Corporatism Rides Roughshod Over Tennessee. You Wonder Where Harper Gets It.

Since he came to power, Steve Harper has shown himself to be staunchly anti-labour.   The mere hint of collective bargaining turns him apoplectic.  He runs into the public square, yells "the economy" and - voila - back to work legislation magically tumbles from his pants. 

Harper comes by this redneckery honestly.  He's only following the example of his American Idols, the tea party Republicans.   The Repugs praise the middle class and perform ritual dances around middle class values yet never pass up the chance to derail the engine of middle class prosperity, unions.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Tennessee.  Automaker giant, Volkswagen, has a plant in that state and that plant has workers, lots of them.   And those workers, it seems, think they might like to have a union.

This is, of course, the American south where employers generally don't tolerate unions and workers know how to do what they're damned well told.  So, when Volkswagen decided the company would remain neutral on the union campaign, the powers that be took that as positively heretical.  State legislators got in such a tizzy they actually threatened the company.

In a press conference to address the potential unionization of the Volkswagen plant, State Senator Bo Watson said, "Should the workers at Volkswagen choose to be represented by the United Auto Workers, then I believe any additional incentives from the citizens of the state of Tennessee for expansion or otherwise will have a very tough time passing the Tennessee Senate." .....

Senator Watson said, "I believe the members of the Tennessee Senate will not view unionization as in the best interest of Tennessee. The Governor, the Department of Economic and Community Development, as well as, the members of this delegation, will have a difficult time convincing our colleagues to support any Volkswagen incentive package."....

House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick said... "The taxpayers of Tennessee reached out to Volkswagen and welcomed them to our state and our community. We are glad they are here. But that is not a green light to help force a union into the workplace. That was not part of the deal.

Now that, kids, is the ugly face of the corporatist state writ large.  They'll look you square in the face and tell you they're all for the middle class and everything it stands for and they won't bat an eye when they see to it that reality never happens.  And we've got that very same mentality at large in Stephen Harper.

One Fact that Puts Iran in a Different Perspective

The Israeli lobby and their rightwing stooges in governments in North America keep feeding us images of a nuclear-armed, Dark Ages Iran, steeped in Sharia law and bloodlust.  Look at this graph.  It's from the World Bank.  It concerns backward Iran.  Something is up there.  From the time the Iranian people turfed out the Shah to today it has risen from just over 40 per cent to just under 100 per cent today.  What have those dastardly Mullahs been up to?  Care to guess?

Well, this graph depicts female, 15-24, literacy rates in Iran over the past four decades since the country regained independence.  Today 60 per cent of university students in Iran are female.  Dwell on that for a minute and then tell me that Iran is a country driven by Islamist fanatics out to set the world on fire.

So Much Cheaper When You Spy On Everyone

Volume, volume, volume.  When you're a surveillance state there are real economies of scale to spying on everyone.   America's security apparatus is said to keep tabs on about 315-million people.  Carve up the NSA budget by 315-million and you get $574 per person.   That works out to just 6.5 cents per hour.
There are some who contend that a major reason America's spymasters keep close tabs on everyone is because it's so damned cheap thanks to 21st century technology.

 If privacy law experts Kevin S. Bankston and Ashkan Soltani are correct, costs, once a significant check on government spying and police monitoring efforts, have become an afterthought. In a recent study published in the Yale Law Journal Online, Bankston and Soltani found that most technologies deployed for mass surveillance efforts by police departments (e.g., GPS devices and domestic drones) are on cost trajectories similar to the NSA spying program: As the number of subjects increases, the cost of keeping tabs on each target nears zero. Cheaper, more effective tracking devices have been a boon to cash-strapped police departments nationwide, largely to the dismay of civil liberty groups.

Meanwhile, privacy protections afforded to individuals under the Fourth Amendment, which safeguards individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures by the state, have been eroding for years. Whether a particular search or seizure is deemed “reasonable” — thus justifying police action — rests largely on our ephemeral notions of privacy. It’s a dicey standard. As we place more of our private lives in the public domain (73 percent of adults online use social media), we, as well as courts, consider fewer acts to be truly private and thus protected by the Constitution. At the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s, for instance, groups fought tooth and nail to keep library lists private; today, we publicize the titles of books we’ve recently read on sites like Facebook and Goodreads.

There's a critical lesson in this for all of us.  Rights and freedoms atrophy when they're not exercised.  When we no longer recognize or value them, they will be infringed or simply stolen via the very sort of incrementalism of which our own prime minister is a master.   Today, as perhaps never before in our country's history, we need to defend our rights and freedoms against our own government that would take them away and, indeed, is doing just that.

The evidence is everywhere.  The rabid control of information.  The secrecy and utter dishonesty.  The manipulation.  The gagging of our public service.  The suppression of science.  The dismemberment of libraries.  The substitution of messaging for information. The wilful dissemination of fear, anger, resentment and distrust to leave us, as a people, divided and powerless.  The corruption and politicization of our police and security services.   The collaboration between government and the corporate media cartel.

All of these things are the hallmark of tyranny.  They are the doing of tyrants.  I posted this graphic yesterday but it needs to be presented again.  Think on it and realize that the first step in remedying our democratic deficit must be the dismantling of this rancid, corporate media cartel and the restoration of open government.

Glenn Greenwald's online news site, The//Intercept, is now up and running with a cast of leading-edge journalists.  It should be one to bookmark.
The lead story is now NSA metadata and cellphone tracking is now being used in lieu of actual human intelligence to select targets for America's assassination by drone programme.

In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device.

The former JSOC drone operator is adamant that the technology has been responsible for taking out terrorists and networks of people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But he also states that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed as a result of the NSA’s increasing reliance on the surveillance tactic.

One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.

Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”

As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.

Well that certainly gives a diabolical new meaning to the old adage "good enough for government work."

They Could Have Been Speaking of Stephen Harper

As I pored over these observations on tyranny, I thought each of these men and women could have easily been speaking of Stephen Harper.

“Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.”   - Bruce Coville

“Rebellion to tyranny is obedience to God.”   - Thomas Jefferson

“In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point
out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is
not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate
them.”   - Pierre Trudeau

“The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.”   - Lord Acton

“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.”   - Thomas Jefferson

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”   - Samuel Adams

“When one with honeyed words but evil mind
Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.”   - Euripedes

“Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.” - Lysander Spooner

“Time and time again does the pride of man influence his very own fall. While denying it, one gradually starts to believe that he is the authority, or that he possesses great moral dominion over others, yet it is spiritually unwarranted. By that point he loses steam; in result, he falsely begins trying to prove that unwarranted dominion by seizing the role of a condemner.”   - Criss Jami

“The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.” - G.K. Chesterton

“For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.” - Aeschylus 

“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and opressions of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” - Thomas Jefferson

“A city which belongs to just one man is no true city” - Sophocles

“Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”   - Thomas Jefferson

“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”   - Thomas Jefferson

Photo by Joe the Lion

“The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.” - Christopher Hitchens

“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”   Edward R. Murrow

“Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!” - Erich Maria Remarque

 “The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.”  - Stendhal

“Silent acquiescence in the face of tyranny is no better than outright agreement.”   - C.J. Redwine

Obamacare Chuckle

The rabid Right has made much of a Congressional Budget Office analysis that upwards of 2-million Americans might give up their jobs due to Obamacare.  The Right depicted it as those people somehow losing their jobs.  What the CBO was actually getting at was that Obamacare made it possible for people who hated their jobs but stuck with them out of fear of being left without any healthcare to finally quit.

Marine Migration is the Bellweather of Climate Change

For the past couple of years I've been noticing the arrival of newcomers to our local waters.  Humboldt squid, the denizens of the Sea of Cortez, washing up in their hundreds on the beaches of Tofino.  A green sea turtle spotted in the waters off Haida Gwai.  Huge schools of sardines apparently emigrating from California.  A flock of brown pelicans taking up permanent residence in the waters between Victoria harbour and Race Rocks.  The giant white sunfish.  And, of course, the return of the Humpback whale in large numbers around Vancouver Island.

Now the marine migration phenomenon has been documented by scientists from the Scottish Association for  Marine Science (SAMS) in a paper published in the journal, Nature.

The paper, the collaborative effort of researchers from the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Europe, finds that some prey species, such as krill, have already migrated up to 1000 km. northward.  Some species, however, get trapped by coastlines and find migration routes blocked.   The Mediterranean and Baltic seas are clear examples.

Species that cannot easily find their way to cooler waters run the risk of extinction.

While some species may be able to adapt fast enough to changes in their environment and while others may disperse to colonise new habitats with thermal conditions they can tolerate, there will be species that can neither adapt nor move. Those species are likely to go extinct.

A key finding of the Nature study is that routes to the shifted climates are often blocked by coastlines. Coastlines can act as barriers to the migration of marine life just as mountains ranges do for terrestrial life. Species seeking refuge from increasing temperatures in enclosed seas like the Mediterranean and the North Sea are at risk because those seas are not directly connected to the North Atlantic or Indian Oceans.

"Mapping these areas around the globe shows those places where biodiversity may be compromised by climate change, alongside all the other threats to life in an increasingly crowded and developed world," said Professor Burrows.

In the ocean, the biodiversity of equatorial regions is especially vulnerable. As sea temperatures increase, species are migrating to cooler places. These migrants are not being replaced and so biodiversity is declining.

"Knowing the areas of potential vulnerability to the effects of blocked shifts can help focus conservation efforts. In an unprecedented period of climate change, economic development and fast growing demand on an already pressured planet, we need to act fast to make sure as much of the world’s living resources survive that change," Professor Burrows urged.

This is also borne out by the migration of the Pacific grey whale.  They used to travel up from the Sea of Cortez past Vancouver Island en route to their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea.  The krill, however, have migrated which now forces the whales to journey further, into the Beaufort Sea in pursuit of the krill.  The extra time and travel spent in pursuit of the krill was said to result in lower body mass for the grey whales.

We might know how climate change was impacting fish stocks and marine life along British Columbia's coast if only Harper hadn't thought it helpful to dismember the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in preparation for his bitumen purge to Asia.

Have Humans Become a Climate Change "Feedback Mechanism"?

In case you're wondering, we're considered a "positive feedback"

From Australia to California, Atlanta to London, climate change has settled in as a more or less permanent fixture.  Australia is roasting, California is parched, Atlanta was frozen solid and London is staring into the face of severe and perpetual flooding.  What to do, what to do?

The lead editorial in The Guardian proclaims climate change as "weather of Olympian extremes."

Even before 1988, when global warming first became an item on the international agenda, climate scientists had begun to warn that, were average temperatures to rise with greenhouse gas levels, then extremes would become more damaging, more frequent, or both.

Since then, the warnings have multiplied, and intensive and sustained research by scientists in Britain, Europe, China, Australia and the US has told the same story: if there are no steps to reduce greenhouse emissions, then average global temperatures will continue to rise, and extremes of heat and cold, of evaporation and precipitation, will continue. And yet each extreme triggers new energy demand.

Sea defences, river dredging and the pumping of water from flooded farmland all consume expensive energy. The alternative is catastrophic loss; by 2100, according to a European study this month, without adaptation, storm surge damage to coastal cities could total $100 trillion a year.

In a blizzard, cities and homesteads have no choice but to turn up the thermostat. As summer temperatures soar, so will the demand for air conditioning: the US today uses about as much electricity to cool its offices, malls and homes as it did in the 1950s to supply the needs of the whole nation for all purposes.

In a cycle of positive feedback, demand for fossil fuels will continue to grow, and temperatures will continue to rise.

Say what?  Storm surge damage could soar to $100-Trillion a year, as in with a "T"?  What this editorial appears to suggest is that we're now locked in.  Ever worsening climate change impacts will compel us to consume ever more fossil fuel in adaptation efforts.  We've long known of feedback mechanisms - the disappearance of polar ice, the thawing and burning of the tundra, the release of Arctic methane - but now we, mankind, have become a positive feedback unto ourselves?

When is extreme weather no longer 'extreme'?  Perhaps when it becomes the new "normal."  By now most of us will have learned of the devastating storms, heavy rains and flooding that have beset Ireland and the southern half of England.  The chief scientist at Britain's Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, has warned this is what Britain can expect from climate change over the next 20-years.

Colin Thorne, the chair of physical geography at Nottingham University, writes that the flooding scenario Britain's former chief scientist, Sir David King, warned ten years ago would hit the U.K. in 2030 has arrived prematurely and very unexpectedly.  The choices, says professor Thorne, are bleak.

What are the "hard choices" to which King alluded in 2004? Perhaps the best way to consider them is in relation to the three major causes of flooding: coastal, river, and surface water.

The enormous volumes of water and geographical scale of coastal flooding set it apart from the other two and, as an island nation with extensive areas of densely populated, low-lying land along our coasts and estuaries, we are especially vulnerable. Let's be clear: we cannot hold the line everywhere – it would cost too much and would destroy irreplaceable shoreline ecosystems through "coastal squeeze".

The Dutch take coastal protection very seriously indeed and they're very good at it too – even they now plan for and allow their coast to adjust to accommodate changing tides, waves and currents through "managed retreat". No, the future for coastal management in the UK will involve realigning defences by retiring them landward. The difficult choices for government are not in deciding where, or how much to retreat, but rather in finding equitable ways to relocate and, perhaps, compensating those affected for their financial losses and personal sacrifices.

Thorne sees a variety of options available to respond to river flooding but urban flooding poses real challenges.

Our cities rely largely on Victorian pipe and surface drains, often combined with sewer systems (Combined Sewer Overflows, or CSOs), that were never designed to handle rainstorms with the intensity and duration to which they're now subjected. When a CSO occurs, raw sewage mixed with flood water enters our streams and may overflow into our communities. The first hard decision is to separate storm water from sewage – this reduces the damage, misery and health impacts of urban flooding but at a considerable replacement cost. People say this can't be done – we must not believe them. Portland, Oregon, proves it can be done. In 2008 as part of a city-wide "gray to green initiative", they decided to get rid of their main CSO; just six years later, it's gone, and good riddance.

That's a huge investment, a particularly bitter pill for an austerity-obsessed government like David Cameron's to swallow.  It's a problem shared by every industrialized nation and Canada is no exception.  It has been estimated that upgrading Canada's essential infrastructure to withstand the impacts of climate change that are heading our way would be upwards of a trillion dollars.  Look for that in Jimbo Flaherty's budget.

Professor Thorne also explains that flooding has to be recognized for what it can offer to regions that face cyclical floods and drought.

...by reinventing the way we manage the urban water cycle and making it a lot more like the natural cycle – recharging aquifers and surface-water stores in times of abundance to get us through what are likely to be increasingly frequent and protracted droughts. This is what Prof Cedo Maksimovic of Imperial College calls the blue-green dream. The "blue-green city" will use green spaces and corridors that turn blue during floods – reducing pressures on the pipe network while providing a wealth of benefits to citizens the rest of the time. The "Blue-Green Cities Research Consortium" is working out how this can be achieved, using Newcastle (ravaged by the Toon Monsoon in 2012, as its case study. Think it can't be done? Ask the people of Melbourne – they're at least a decade ahead of us, and their experience is just as compelling as Portland's move away from CSOs.

Yeah, It's Despotic. Ask the Council of Canadians

As usual, count on The Council of Canadians to call out the Harper government while the opposition cowers in corners.

From Now On, Let's Call It the "Holey Gospel"

Former Harvard divinity student, Chris Hedges, tackles biblical inerrancy head-on in his excellent book, American Fascists.  In it, Hedges points out a gaggle of contradictions and inconsistencies in scripture which Christian extremists proclaim the Word of God.

Now a pair of Israeli archaeologists have released a report showing that the Bible is not really anchored in the Old Testament past and is full of details that are just plain wrong.  The 'camel' is a dead giveaway.


The Hebrew Bible’s oldest chapters– Genesis, Exodus, and even Judges purport to discuss events thousands of years ago. The custom in Western biblical scholarship is to date Abraham to e.g. 2000 B.C. This dating is based on nothing more than counting generations (“begats”) backward and assigning an arbitrary number of years to each generation. In fact, Genesis is replete with myths and assertions of people living hundreds of years, and was only historicized in this way by 19th century positivists.

But here is proof that the Bible was written late and projects later developments into the distant past: it alleges that people had domesticated camels four millennia ago in what is now Israel. And that assertion, folks, is simply not true. That is the finding of Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef.

E.g. Genesis 24: 64 says, “Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she dismounted from the camel.” If this encounter happened circa 2026 BC, it was happening a thousand years before anyone was riding camels.

The archeologists’ digs near the Jordanian border find evidence of domesticated camels sort of 930-900 BC. But they don’t find that evidence in any settlements older than 930 BC. There is a pretty clear dividing line between the pre-domestic camel and post- domestic camel settlements.

Although it was likely based on previous oral tales, the Bible probably wasn’t written down in something like its present form until the Babylonian exile, 586-539 B.C. When those scribes reworked the folk tales of the Canaanites, they projected sixth-century BC realities back into the past.

Thus, they had characters riding camels before they were domesticated. Riding a camel was taken for granted in 580 BC.

The archeological evidence shows that not only weren’t people riding camels in the Levant when the Bible says they were, David and Solomon didn’t have a huge palace in Jerusalem in the 1000s and 900s BC. The Assyrians, the gossips of the ancient world, wrote down everything on their clay tablets. They knew events in the whole Middle East. They did not know anything about a glorious kingdom of David and Solomon at Jerusalem. Indeed, in the 1000s when David is alleged to have lived, Jerusalem seems to have been largely uninhabited, according to the digs that have been done. Jerusalem was not in any case founded by Jews, but by Canaanites in honor of the god Shalem, thousands of years ago. There is no reason to think anyone but Canaanites lived in the area of Jerusalem in the 1000s or 900s BC. Likely some Canaanites became devoted to Y*H*W*H in a monotheistic way during the Babylonian exile when they began inventing Judaism and becoming “Jews” and projecting it back into the distant past.

In short, those far right wing Israelis who use the bible stories as a basis for kicking Palestinians out of their homes in East Jerusalem are making many mistakes, including historical ones, as well as human rights mistakes.

And now a few insights from Biblical scholar, Lewis Black:

BP Paints a Dark Future For Our Kids and Grandkids

Some, like James Hansen, say we've probably already left it too late.  The slightly timid assessment of the IPCC says greenhouse gas emissions must peak no later than 2020, just six years from now, and thereafter decline rapidly if we're to avoid catastrophic or runaway climate change.

British Petroleum, BP, says even the IPCC is dreaming.  It ain't gonna happen.  The energy giant's Outlook 2035 foresees a 29% increase in CO2 emissions over the next two decades. 

BP's dismal forecast is in keeping with the Harper government's report to the United Nations  in mid-January predicting that Canadian emissions, far from being cut as the government tells us, will actually soar 38% by 2030.

A Cool Pacific Breeze Masks Global Warming

Consider it, at best, a reprieve.  "It" is the recent slowdown in the rate of global warming surface temperatures.  A team of American and Australian researchers have concluded the slowdown is the result of stronger winds over the Pacific.

A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday said stronger Pacific trade winds - a pattern of easterly winds spanning the tropics - over the past two decades had made ocean circulation at the Equator speed up, moving heat deeper into the ocean and bringing cooler water to the surface. The winds have also helped drive cooling in other ocean regions.

"We show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming," said the study, led by scientists from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

It will be interesting to see how this theory holds up over 2014 and 2015 should an anticipated El Nino develop.  While 2013 was rated the fourth or sixth warmest year on record, it was actually the second warmest year since 1850 that didn't have an El Nino event.  A report last month forecast a doubling of El Nino events this century and an increase in their intensity.

Best enjoy the reprieve while it lasts.

A World Standing on a Precipice

The global freshwater crisis has worsened markedly over the past decade and in the most hard-pressed areas the response has been to ramp up the depletion of dwindling groundwater reserves.  True to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, wet areas of the planet are getting wetter and dry areas are turning every more parched.

Ireland has been particularly savaged by flooding this year.  There, the government is looking at demolishing neighbourhoods and relocating residents to replacement housing on higher ground.  Another week of severe storms is expected to hit Ireland and Britain.

In England and Wales, residents have endured two months of heavy rains and record flooding and are now being warned of at least another week of heavy rain on its way.  Throughout the Cameron government, finger-pointing is the order of the day.  Tory prime minister David Cameron tried to lay the Somerset flooding at the feet of the former Labour government.  The chief scientist at  Britain's Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, has singled out climate change as the culprit behind Britain's weather woes.

According to new analysis from the Met Office, persistent rainfall over Indonesia and the tropical West Pacific triggered a global weather system that included the severe storms that have flooded thousands of homes in Britain, as well as the exceptionally cold weather in North America.

 

“In a nutshell, while there is no definitive answer for the current weather patterns that we have seen, all the evidence suggests that climate change has a role to play in it,” Dame Julia said.

 

The “clustering and persistence” of storms that have hit the UK was extremely unusual, she added. “We have seen exceptional weather. It is consistent with what we might expect from climate change.”

 

Yet, for every part of the world suffering inundation, there are more regions plagued with drought.  It has the world poised on a precipice of conflict.

 

 

The Middle East, north Africa and south Asia are all projected to experience water shortages over the coming years because of decades of bad management and overuse.

Watering crops, slaking thirst in expanding cities, cooling power plants, fracking oil and gas wells – all take water from the same diminishing supply. Add to that climate change – which is projected to intensify dry spells in the coming years – and the world is going to be forced to think a lot more about water than it ever did before

The losses of water reserves are staggering. In seven years, beginning in 2003, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers lost 144 cubic kilometres of stored freshwater – or about the same amount of water in the Dead Sea, according to data compiled by the Grace mission and released last year.

A small portion of the water loss was due to soil drying up because of a 2007 drought and to a poor snowpack. Another share was lost to evaporation from lakes and reservoirs. But the majority of the water lost, 90km³, or about 60%, was due to reductions in groundwater.

Farmers, facing drought, resorted to pumping out groundwater – at times on a massive scale. The Iraqi government drilled about 1,000 wells to weather the 2007 drought, all drawing from the same stressed supply.

In south Asia, the losses of groundwater over the last decade were even higher. About 600 million people live on the 2,000km swath that extends from eastern Pakistan, across the hot dry plains of northern India and into Bangladesh, and the land is the most intensely irrigated in the world. Up to 75% of farmers rely on pumped groundwater to water their crops, and water use is intensifying.

 

Over the last decade, groundwater was pumped out 70% faster than in the 1990s. Satellite measurements showed a staggering loss of 54km³ of groundwater a year. Indian farmers were pumping their way into a water crisis.

The US security establishment is already warning of potential conflicts – including terror attacks – over water. In a 2012 report, the US director of national intelligence warned that overuse of water – as in India and other countries – was a source of conflict that could potentially compromise US national security.

The report focused on water basins critical to the US security regime – the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Mekong, Jordan, Indus, Brahmaputra and Amu Darya. It concluded: "During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems – shortages, poor water quality, or floods – that will risk instability and state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States."

Fortunately for Canada this is all a distant distraction.  Not really our problem.  Go about your business.   What's that you say?  California?  Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada?  Florida and Georgia?

California is getting a bit of a respite at the moment with heavy rain falling in the northern part of the state.  State officials have concluded that the current rainstorm won't slake the state's drought.  It would take four or five of these storms in succession to ease the California drought.

Meanwhile, sometimes a picture is far better than words.  Here is a herd of beef cattle near Delano, in California's central valley.  The ground they're walking across should be lush with grass at this time of year.  There's nothing to be had and that has forced the rancher to buy bales of fodder to keep the herd alive.

 

 

Chief Electoral Officer Laments Gagging of Canadian Democracy at Harper's Hand

Marc Mayrand isn't pulling any punches in his outright condemnation of the Harper regime's election reform bill.

In an interview airing Saturday on CBC Radio's The House, Mayrand said "my reading of the act is that I can no longer speak about democracy in this country."

The Fair Elections Act says it "limits the chief electoral officer's power to provide information to the public."

Under the proposed bill, the only role of the chief electoral officer would be to inform the public of when, where, and how to vote.

Elections Canada would be forbidden from launching ad campaigns encouraging Canadians to vote. Surveys and research would be forbidden under the new bill, Mayrand said.

"Most of the research will no longer be published because these are communications to the public."
The chief electoral officer and the commissioner of Canada elections would also no longer be allowed to publish their reports, Mayrand said.

Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre, who introduced the bill in Parliament on Tuesday, said candidates are better placed to get the vote out.
"
Political candidates who are aspiring for office are far better at inspiring voters to get out and cast their ballot than are government bureaucracies," ​Poilievre told the Commons on Wednesday.

Persistent and declining voter turnout could undermine the legitimacy of an election's outcome, warned Mayrand.

"Nobody owns [voter] turnout. I think it requires a collective, collaborative approach of the whole society."

That's where you're wrong, Marc.  The whole purpose of Poilievre's brainchild is to see that somebody indeed owns voter turnout - his party, the one that has already dabbled in achieving that very goal through robocalls.

The Green Party's Controversial Compromise

British Columbia's sole Green Party MLA, Andrew Weaver, is willing to accept a Northern Gateway pipeline but on conditions that probably won't be acceptable to Ottawa, to Alberta or to Big Fossil.

Weaver is solidly opposed to trafficking in dilbit - bitumen diluted with light hydrocarbons to liquefy it enough to pass through pipelines.  He wants it refined, on site in Alberta, into synthetic crude.  And then he wants that synthetic crude further refined into market products - oil, gasoline, diesel - at a refinery in Kitimat before being loaded into tankers for Asian markets.

The advantages to a dual state refining process would be eliminating the dilbit hazard.  Energy producers in Alberta would have to do the right thing - refining the garbage out right there.  That would include the toxins, acids and heavy metals.   It would also remove the pet coke, the truly dirty, granular petroleum coal that gets exported with dilbit and burned elsewhere.   Let that crap stay in Alberta where it belongs.

A pipeline carrying refined, synthetic crude presents a far lower environmental hazard than one carrying dilbit.  Dilbit is corrosive, leading to more pipeline failures.   Being sludgy it has to be heated and pumped under higher pressure to get it through pipelines. When dilbit leaks occur they're massively destructive and extremely hard to clean up.  The example of the Enbridge fiasco in Kalamazoo, Michigan is all anyone needs to know.  Dilbit also requires a pipeline bringing diluent in to be mixed with bitumen and, hence, a much larger volume pipeline going out because it carries not just the unconventional crude but also the volume of pet coke, other contaminants plus the diluent itself.  Dilbit, because of its greater volume, also necessitates more tanker traffic.

If a pipeline must go to Kitimat, the only thing it should carry is fully refined, synthetic crude oil.   Refining that heavy oil into commercial products, gasoline, diesel and light oil, would further  reduce the environmental impacts of a major tanker accident which is a near certainty at some point.

Jobs, jobs, jobs.  The dual refining option would create well-paid, permanent jobs in Canada, work that now goes to offshore refineries.  We would also be able to keep a close eye on those operations and their emissions.

Cost, cost, cost.  Our federal and provincial governments, the pipeline operators and Big Fossil want to shift the dirtiest, most dangerous product directly into those tankers for a couple of reasons.  It's cheaper to shift cruddy crude to market than it is to ship refined crude.  That's because there's 'surplus' refining capacity in Texas or China, or so we're told.  What's rarely mentioned is the added energy consumption and emissions that refining on site in Alberta would add to the province's already bloated GHG numbers.  That would be like having to live with two black eyes when you can offshore one.

I'm all for not offshoring emissions from our own economic activity, especially on the energy resource side.  We should take responsibility for what we do and any costs that go with it.  What is never mentioned is that if Canada shouldered the costs of refining bitumen into market products, the margins could be hammered, if not wiped out even with all the subsidies, grants, deferrals and minimal royalties we now have in place.

And, while I'm still opposed to supertanker traffic on the B.C. coast, I'd rather see a tanker sink that's full of product that floats, evaporates and disperses in wave action than a tanker laden with bitumen any day. 

Sorry, Woody. This Time You've Gone Too Far.

Woody Allen has responded to his former adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow's allegations of molestation by attacking her mother, Mia Farrow.

"Of course, I did not molest Dylan," writes Allen. "I loved her and hope one day she will grasp how she has been cheated out of having a loving father and exploited by a mother more interested in her own festering anger than her daughter's well-being."

So, Woody, bugging out with Dylan's mother's adopted teenage daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, wasn't itself cheating Dylan 'out of having a loving father'?  Really?  You're the one who not only walked out of your marriage to Mia Farrow but walked out with her adopted daughter on your way out the door and yet Mia Farrow is vindictive? 

Woody, thanks for reminding us what a dirtbag you are.

Maybe That's What Brought Rob Ford to Vancouver

Was a funeral really the only reason Toronto mayor Rob Ford came to the Lower Mainland?

Word has it that, after the funeral, Ford got pretty well baked.  On a Friday night he even jaywalked across the Lougheed Hwy. to scarf down some Chinese food.  Later that evening he was reported to be whooping it up in Coquitlam's Foggy Dew pub.   While there, Ford is said to have closeted himself in a staff washroom stall, emerging an hour later speaking gibberish.  Maybe he spent that hour brushing up on his gibberish.

But was a funeral the only reason for Rob Ford's trip to the west coast?  Or was it maybe the "pipe"?  Vancouver has just introduced Canada's first crack pipe vending machine.  They're only two-bits.  (does anybody even use 'two bits' anymore?)   Apparently the idea behind cheap, disposable crack pipes is to prevent the spread of disease.  For what it's worth, there have been no reports of Rob Ford lining up with a pocket full of quarters.

Soggy Old England

It's not just the south coast any more.  Flood alerts and warnings now extend across the south coast, including all of Wales,  and northward as far as Blackpool, Sheffield and East Anglia. 

The link above leads to a graphic where those in the bottom half of England can check out their local conditions.  From BBC News:

The system, developed by Shrewsbury-based firm Shoothill, uses data from the Environment Agency's nationwide network of monitoring stations.
 
Users can zoom in on any point of a map of England and Wales to see flood alert and flood warning statuses, as issued by the EA within the previous 15 minutes.

Custom searches can also be carried out by postcode.

Shoothill managing director Rod Plummer said: "We are expecting a crazy amount of rain today and in the coming days and the evidence of similar incidences in previous weeks tells us that floods are hitting places that haven't seen such a thing for decades, sometimes with devastating and even tragic consequences.

"Lots of people have reason to be concerned, given the weather forecasts. Those alerts could be to monitor the area around their homes, or perhaps their routes to and from work or their children's schools.

Is Enbridge Already Distributing Northern Gateway Pipe? If So, The Fix Is In.

Once They Start, It Will Be a Race to the Pacific

I know a fellow who works in the Alberta oil patch.  Not in the bitumen racket but in oil shale fracking in a job that takes him far and wide across northern Alberta from well site to well site.

He just came back with news that Enbridge is already stockpiling pipe along the Northern Gateway route.  If that's true, it means the fix is in.  The farcical, regulatory process was just a sham.

Now to track down proof that this is in fact going on.

Yes! Floating Wind Power Coming to Oregon.

Approval has been given for an offshore wind-turbine demonstration project near Coos Bay, Oregon.  The turbines will float, anchored some 1,400 feet above the sea bed.   They'll be situated some 16-nautical miles offshore.  At first five floating turbines will be used to generate a peak 30-megawatts of electricity.

Europe has a head start in this technology, exploiting the "west coast" advantage for offshore turbine power.  So long as the Earth rotates we can depend on the energy of prevailing westerly winds.  Then again, if the Earth stops rotating, we won't need it for long anyway.

If the European and Oregon demonstration projects achieve their potential, offshore wind farms could become a major source of renewable, clean energy for North America.

Why Is British Columbia Pushing Fossil Fuels When It's Easier and Cheaper to Go Green?

I sat in on a discussion presented by Canada's sole Green Party MLA in Port Alberni Tuesday night. 
The MLA for Victoria's toney Oak Bay/Gordon Head riding and leading Canadian environmental scientist, Dr. Andrew Weaver touched on a lot of topics including British Columbia's unique alternative energy resources.  Our province's capacity for generating clean, renewable energy is unlike any other.

B.C. has enormous resources from tidal energy, wind energy, ocean current and wave energy, hydro-electricity, solar and geo-thermal.  It's all there and in huge abundance.  Continental west coasts get westerly winds that build across the open ocean.  We get wave energy that likewise builds across the ocean.  Those winds bring rainfall that drives our hydro-electric system.  The Pacific is wide which means high tides and plentiful tidal energy.  Powerful ocean currents line the coasts.  Being on the Pacific means being on the Ring of Fire which means strong, geo-thermal options.  In fact, Weaver pointed out that Canada is the only Pacific Rim country that hasn't tapped its geo-thermal energy.

We have the ocean and we also have mountains.   Mountains are ideal for placement of wind turbines.   They're also great for energy storage.  During peak energy production you can use the surplus to pump water into mountain reservoirs that can release the water for hydro-electric (turbine) generation as needed.  Weaver pointed out that the desert of the Okanagan valley would be ideal for solar power generation on an industrial scale.

Properly developed, these resources could allow British Columbia to be the power plant for western Canada.  As though we needed another reason to pry loose the cold, dead, boney fingers of the Fossil Fuelers.

WANTED - New Drummer for Stephen Harper's Band

Stephen Harper has a band.  Who knew?  You probably did but I didn't.  Anyway he's going to have to find a replacement for the band's former drummer, Ottawa teacher Phil Nolan.

Phillip Nolan, 43, has been charged with five counts of sexual assault, five counts of sexual interference and five counts of sexual exploitation in relation to incidents that occurred between 1998 and 2000.

Police said that Nolan was working at a school within the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board at the time of the incidents and police are concerned there are more unreported incidents.

The Prime Minister’s Office issued a quick response Thursday afternoon, saying they are “shocked” by the allegations.

Oh my, lookee what I found on YouTube.  Steve's stomach-churning cover of 'Jumping Jack Flash' performed at the 2013 Negev Dinner in Toronto.  Rock on, Steve.

Canada's Lone East Coast Submarine Back in Dry Dock

If a boat is just a hole in the water into which you pour money, a submarine is a cavernous tube into which you sink fortunes.  At least that's the case if it's a Canadian navy submarine.

The Royal Canadian Navy's sole undersea denizen on the East coast is HMCS Windsor and seems to be in a similar state to its namesake city.  Windsor is part of a flotilla of crappy subs the Brits unloaded on us in a deal that must still have them rolling in the aisles.  They're all dogs that are rapidly nearing their "best before" date, the end of their service life, without every really being of much service.

Windsor was withdrawn for service in 2007 to undergo a 2-year, $45-million refit that wasn't completed until 2012 by a then swollen cost of $209-million.  According to CBC News, Windsor was scarcely out of dry dock before she encountered more, debilitating problems.

Shortly after the navy slipped the Windsor back into Halifax harbour in the spring of 2012, the diesel engine was declared unusable. The diesel engine is used to charge the batteries the submarine depends on to drive electric propulsion motors when submerged.

The engine failure meant that even after hundreds of millions spent on upgrades, the Windsor only had one working engine, which restricted the sub's ability to dive and manoeuvre.

The submarine's 48 crew members were forbidden to take the submarine from home waters because of the useless engine.

So now, in 2014, the Windsor is being taken out of service to replace the diesel engine that has kept her out of operational service since she came out of refit in 2012.   The navy types are hoping they'll be able to remove the defective engine and get a replacement in via a special hatch called a "Dutch breach."  If not they'll just have to cut the Windsor in half.  They're hoping the job can be done in under 8-months at a cost of $1.5-million but optimistic outcomes have not exactly been the navy's long suit when it comes to these boats.

Just in case you're wondering, the service life for the Windsor and her sister boats is said to lapse in 2018.  Subs are limited by the age of their hulls.   Canada bought these subs in 1998 for about $525-million (including upgrades), proof that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it is. Wiki notes that, during the 2007-2012 refit the hull was founded to have rust that would limit its diving depth and the navy had to spend thousands of dollars to keep pigeons from roosting in it.

Ignoring that these subs have never performed as we expected, for about the same money we could have bought brand new, proven, reliable, state of the art subs from the Germans, the Thyssen Krup Type 214 for example.

A Critical Distinction - Denialism Isn't Skepticism

Climate change denialists are not skeptics no matter how much they try to make that claim.  If they were skepticists they would probably be scientists, not denialists.  Scientists are skeptics.   They practice skepticism as part of the scientific process.

Scientists as skeptics seek evidence, proof of theories and, even then, they always leave the door of possible doubt at least somewhat open, just in case.  Hence, gravity still remains a theory in the realm of science.   It's a theory with a very high probability that it's right.  The theory of anthropogenic global warming also has a very high probability that it's right.  The theory of global warming, although relatively new (a century perhaps), has been steadily progressing in probability over the past three decades and is now well past 97%.

Denialists are like those other wackjobs, religious fundamentalists, who aren't concerned with knowledge, evidence, facts and proof.  They substitute belief for those things.  Faith trumps all.  Reality, to them, is whatever they're told to believe it is.

Denialists are the dupes of powerful people and industries that cannot refute climate science and so instead seek to corrode the consensus with a cacophony of noise.  If these powerful people and industries could use science to come up with evidence, facts and research undermining the theory of anthropogenic global warming they would do it in a heartbeat because, for them, trillions of dollars hangs in the balance.  They have all the money in the world, they have the political classes "captured" and all they need is science that unravels the existing scientific consensus.  Don't think they haven't explored those options and don't think their decision to go the denialism route isn't an act of surrender to the scientific consensus.

Oxford physicist  David Robert Grimes explores how denialists have moved into the top ranks of today's decision makers.

The nay-sayers insist loudly that they're "climate sceptics", but this is a calculated misnomer – scientific scepticism is the method of investigating whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence. Climate sceptics, by contrast, persist in ignoring empirical evidence that renders their position untenable. This isn't scepticism, it's unadulterated denialism, the very antithesis of critical thought.

Were climate change denialism confined solely to the foaming comment threads of the internet it would be bad enough, but this is not the case – publications such as the Daily Mail, Wall Street Journal and other Murdoch publications give editorial support to this view. Worse still, a depressingly large number of denialists hold office around the world. Australia's Tony Abbot decreed climate change to be "a load of crap", and a sizable chunk of the US Republican Party declare it a fiction. Even in the UK, spending on climate change countermeasures has halved under the environment secretary Owen Paterson, who doubts the reality of anthropogenic climate change, despite the fact the vast majority of scientists say unequivocally that the smoking gun is in our hands.

 

It should be no surprise that the voters and politicians opposed to climate change tend to be of a conservative bent, keen to support free-market ideology. This is part of a phenomenon known as motivated reasoning, where instead of evidence being evaluated critically, it is deliberately interpreted in such a way as to reaffirm a pre-existing belief, demanding impossibly stringent examination of unwelcome evidence while accepting uncritically even the flimsiest information that suits one's needs.

 

The great psychologist Leon Festinger observed in 1956 that "a man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." This is the essence of the problem, and sadly, Festinger's words ring true today: the conviction of humans is all too often impervious to the very evidence in front of them.

Motivated reasoning is not solely the preserve of conservatives. While nuclear power has been recognised by the IPCC as important in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, staunch and uninformed opposition to nuclear power arises often from the liberal aisle. In the furore over the Fukushima nuclear disaster (which has claimed no lives and probably never will) many environmentalists lost sight of the fact that it was a natural disaster, very possibly exacerbated by climate change, that cost thousands of lives. Instead, they've rushed to condemn nuclear power plants.

 

...Nor is there any inherent contradiction in an environmentalist being in favour of nuclear power – George Monbiot, Mark Lynas and James Lovelock have written eloquently on the importance of nuclear power in mitigating the ravages of climate change.

If we truly wish to avoid catastrophe, we must be pragmatic and take action. Ideological differences need to take a back seat if decisive action is to be taken. When one's house is on fire, the immediate priority should be putting the flames out, not squabbling about the insurance. Let us hope we realise this before it's too late.

 

 

 

CN Rail Strike Looms. Harper Recoils Impulsively.

There's nothing, absolutely nothing that Stephen Harper abhors more than a little workplace democracy.  When it comes to workers choosing to exercise their rights to democratic collective bargaining which, let's face it, includes the right to strike, Harper will have none of it.

CN Rail has received a 72-hour strike notice from the Teamsters' Union.   Harper sock puppet and labour min, Kellie Lietch responded that Beelzebub is predictably 'concerned by the impact a possible strike will have on the Canadian economy."

Yes, Kellie, the right to strike is meaningless unless it carries an economic impact.  That is part of democracy and at times it can be a little chaotic and cause a little dislocation but that's the price of  having organized labour capable of collective bargaining.

So, Kellie, please - stop being such a fascist douchebag.

Drama at Sea, Nanaimo, 3 Feb.

Passengers aboard a B.C. Ferry at the Departure Bay, Nanaimo terminal on Tuesday got to witness the spectacle of a school of white stripe dolphins being hunted by a pod of transient orcas.



Transient pods migrate through the local waters hunting for dolphins, seals and sea lions.  Resident pods hunt fish.

What Then Must We Do?

One of the great failures of progressive bloggers is our obsession with telling each other, over and over and over ad infinitum, that Stephen Harper is a shit.   It's not that there's any reason to give Harper & Co. a pass on their perfidy but surely we have more important fish to fry.

Turfing the Harper government won't mean all that much unless the incoming firm, be that Mulcair or Trudeau's outfit, is prepared to right Canada's political keel and rectify Harper's excesses. 

Our progressive cousins in the States hoped for so much when Obama succeeded the truly imperial presidency of Bush/Cheney and they're bitterly disappointed by the results so far.  Oh sure there's been a small victory on health care but there's also been the drone war campaign and the "all of the above" rudderless policy on fossil fuels.  Guantanamo remains in business and America's domestic spy apparatus has never been so uncontrollably powerful.  Obama should have and could have renounced the imperial powers built up by Bush and Cheney but he didn't.

What if our next prime minister finds Harper's excesses to his liking?  What if he doesn't dismantle the walls of secrecy that offer so much cover and control?  What if he finds our democratic deficit worth continuing?  What if he chooses to continue the corporatist state?  What if he can't be bothered to restore a free press to Canada by breaking up the corporate media cartel?   What if our next leader won't move effectively to reverse inequality and rehabilitate Canada's middle class?

Yes, of course Harper's a shit.  I know that.  What I don't know is how we're going to ensure his successor isn't just another shit in a slightly better wrapper.  'I promise I'll be better than Harper' isn't enough.  We need change we can believe in, real change long overdue,  and not merely window dressing.

Time is not on our side and Canada can't endure another, slightly less offensive iteration of Harper. 

Palestinians Want NATO Buffer

Palestinian Authority president Mahmound Abbas is floating the idea of a permanent, i.e. generational, NATO force to patrol a buffer zone separating his nation from Israel.

Palestine, he said, would not have its own army, only a police force, so the NATO mission would be responsible for preventing the weapons smuggling and terrorism that Israel fears.

"For a long time, and wherever they want, not only on the eastern borders, but also on the western borders, everywhere," Mr Abbas said of the imagined NATO mission. "The third party can stay. They can stay to reassure the Israelis, and to protect us.

"We will be demilitarised. Do you think we have any illusion that we can have any security if the Israelis do not feel they have security?"

For an alliance that has spent more than a decade in futile service in Afghanistan, NATO could redeem itself in bringing peace to a Middle East sore spot.

One can only expect Netanyahu to how like a scalded cat at the notion of NATO soldiers standing between Israeli forces and the Palestinian population.

Care to Take Your Own Temperature?

Ever wonder what global warming has done to temperatures where you live?  The University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has developed an interactive layer for Google Earth that lets you see your local situation based on weather data collected over the past century and a half.

It's an eye-opener, especially if you head up to the Arctic and check out warming there.

For those who like their data depicted in graphs, the U.S.  National Ocreanic Data Centre and NOAA have released a series of charts showing oceanic warming.   Here's one:

The orange bar is representative of those years in which climate change denialists contend our planet's warming stopped.  And, in case you think that ocean warming is a good thing, it's not.  Among other things, it is being accompanied by acidification which triggered all but one of Earth's major extinctions.  It also weakens the oceans' conveyors that circulate heat throughout the planet and upon which our species rely for our survival.

Athabasca's Cancer Ponds

The Athabasca Tar Sands tailing ponds are said to be so huge they're visible to the naked eye from space.   As the Harper government steamrollers over obstacles in the way of massive Tar Sands expansion and new pipelines to transport bitumen to overseas markets, those tailing ponds will be getting ever more numerous, ever larger.   A new report from the University of Toronto reveals those tailing ponds are already releasing high levels of carcinogenic vapours into the air.

The emission levels of some toxic air pollutants in the Alberta oilsands have been greatly underestimated, according to University of Toronto researchers.

“When dealing with chemicals that have such great potential to harm people and animals, it is absolutely vital that we truly understand how, and how much they are being released into the environment,” Abha Parajulee, lead author of a paper on oilsands pollution, said in a news release. 

The U of T study used a model to predict emission levels of a group of atmospheric pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which can be highly carcinogenic. 

“Tailing ponds are not the end of the journey for the pollutants they contain. PAHs are highly volatile, meaning they escape into the air much more than many people think,” Parajulee said. 

The model also factored in additional PAHs released during the transport and storage of other waste materials from oilsands operations. 

The researchers said the higher levels of PAHs predicted by the model are consistent with levels measured in samples taken from areas near and in the Athabasca oilsands region.

Athabasca bitumen producers, faced with enormous costs to remediate the existing tailing ponds, have been floating a proposal to simply leave the ponds intact in the hope that, within a century, they'll miraculously cleanse themselves and give Alberta the gift of free wetlands.    Yeah, that sounds like a plan.

Philip Seymour Hoffman - 46

Died in his apartment bathroom.  Apparently drug overdose.  A giant talent lost to the needle.

Don't ask me why, what I was thinking, but as the reality of Hoffman's loss sank in, I was drawn to this.  In it I found comfort.  It reminds me of the many deeply flawed but genuinely heroic men I knew as I grew up, many of them immediate relatives. 

I always thought there was that vein of courage inside this man but I have also seen, first hand, how it can be such a powerful demon that they struggle, unsuccessfully to escape.

He Said WHAT?

Shinzo Abe seems to have dropped a bomb in his speech to the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Abe has some of Japan's neighbours nervous over his support for expanding Japan's already formidable military and eliminating some of the 'self defence' restrictions in place since WWII.   Recent tensions between Japan and China over the disputed Senkaku islands are another concern, one Abe did nothing to ease by his remarks at Davos.

International affairs boffin Ian Bremmer and a suspiciously large contingent of think-tank poobahs were primed to love the speech (the text of which was, by Davos practice, not made available to the common herd), and they did.

First, Bremmer:

And Prime Minister Abe just came, he gave a great speech. Folks are optimistic about the economy. The one part of the speech that people were really concerned about was Japan-China. And understandably. He's criticizing the Chinese as being aggressive and militaristic. He compared Japan-China relations explicitly to relations between Germany and the UK in 1914, where the economic relations were good but the security tensions, let's say, were not so good. And we saw what happened there.

I wouldn't say that Abe was directly raising the specter of war, but he was saying that China is acting in a manner that's unacceptable and Japan won't tolerate it. [1]

 

Hmm. Nice Bike.

Harley riders are fond of claiming they want to be buried with their bikes.  For 82-year old Billy Standley, his wish came true.

Billy's kids decided their dad should go the way of the Hog and constructed this Plexiglas box casket to house their dad and his bike to speed him on his way to celestial Sturgis.   I wonder how long before some badass decides to go after that bike?

Rob Ford - A Hazard to Navigation

Okay, let's face it.  Friday night, following a wake.  Rob Ford.  Lougheed Hwy at North Road, a high-traffic corridor dividing Burnaby and Coquitlam.  The two-legged bucket of lard decides he's going to jaywalk across Lougheed Hwy to hit the Chinese restaurant on the other side of the arterial road.

The RCMP stop Ford and give him a $109 ticket for jaywalking, leaving Toronto's mayor gobsmacked.

What was Ford thinking?  Did Sir Jack Falstaff not realize the hazard to navigation that he was creating?  Zounds, ye fat sack of guts!    Crashing into that guy would be like striking a moose only it would be 400-pounds of  lard, not sinew and muscle, coming through the windshield.  And who would be left to clean up the mess?  Lougheed Hwy would quickly begin to resemble a freeway out of Atlanta.

Whether it's a wallowing supertanker laden with bitumen or a wallowing, crack-smoking elected official from Ontario, British Columbians take hazards to navigation seriously.