesting to watch how these enviro-institutions react.

A Modest Proposal for Effective Electoral Reform

Manitou only knows how we're struggling to find democratic reform for our ailing electoral system.   At the moment some type of proportional representation is the favoured approach.

I have another idea, one that may even be superior to proportional rep.

How many of us have dutifully dragged ourselves to the polls only to have to hold our noses and cast a ballot for the least odious of a motley crew of candidates and their respectively odious parties?  I know I certainly have.  Yes I have voted for representatives when I was less than convinced that any of the candidates or their parties deserved my support.   And I suspect a great many people who don't vote at all stay away from the polls for that very reason.  Here's a modest proposal.

Add one option to the ballot.   Allow the conscientious citizen, who honours their obligation to vote, the option to be heard without voting for any of the candidates.   Give that voter the option, instead of voting in favour of some candidate, the privilege of voting against one of the candidates on the ballot.

It would be the rectal equivalent of a thermometer measuring the true state of politics in the land.  It would be our one chance to express our dissatisfaction with the whole damned business.  It would be a bellweather of the legitimacy of the mandate earned by the winning party.  And, I'm guessing, it would encourage far greater turnouts at the polls.  People would go just to vent, to settle scores, knowing they could strike a blow at Dork A without having to endorse Dork B or Dork C in the process.

And the party that ultimately wins would have to reflect on how many negative votes it suffered against the number of positive votes garnered.  That would inject a healthy degree of sobriety into electoral victories.  The winner would know how badly it needed to shape up and fly right if it was to stand a chance in the next runoff.  The runners up would have their own lesson in the aftermath.  For what is an election without a bloody, righteous aftermath?   That's what leaves us saddled with governments just like Harper's.  See my point?

It will never happen, of course.  The governing party and their opposition parties would never permit the electorate to discover how few of us actually support them.   They have nothing to gain and oh so much to lose if Canadians were offered a snapshot of what we really think of them.  Why they might even have to resort to earning our support, perish the thought.

Peter MacKay's Hole in the Ocean

Sailors often complain that a boat is merely a hole in the ocean into which you pour money.   This brings us to Harper DefMin, Peter MacKay's 250-million dollar hole in the ocean.

CBC News is reporting a quirky deal surrounding Canada's Arctic offshore patrol vessel programme.  And, yes, it involves not only MacKay but Harper hairpiece Rona Ambrose also.

Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose and Defence Minister Peter MacKay announced March 7 in Halifax that Ottawa will pay Irving Shipbuilding $288 million just to design – not build – a fleet of new Arctic offshore patrol ships.

Irving will then build the ships under a separate contract.

However, a survey of similar patrol ships bought by other countries shows they paid a fraction of that $288 million to actually build the ships – and paid less than a tenth as much for the design.

In addition, the design of Canada's new ships is based upon a Norwegian vessel whose design Ottawa has already bought for just $5 million.

So, we already bought the design for the underwhelming sum of $5-million but we're going to pay Irving Shipbuilding almost $300-million to design the ship we already have the designs for.  And, even starting from scratch, the design for this sort of vessel should come in at around $30-million, tops.   And, worse yet, you should be able to design and construct these ships for under $300-million.

The Norwegian ship, the Svalbard, was designed and built for less than $100 million in 2002.
 
Experts say the design price is normally 10-20 per cent of the total cost of the ships.
 
Another country with Arctic interests, Denmark, acquired two patrol ships for $105 million in 2007.
 
They have modest ice-breaking capability, similar to the Canadian project, which allows for the ships to crunch through "summer ice" – about one-metre thick.
 
The Irish navy now is building two offshore patrol ships for $125 million.
 
In all cases, these prices include the design.

When CBC went after the MacKay/Ambrose brain trust for explanations, Ambrose went full Michelle Bachmann and said speak to her officials who, in turn, couldn't explain it.  MacKay meanwhile went all brain dead and said the "other shipyards are wrong."   They're "wrong", that's it Pete?

Ambrose got completely spinny, babbling on about the new, Canadian way of designing ships.

"We are implementing what's called a design and then build strategy," the minister told CBC News. "What that means is that we are spending more money up front on the design and production phase. That's important because we want to make sure that the shipyards, and the navy, and the coast guard, get the design correct."

However, Ambrose did not cite any other country that fails to design first and build later. Interviews with both Ambrose and her officials were interrupted by government media handlers who cut off further questions.

Fancy that, we're going to design the ships before we build them!  What a radical but brilliant concept, Rona.  Now go spray your hair.

My guess?   The Conservatives are using tax dollars to rebuild Irving's shipyard only the Canadian taxpayers aren't going to wind up owning what they've paid for.   No, that'll be a gift for the Irvings who, after all, really need the money.  At least that's my guess.

What's the Chance of a Northern Gateway Supertanker Disaster? Try 93-99%

Simon Fraser University has released a study of the likelihood of an environmental catastrophe from the Harper/Enbridge Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline/supertanker scheme.   Not surprisingly, their conclusions aren't quite as carefree and rosy as those put out by Enbridge.

The chance of a bitumen supertanker disaster during the operating lifespan of the Northern Gateway?   The research suggests it's a near certainty, at least if you consider a 93 to 99 per cent chance nearly certain.   Enbridge was claiming an 18% chance of tanker mishap.

Along the Northern Gateway pipeline itself, Enbridge figures it will have one spill every two years.   The Simon Fraser University researchers estimate fifteen spills each and every year.   That's thirty times worse than what Enbridge is claiming.

Lead author Dr. Tom Gunton, director of the School of Resource and Environmental Management at SFU suggests that Enbridge may have cooked the risk books.

"What we found was there were 28 deficiencies in (Enbridge's) risk assessment model. The database Enbridge used under-reports the number of tanker incidents by between 38 and 96 per cent," he said.

"They made no attempt to correct that under-reporting."

The other problem with Enbridge's risk assessment, said Gunton, is that it fails to use the standardized model used by the U.S. government.

The U.S. Oil Spill Risk Analysis model, which was developed in 1975 by the federal government, and is used by companies around the world to evaluate offshore oil-spill risks.

Enbridge is a company with a terrible reputation not only in terms of its oil spill record but also on the fundamental question of honesty.   And Harper and Redford want British Columbia to trust them?  Really?