Former Coast Guard Commander Calls "Bullshit" on Harper

Retired Coast Guard Commander, Fred Moxey, believes the federal government's claims to have recovered 80% of the English Bay oil spill are nonsense.

“I’ve been in hundreds of spills and never seen an 80 per cent recovery," Moxey said. "Usually you recover 30 per cent at most, more like 10, and that’s with an immediate response and a trained crew with sponges and straw pulling the oil out by hand.”

The "80 per cent" figure was repeated at a press conference by the coordinated response team today at Canada Place.

Moxey, a 35-year Coast Guard veteran and former commander of the now-closed Kitsilano Coast Guard station, said the numbers reported by government are likely based on observation and aerial photography which fails to show the full reality in the water.

“They need to send cameras to the bottom of the bay to see what made it down there.”

...Moxey said that under the Harper government,coastal and marine response services has been amalgamated.

He called this "a horrible practice," meant to cut costs and push capacity away from the Coast Guard and onto partnered private enterprises.

The 2013 closure of the Kitsilano station has been under scrutiny since the spill. Moxey said before the closure the station was the busiest on the west coast, responding to over 300 calls per year.

Moxey said this spill was small – less than 2,900 litres of fuel, likely dumped from the ship’s bilge. He was visibly disturbed as he spoke about his lack of confidence in the cash-strapped Coast Guard's ability to deal with a larger incident.

"You can't remove the possibility of human error. They are in no way prepared for a catastrophe," he said. "It'd be years to clean it up."

The Vancouver Observer published the photo above showing the now shuttered Kitsilano Coast Guard station (in blue) overlooking English Bay where the oil spill occurred. 

Honestly, I feel like my coast is being assaulted by my own government.  Harper & Co. have done everything in their power to leave the coast vulnerable and essentially defenceless even as they have massively increased the risks of an environmental catastrophe.  The greatest threat to my coast is not ISIS, it's Ottawa.

How the Fearsome Become the Fearful

A Weapon of Weakness?

How did we become indentured to a culture of fear?  Fear-mongering has become a modus operandi in today's morally corrupt, visionless politics.  It is the stock in trade of authoritarians like our own Stephen Harper and it's effective.

The thing is democracy cannot thrive in the presence of a culture of fear.  It may not even be sustainable in that toxic milieu.

The culture of fear quickly comes to dominate aspects of how we are governed, how the nation state operates.  It even extends into national security structures and how we wage wars.  Until recently war was an interval of conflict between periods of peace.  In case you haven't noticed, peace is gone.  We've descended into a state of permawar, low-intensity conflict fought not to win a peace but out of fear to strike at groups we deem, often incorrectly, as a threat to our society.

I'm doing an online course on remote-control warfare.  It's an awkward term that incorporates drone or autonomous warfare, special operations warfare and for-profit wars waged by corporate entities, the modern version of mercenaries.  It's a 21st century type of warfare that can be dangerously corrosive of democracy.

In better times states jealously guarded their monopoly on violence so integral to the state's ability to meet its cardinal responsibility to protect the citizenry. Now wars have become more complicated engaging state actors with a confusing and shifting mix of non-state actors that run the gamut from militias to rebels to insurgents to organized crime, even banditry.  States have likewise lost their monopoly on lethal, war-waging weaponry and technology.

Some speculate that this dystopian era will end the classic 'nation state' that has evolved in the Westphalian interval.  State sovereignty, borders, the use of lethal force pretty much wherever and whenever, demands a different political reality.

I was struck in reading the transcript of a lecture by prof. Bill Durodie, University of Bath, by a passage that resonates with some central themes I've been canvassing on this blog for several years.  Here are some excerpts.

Since the end of the Cold War not only have we become disenchanted with science, but some suggest that our social networks have become much more fragile or eroded. People no longer participate in the political democratic process in the same numbers as they used to. We've become disengaged from the decision-making processes of our own society. And at the same time, many of the informal social networks that provide a social glue and identity to people, whether they are families, neighbourhoods, communities, trade unions, out of hours clubs, teams, and associations all of those have seen a steady decrease in membership too. 

So what we're now seeing is a world in which we've become disenchanted with the benefits of science, disengaged from the decision-making process, and disconnected from one another. Put together, these make up what some people are describing as a culture of fear, but lends itself towards a politics of fear, whereby people always imagine and project the worst in relationship to any new development. And it's within that broad context that we need to understand the discussions occurring about science and technology and its application to warfare today. Drones and remote technologies are used in a very dystopian, negative way some will accuse.

In summary, if we ask the question, is technology a demon in the contemporary period or the saviour in terms of protecting real lives in the combat space, I think the correct answer is neither. There's a lot of hype about technology from both sides of the spectrum. Risk management, we should remind ourselves, is a means to achieving an end not an end in itself. And the danger is to view technology as the solution to problems or the problem itself. What we need is a clearer sense of purpose and direction for anything that we are doing in society, including the conduct of war. 

If we look at recent missions in Afghanistan or Iraq, what is strikingly obvious is that the purpose of the mission itself has being confused. Was fighting in Iraq to get rid of Saddam? Was it to bring democracy to the region? Was it to liberate women? All of these aims were thrown into the pot together. And the consequence is that there is a confusion as to what it is that we are fighting for. 

If we look historically, it's quite clear that when a society is very clear as to its aims and objectives, it is actually able to put up with remarkable acts of barbarism. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki must rank as some of the most devastating and barbaric acts of human history. But set within a context of the Second World War, where a narrative had been framed and people bought in to the notion that we were in a civilizational struggle, these events went, if not unnoticed, certainly uncriticised for a remarkable period of time. 

Today, far less dramatic incidents, such as drone strikes in Pakistan, bring forward much more criticism. And that's because we live in a period in which we're unclear as to what the purpose and objective is in the first place. If technology is really going to be used to a positive benefit, rather than simply feeding into dystopian narratives, we need to clarify our purpose as a society and engage a much greater layer of the population in a discussion as to what it is that we're trying to achieve.

As we get into these low-intensity permawars, it's increasingly difficult to maintain effective civilian control over our armed forces.  Wars are now fought increasingly in the shadows, remotely.  It becomes harder and more complex to ensure effective oversight and there are political leaders who very much like it that way.  Outsource it to the commercial sector and oversight becomes almost meaningless.

Another Hot Year, Even Hotter for 2016

Word from Australia that this year and next will probably see record-breaking temperatures.

Sea temperatures around Australia are posting "amazing" records that climate specialists say signal global records set in 2014 may be broken this year and next.

March sea-surface temperatures in the Coral Sea region off Queensland broke the previous high by 0.12 degrees – a big jump for oceans that are typically more thermally stable than land. Temperatures for the entire Australian ocean region also set new highs for the month, the Bureau of Meteorology said.

The unusual warmth off Australia comes as the Pacific Ocean remains primed for an El Nino event, as the bureau reported last month.

If such an event occurs, the underlying warming from climate change will get a further boost from natural variability, making 2014's ranking as the hottest year on records going back to the 1880s likely to be short-lived, according to Andy Pitman, head of climate research at the University of NSW.

"If we do get an intense El Nino, it will blitz the records," Professor Pitman said. "The climate is on a performance-enhancing drug and that drug is carbon dioxide."

As Flat as Piss on a Platter

As oil spills go, Harper's "world class" oil spill response team couldn't have asked for better conditions than they faced last Wednesday in Vancouver's English Bay.

There was nothing to obstruct crews getting at the spill and deploying their booms and equipment.  The waters were calm.  It was day time.  It happened not all that far away from the Sea Island Coast Guard station.  The best part is that it was a small spill, what should have been a piece of cake for our world class guardians.

And still they screwed it up.

It could have been so much worse.  Imagine a heavily loaded tanker floundering on the rocks overnight in the midst of the sort of West Coast winter storms that fell giant trees in coastal forests.  Imagine that heavily loaded tanker breaking up in the Douglas Channel or Hecate Strait.  That is to imagine catastrophe of an incalculable scale on a multi-generational time span.

Do you realize that those world class oil spill recovery vessels can't leave the pier in our winter storms and their booms are useless in those conditions?

That oil spill in English Bay should have been like a kindergarten field day. Everybody should have come away with a shiny blue ribbon.  Only they screwed it all up.

Environment Minister Mary Polak told the B.C. legislature on Monday that in the event of a marine spill “we are led in a unified command structure by the federal government through the Canadian Coast Guard.”

However, the minister said the province and other emergency response agencies were forced to act outside their usual roles due to the Coast Guard’s inaction.

“As a result of our repeated requests for an improvement in that situation, I can tell the members that the Coast Guard certainly stepped up their involvement, took back over the leadership of incident command as of Friday morning,” Ms. Polak said.

Of Leaders and Eunuchs

One of these three has balls:  Tommy Boy, Junior, or Hillary.  And the winner is - Hillary!

Even though her duel at the ballot box isn't until November of next year, Democratic presidential frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, has wasted no time in serving notice that the fight against climate change will be front and center in her campaign.

In fact, Hillary's is the first ever presidential campaign to make combating climate change a core issue.

Our boys, Mulcair and Trudeau, get to strut their stuff this year and, like the wee geldings they are, climate change seems to be something they're not too keen to talk about.  Oh Canada, indeed.

Guess Who Can't Make the Party?

It's quite a gathering.  55-warships from 13-NATO countries are taking part in Exercise Joint Warrior in the waters off Scotland.  This year's war games are considered especially important given the perceived resurgence of Russian naval forces.

They take place against a background of rising concern about Russian expansionism but the Ministry of Defence said the Exercise Joint Warrior war games are a twice-yearly exercise rather than a response to any specific threat.

However, the Joint Warrior exercises are the biggest yet held by Nato and are intended to act as a show of strength while honing the ability of member nations to co-operate in the event of an attack.

Training for submarine hunts is regarded as particularly important in waters north of the UK as they are the most obvious route into the wider Atlantic Ocean for Russian vessels.

Russian submarines are also suspected of operating close to the UK shoreline. In March a fishing vessel 10 miles off the Isle of Lewis snagged an object suspected of being a submarine – none from Nato were said to be operating in the area at the time – while in November dozens of aircraft and ships took part in a major search after a sighting was reported.

...Warships from the US, including guided-missile vessels USS Porter and USS Anzio, will join the Royal Navy for the exercises along with ships from Poland, Estonia, Lativa, France, Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania, and Belgium.

So, which country is conspicuous by its absence?  That, of course, would be Canada.  Unlike Latvia or Belgium, we don't seem able to contribute a naval presence to these games.  The best I could find is a National Defence press release from 2013 that proclaimed the importance of Exercise Joint Warrior and Canada's role in it.

News Release / April 2, 2013 / Project number: NR - 13.095

OTTAWA – More than 900 Canadian sailors, airmen and airwomen of the Canadian Armed Forces departed today to participate in Exercise Joint Warrior, a joint multinational NATO exercise taking place in the United Kingdom from April 15 to 25. Exercise Joint Warrior is the largest military tactical exercise in Europe and is designed to prepare NATO military forces to work together in a variety of missions from providing humanitarian aid to full-combat operations.

“This exercise presents an excellent opportunity for the Canadian Armed Forces to build and strengthen interoperability and combat effectiveness between Canada’s military and our NATO allies,” said the Honourable Peter MacKay, Minister of National Defence. “Our sailors and aircrew will conduct realistic training to enhance the various tactics, techniques, and procedures that they will employ on behalf of the Government of Canada in a variety of operational scenarios both at home and abroad.”

...Exercise Joint Warrior is organized by the United Kingdom and will involve the participation of close to 13, 000 military personnel, 55 vessels, and up to 40 aircraft from various NATO nations over a ten-day period. Her Majesty’s Canadian Ships (HMCS) Preserver, Iroquois, and St. John’sdeparted Halifax, N.S. today to begin their transit across the Atlantic Ocean and will participate in the exercise later in the month.

The Iroquois, of course, is now headed for the scrap yard. Sister ship
Algonquin has also been paid off.  HMCS Annapolis (pictured above) just got sent to the bottom of Howe Sound to become an artificial reef.  HMCS Preserver along with sister ship Protecteur are also awaiting their turn at the breakers' yard.

Oopsie. And the Walls Come Tumblin' Down.

The irony is utterly delicious.

The Crown in the Duffy trial has introduced a very interesting proposition using Justin Bieber to make the point.

The Crown's contention is that you cannot be a senator unless, at the time of appointment, you are duly resident in the province you are to represent.  Mr. Holmes used the example of the requirement that senators be 30-years of age when he asked the Senate law clerk whether, had 21-year old Bieber been given a Senate appointment, the law would deem him to be 30.  Of course not.

So the Crown's theory is that, if you're not already resident at the date of appointment, your appointment is invalid.

Oopsie!

Let's chat about Harper loyalist and former personal aide, now senator for New Brunswick, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen - the one who dutifully helped launder Duffy's Senate audit report.  For years she lived and worked as a nurse in the Ottawa area.  Unlike Duffy, who actually owned property - land and a cottage - in Prince Edward Island at the time of his appointment, apparently Stewart-Olsen didn't get her residence in New Brunswick until several months after taking her seat in the Senate.

Wowser.

By the Crown's theory. Stewart-Olsen's appointment was even less valid than Duffy's which could mean her residency expense claims are every bit as fraudulent as Duffy's.

Wow, slap the bracelets on the honourable senator for New Brunswick.

Expect to hear more about this when Stewart-Olsen answers her subpoena to testify.  The ironic part is the role she played as Harper's handmaiden in driving Duffy out of the Senate.  I wonder what her residence stats were before the Duffy scandal began?  Bring on the forensic auditors.

We Hear Rumours

Spent almost two hours tonight with a veteran trial lawyer/long-time Tory insider dissecting Week One of the Duffy trial.

Stephen Harper won't be testifying at trial?  Who says?  Duffy's lawyer, Don Bayne, has been quietly establishing the foundational basis throughout the week that the trial judge may have no choice but to issue that subpoena.

Rumour has it that the Crown might just drop the whole essence of this proceeding - the bribery charge. People close to Nigel Wright are said to be floating the idea that Nigel may never take the stand.  No bribery charge, no need for Nigel to spill his guts on Harper, Perrin et al.

Imagine what you might do if the core charge is inexplicably dropped?  A motion to stay/dismiss all the charges?  A proceeding in malicious prosecution or vexatious proceedings?

Benjamin Perrin.  I hear there's an e-mail in which Perrin writes that Duffy will fold either out of embarrassment or because the PMO-directed trial will bankrupt him.  Benny, did you really write something that potentially damaging to yourself and your prime minister?  Were you that much of a cynical douchebag?

The Crown.  Did they get their lessons in prosecutorial brilliance from watching Marcia Clark in the OJ trial?  How about opening your trial with an expert witness who testifies that the applicable laws are hopelessly vague?  If the laws are so vague who influenced the prosecution to proceed?  If those laws are so vague, why did RCMP investigators choose to pretend that they demonstrated the criminal culpability of the Cavendish Cottager?  Is RCMP commish Paulson heading for early retirement?

What about the Prince of Darkness?  The documents introduced in court this week seem to show that this prime minister lied his ass off throughout this scandal as to his role, what he knew and when.  Nigel's written statements are as good as fingerprints on this score.

The Crown may have decided not to call Harper and Harper may believe he's off the hook but Steve's megalomania isn't the end of the issue.  He may be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the witness stand and, if so, it won't be for just an hour or two.

This is shaping up to be the biggest political trial in Canadian history.  It's set for 41-days but it could drag out far longer.  The defence is planning to interrogate Nigel Wright for more than a week and who knows how much more?

This is not going to die an easy death.

Harper is a "Defence Deadbeat"

The man sure talks a good game but Canada has never seen a bullshitter with the skillset of Stephen Harper.

Oh we've got a penny packet of jets flying here and there, dropping a few bombs there and over there, but, overall, Canada's armed forces are about to succumb to fiscal starvation.

It's a common problem among NATO members.  They're simply not pulling their weight.  They're not putting their money where their big, greasy, oh-so bellicose mouths are.  But, even for this bunch of martial loafers, Canada is about the bottom of the barrel according to a report by the European Leadership Network.

As one of the main opponents of setting a hard target for NATO defence expenditure in Wales last year, Canada continues on its current course of downsizing its military and reducing its defence budget. In 2014, the Harper administration allocated CA$18.2 billion to defence (or 1% of the country’s GDP).33 No official information has been published yet on the figures for 2015 (the federal budget is due to be announced in April 2015). However, a briefing note prepared for the deputy Defence Minister last September projected that the budget could be cut by CA$2.7 billion as a part of the government-wide programme of reducing the federal deficit.34 If that happens, it would put Canada behind countries such as Spain, Slovakia, Hungary, Luxembourg, Lithuania, and Latvia when comparing the percentage of GDP spent on the armed forces.

At this point I like to recall that the last time Canada's defence budget was at the magical 2% GDP mark was during the Trudeau government.  As for Harper, he's made such a mess of the economy and the country's finances that he's ideologically duty-bound to starve the military of essential funds at what he never fails to tell us is an extremely dire moment for Canada's national security.  

Houthis Commit Atrocities Too - Well, Sort Of.

By now we're all too familiar with al Qaeda executing people and ISIS beheading captives, even burning them alive.  But let's not overlook the Houthi rebels in Yemen.  They too are committing atrocities, hundreds and hundreds of them. Why, they turned some schools into temporary barracks preventing kids from attending classes for - wait for it - ten days!

Fortunately, Euro-mid Observer has kept an eye on those Houthis and has published a summary of their skulduggery.  It's enough to make your blood boil - or not.

In Over Our Heads, Way Over.

Usually when someone orders their life according to alternate realities we consider that person mentally ill.  It's not hard to notice, they do a lot of weird things that just don't make much sense.

Nations can come down with a similar affliction and, like their human counterparts, unless it's diagnosed and treated early, it rarely ends well. Which brings us to the bizarre alternate realities being played out in the Middle East - Iraq, Syria, the US, Canada (et al), the Gulf States, al Qaeda, ISIS and, most recently, Yemen.

While the West has been earnestly doing the bidding of the House of Saud and the sheikhs and princes of the Gulf States, our Sunni Arab masters have been pulling a Sneaky Pete in Yemen that could be putting us in a "one step forward, two back" position.

The Sunni Mafia, apparently confident that we'll do their bidding in Iraq and Syria, have decided to take their own warplanes and armies to attack the Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen.  Only, like the Israelis raining death from above on Palestinians, the Sunni mob is employing tactics against the Houthi people eerily reminiscent of Israel's Dahiyeh campaigns.

What we're far too polite to mention is that the Sunni Mafia is also providing air support for a couple of outfits that the Houthi are engaged in fighting - ISIS and al Qaeda.  Isn't it curious how these Sunni potentates and these monstrous Sunni terrorist outfits have this habit of lining up?

This is one mini-war where we're keeping our eye on the ball so that we don't have to see the other ball, the one that really matters.  The schizophrenic cast of the Sunni mob's war in Yemen is explored in Foreign Policy:

Amid the chaos and suffering of Yemen’s ongoing, and quickly internationalizing, civil war, one clear winner seems to have emerged: al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the al Qaeda affiliate with the closest relationship to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The group, which U.S. officials have long labeled the most dangerous offshoot of the core al Qaeda organization, could be set to find an even more comfortable operations base from which to launch terrorist attacks and claim territory. Just this week, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter warned, “AQAP has seized the opportunity of the disorder there and the collapse of the central government.”

...What separates AQAP from other al Qaeda affiliates is the group’s willingness to strike outside Yemen and the Middle East, even making attempts inside the United States and Europe. Since the group formed in 2009, most of its attacks have focused on the Yemeni government. However, U.S. officials have tied it to sophisticated attempts to bomb American airliners in 2009 and 2010, and the group produces Inspire, a stylish English-language online magazine that regularly features anti-Western content, including calls for lone wolves to attack in the United States and detailed instructions for how to make or acquire the weapons to do so. AQAP also took credit for the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris in January, and the attackers trained with the group in Yemen.
...Now that Hadi’s government has fallen to the Houthi rebels and civil war has engulfed much of the country, counterterrorism efforts against AQAP have eased. U.S. officials rightly fear that the group will enjoy greater freedom of action: Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, warned on Sunday that “the pressure has been taken off AQAP.” The Washington Post reports that as violence escalated, the United States pulled its military and intelligence personnel from the country, and our Yemeni counterterrorism partners are now in disarray. Last Thursday, AQAP conducted a massive prison break (the usual adjective before “prison break” is “daring,” but given the chaos this one seemed pretty easy), freeing many cadres and at least one senior leader. AQAP militants subsequently took control of the port city of Mukalla, where the prison is located. The group now reportedly controls the checkpoints at all five entrances to the city as well asthe governor’s palace, the central bank, a military base, and several other key local government facilities. Armed tribesmen are trying to launch a counterattack to retake the city and drive out the jihadis but have so far been unable to get past AQAP’s checkpoints.
...One key uncertainty in assessing what comes next for AQAP is Saudi policy. On the one hand, Saudi Arabia opposes al Qaeda in general and AQAP in particular, as the latter has targeted Saudi security forces and, in 2009, even tried to kill Prince Mohammad bin Nayef, who is now in charge of Saudi military operations in Yemen. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia has a history of working with Salafi-jihadi groups and may believe they are the lesser of two evils in the war against the Houthis, whom the Saudis believe are puppets of Tehran.Tehran has armed and otherwise assisted the Houthis, but the scale of Iranian involvement remains unclear. For the Saudis, the temptation to aid all the Houthis’ enemies, no matter how nasty, will grow should Saudi military operations stagnate.

But how is the Sunni war against Shiites in Yemen going?  Not well at all, even with America's assistance.  Yes, that's right - Alternate Reality Alert - Washington is helping those helping al Qaeda and ISIS.

Through its backing of Saudi Arabia — with bombs, intelligence, refueling, and search-and-rescue capabilities — and Riyadh’s military intervention in Yemen, the United States is effectively at war with the impoverished land that occupies the southwestern heel of the Arabian Peninsula. That war is going spectacularly badly.

Two weeks ago, Riyadh and a coalition of Gulf states intervened in Yemen with a campaign of airstrikes aimed at halting the advance of Houthi rebels and restoring President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to power.

Neither of those goals currently appears achievable. Instead of being halted, the Houthi rebels, whom Saudi Arabia claims are backed by Iran, have gained territory. On Thursday, they took the city of Ataq, a Sunni stronghold. Local residents told Reuters that the city’s security forces and tribal chiefs helped the Houthis enter the city.

Meanwhile, fighting continues in the city of Aden, a city of about 800,000 on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. The city, a port on the southern coast, is currently the scene of street-to-street fighting, and humanitarian agencies report having difficulties delivering aid. International shipping companies are steering clear of Yemeni ports — terrible news for a place that imports about 90 percent of its food and which faces a looming water crisis. “It’s nearly catastrophic,” Marie Claire Feghali, the International Committee of the Red Cross spokeswoman in Yemen, told Reuters.

Amid this fighting, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the terrorist group’s Yemen affiliate, is making territorial gains. On Thursday, the group seized government offices in al-Siddah district, which had previously been controlled by the Houthis. Last week, AQAP, which U.S. spies consider to be al Qaeda’s most dangerous offshoot, seized the port city of Mukalla.

...Saudi Arabia views this war as a showdown with Iran. And while Iran has some ties to the Houthi movement and has provided it with some support and weapons, allegations of Iranian backing have been exaggerated by Saudi Arabia to cast the intervention in Yemen as part of a broader regional and sectarian struggle between the two powerhouse nations. The Houthis are Zaydi Shiites, but that religion is doctrinally closer to Sunni Islam. 

To a simple minded ideologue with a Wal-Mart worldview, just like our own Stephen Harper, none of this madness matters.  We're on the third string of the varsity team and grateful for it.  Therefore we'll show up with our cleats in good order for game day and drop a few bombs.  Nothing else really matters.   We're there, after all, because these radical Islamists posted a YouTube video threatening to blow up the West Edmonton Mall.  Yet the guys who might actually do something like that are the guys in Yemen and our side is tacitly backing them.

 

From SLATE - Do Not Watch "Game of Thrones" With These People

Sunday opens the fifth season of Game of Thrones.  If you're going to watch it, Slate.com suggests you not view it with any of these sorts of people.




 While you're waiting for Sunday to roll around, be sure to stop by the Game of Thrones graveyard and pay your respects to the already departed.

Say What? Oh, Yeah. Say What?

You know you've reached 60 when the peer discussion suddenly turns to memory loss.  There's a strong element of 'gallows humour' involved. Yet there's rarely anything said in total jest.

Brace yourselves,  neo-seniors.  Here's a dandy article explaining what might be going on.

Does This Mean No More Chocolate Bunnies?

Cute Little Buggers, Eh?

Hold the presses!  Word out of Israel that the lost tomb of Jesus has been found and it contained the ossuaries (bone boxes) of Jesus; Mrs. Jesus (aka Mary Magdalene), their son, Judah (aka "Junior"); and six others.

Dr Aryeh Shimron says he has carried out new tests that suggest it is more likely the Talpiot Tomb, a burial site found in East Jerusalem in 1980, was a family grave for Jesus of Nazareth, his wife Mary Magdalene and his son Judah.

Dubbed “The Lost Tomb of Jesus” in a 2007 documentary movie directed by James Cameron, the chamber contained nine burial boxes or “ossuaries” inscribed with the names “Jesus son of Joseph”, “Mary” and other names associated with the New Testament.

The inscriptions and the approximate dates of burial have led some to suggest the Talpiot Tomb means Jesus married, that he fathered a child, and that the existence of bodily remains means the Resurrection could never have happened.

...speaking to the New York Times, Dr Shimron has said that geochemical tests on a 10th ossuary make it highly likely the box was recently removed from among the others in the Talpiot Tomb.

That’s significant because the Aramaic inscription on the 10th ossuary reads “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus” – adding weight to the suggestions that the names are those of Jesus Christ and his family.

“The evidence is beyond what I expected,” Dr Shimron said. “I think I’ve got really powerful, virtually unequivocal evidence that the James ossuary spent most of its lifetime, or death time, in the Talpiot Tomb.”

Jesus, Joseph, Judah, James - what's with all the J-names?

But if the Resurrection never happened, does that mean the Easter Bunny is a hoax too?

Can Duffy Shred Nigel Wright's "Goody Two-Shoes" Routine?

Nigel Wright's 'gift' of $90K to senator Mike Duffy was a bribe when it was pocketed by Duffy but not when it was given by Wright.  Most of us are finding that pretty hard to square and it is.  The logic by which Duffy is culpable and Wright is not reflects how far the RCMP is prepared to bend over backwards to make some cherry-picked facts suit their narrative.

It sounds as though they're charging Duffy with extortion, not bribery.  Duffy strong-armed the money out of Wright's chequebook, they would have us believe.  But that's a different section of the Criminal Code of Canada.

Besides, why let Nigel Wright off the hook at all?  Oh, I see.  Charging Wright with bribery would have exposed others in the PMO to criminal jeopardy. Benjamin Perrin for starters and even Old Beelzebub himself, Stephen Harper. The rumours are that Wright made it well known around Ottawa that he wasn't going down alone on this so, take him off the hook and everybody's off the hook - except Ol' Duff.  Even out here on the wet coast you could hear the collective sigh of relief.

To get this to stand up at trial you have to keep Wright virginal, above reproach - just like Caesar's wife.  He was only trying to do the right thing.  Duffy was raising proper hell and so Wright did what he thought was the answer, handing over $90K.  No corrupt intent on the part of Mr. Wright, ergo no crime except for Duffy's.

I don't know how hard you have to struggle to keep the facts at bay but, in this case, it must be almost Herculean.  The Crown needs to keep this very simple. Duffy snarls, Wright cuts the cheque.  Nothing to see here, keep moving.

But there is more, a lot more and it goes to whether Nigel Wright's Goody Two-Shoes image is a highly self-serving scam.  There was a quid pro quo to this deal, one the RCMP chose not to notice.  Duffy got the money but on very clear terms dictated by the Prime Minister's Office.  These were terms plainly intended to benefit the Conservative Party if not the prime minister personally.

In emails, Wright called the brewing controversy, "our public agony," and spoke of Conservatives "circling the wagons."

One of the most revealing sets of internal emails filed in court involved the manipulation of a Senate committee, one drafting a report on Duffy's expenses in the spring of 2013.

PMO staffers set about ensuring the committee remove any negative language  from the report on Duffy, and at one point discussed how to get an independent audit firm to refrain from drawing any conclusions on Duffy's residency status...

"Do I need to call Marjory [LeBreton]?" Wright asked in an email.  "They think they're hurting Duffy, but they will end up hurting the prime minister instead."

Duffy was also coached by PMO staff on what to say to the media about the repayment of his expenses.

"It's a scenario, in Nigel Wright's own words, that was created for Sen. Duffy not because he had anything to hide or he'd made inappropriate claims, but because the PMO had decided they wanted to sweep a political embarrassment to their Tory bse under the rug," [defence counsel Don] Bayne said in 2013.

Oddly enough, what may save Duffy's hide (on the main charge, at least), is the very same email that sets these events in motion.  This whole business would likely have died a natural death at an early stage but for a stupid email Duffy sent to his 'confidantes' at the very time the deal was being put in place.

Duffy's email said the PMO was giving him the cash to clear his tab with the Senate.  It listed the conditions imposed - that he was to make no public statements and he was to stop cooperating with the Senate-appointed auditors. For doing this, the PMO would intervene to ensure the Senate audit report "went easy on" Duffy.

Nigel Wright wasn't trying to bail out an old pal.  Wright didn't even like Duffy. He didn't shell out the cash for his own benefit either.  You could conclude he was acting as an agent for a third party and it wasn't Benjamin Perrin either. Wright was creating a smokescreen for the party and, logic screams, for the very guy he was working for, Stephen Joseph Harper.  "Uncle Joe" Harper, Comrade Steve hisself.

This was the email leaked to CTV's Bob Fife.  It's the match that sparked the wildfire that brings us to where we are today.  What makes that email so critical are its contents - it described the deal that transpired - and when the email was sent - back when the parties thought they could keep a lid on the deal. This didn't come out after the fact.  It wasn't contrived after the fact to suit anyone's narrative.  It conforms to the known events.  That could make it the "magic bullet" when it comes to assessing credibility and resolving contradictions and inconsistencies.

Duffy's story, as we know it, comports with the magic bullet email.  Wright's story doesn't even though his emails also seem to corroborate some of Duffy's statements.

How this will play out in court is unclear but one thing is inescapable - there's been an awful lot of very high-level, Hall of Fame-grade Turd Polishing at both the political and investigatory levels to contrive this result.

John Oliver Takes on the Surveillance State

From Last Week Tonight

I Just Stumbled Over This Again.

One of the very best renditions of Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage" - and the thing is, it's in Polish

New Rule

If your party has cultivated a constituency whose interest lies in perpetuating a state of permanent warfare, you have forfeit any right to participate in democratic governance.

If your party has allowed itself to be politically "captured" by this same sort of constituency, you likewise have abandoned, no surrendered, any claim to legitimacy to govern.

End of story.  New Rule.

The United States of Lunacy

She's Already Got Her Finger On The Trigger.  Let'er Rip, Mom.

Kansas is now in, along with Alaska, Arizona and Wyoming.  Curiously enough, Vermont is in too.  In these states it's legal for residents to carry concealed handguns and these individuals require neither permits nor basic firearm safety training.  If you've got the cash, you can get a gun and toss it straight into your purse.

Talk about "no previous experience required."

Harper Minister Won't Run Again. That Means She Should Quit - or Be Removed - Now.

Manitoba MP and Harper's minister for heritage and official languages, Shelly Glover, announced on Friday that she won't seek re-election this year.  That means the Speaker of the House should toss her out without delay.  Here's why.

Following the 2011 election, Glover ran afoul of Elections Canada for failing to file "complete and accurate" returns of her campaign spending.

The Speaker of the House of Commons received a request from Elections Canada to suspend Glover as an MP in June 2013. Glover failed to file documents related to the 2011 election campaign.[3] Elections Canada spokesman John Enright said, “Those letters advised the speaker that an elected candidate shall not continue to sit or vote as members of the House of Commons pending the filing of complete and accurate returns.” Glover filed a legal challenge in the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench.[4] Liberal MP Scott Andrews indicated the suspension of Glover from Parliament should be immediate according to previous legal precedent.[5] On July 22, 2014, it was reported in the media that Glover's staffers had attempted to remove the controversial election spending information from her Wikipedia page.[6]

In July 2013 it was reported that Glover had filed a revised return, which Elections Canada accepted.[7] Her campaign acknowledged that, as a result of "inadvertence and an honest misunderstanding of what constitutes an election expense", it exceeded the legal limit by $2,267. Glover promised to make up for the overspend by a corresponding underspend in the next election, and was not penalised.

In other words, Glover breached the election spending limits, albeit by a modest amount, but then apparently took herself off the hook by promising to underspend by the same amount in the 2015 campaign.  Except she's not going to run in that campaign, the result of which is that she got away with it.  It seems Glover pulled a fast one on Elections Canada and, unless the Speaker acts, she got away with it.  Pretty neat trick - for a cop.

Well This Is Refreshing - a Liberal Who Makes Sense

Former Liberal prime minister, Paul Martin, has slammed the Harper government's economic record, calling for Ol' Leatherback, Joe Oliver, to introduce stimulus spending in the next Conservative budget.

Dismissing the Conservative economic plan as "an absolute disgrace" and "nonsensical," former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin has leapt into the debate over Finance Minister Joe Oliver's newly announced April 21 budget.

In an interview on CBC Radio's The House, Martin told host Evan Solomon Canada is facing a "very serious" economic situation and he accused the government of doing nothing about it.

"[The government] is not doing the right things now and we have not been doing the right things for the last decade," Martin said.

Taking a cue from Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz, who suddenly cut Canada's key interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 0.75 percent and said recently the first quarter results in Canada will be "atrocious," Martin called on Joe Oliver to kick start a fiscal stimulus program.

"Fiscal policy and monetary policy have to work hand in hand, they cannot contradict each other," Martin said. "If the governor of the central bank is talking about the need for monetary stimulus, he also understands there has to be changes made in the [fiscal policy] and those changes have to be investments."

Investments.  Now he's talking.  Canada is in desperate need of infrastructure rejuvenation.  Much of what we depend upon is aged and crumbling.  Almost all of it - roads, bridges, railways - was designed and engineered to suit the climate requirements of the 60s.  We're now entering a much more environmentally challenging era manifested in such things as more severe flooding and the loss of permafrost, among others.  Critical infrastructure is also simply wearing out with age and incapable of meeting growing demand, a classic example being Eastern Canada's atrophied electrical grid.

We've milked the last drops out of the infrastructure created and paid for by our grandparents' and parents' generations.  We've had a largely free ride.  Now it's our turn to make our own contribution to future generations.  The longer we put it off, the harder and more costly the inescapable effort will become.  In other words we might as well save ourselves a tonne of money, shock our economy into overdrive and make our future more secure while we can still do it on our own terms.

The Unholy Trinity

The Unholy Trinity, the Three O's - Overpopulation, Overconsumption and Overshoot - are mankind's plague on the Earth.

Surf's Up, Indonesia

Despite claims that, with just a bit more efficiency, we can grow our species to nine, perhaps even twelve billion, there are already far too many of us attacking, devouring and contaminating our biosphere.  It is unsurvivable.

The Slums of Mexico City

Even as our numbers have soared three-fold in less than a century, so has the average amount of stuff each of us consumes.  Since WWII, the populations of both China and India have added a billion mouths.  It's hard to believe that, at the end of that war, their populations were smaller than that of the USA today.  First they grew to gigantic proportions and then they became emerging economic superpowers, both stimulating their own huge "consumer class" that wanted bigger and better this and that - cars, housing, food, travel - pretty much the same things we've enjoyed all along and pretty much all of it based on ever greater consumption of fossil fuels.  A car in every garage and a prime rib roast on every table.

A Valley of Greenhouses, Spain

Which triggers the final O, Overshoot.  This is where mankind begins to run into walls.  Overshoot is a condition where consumption has outstripped our planet's ability to support demand.  It causes us to do some incredibly stupid things and it leads to a variety of outcomes including collapse.  That is the course our leaders have charted for our children and grandchildren - collapse.  It's not just Harper who is devoted to this outcome.  So too are Justin Trudeau and Tommy Mulcair. They have no interest in abandoning perpetual, exponential growth.

One example of Overshoot is the rapacious destruction of our very finite groundwater resources, our aquifers, mainly for agricultural irrigation.  To grow our population and meet its soaring demands for ever more of everything, we became hopelessly dependent, mortally dependent, on using far more than nature can provide which is why around the world these underground reservoirs are approaching empty and no one has a clue how we'll cope when they're gone.

Other visible telltale signs of overshoot are spreading deforestation, desertification (the exhaustion of once arable land through excessive production using unsustainable amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides), and the collapse of global fisheries as the industrial fleets fish "down the food chain."

Most of that Oil Still Lurks in the Gulf of Mexico

Another aspect of Overshoot manifests in our growing pollution problem. Nature does a terrific job of absorbing and cleansing our waste but that capacity is also finite.  We've passed it and so the excess simply backs up.  There's plenty of that going on and we don't seem to care.

It's so typically human of me to discuss the Three O's in the context of the lethal threat to mankind.  That overlooks what we have done to nature, wildlife, our ecosystems.

China.  No space for nature, no room for life.

The same resources mankind is over-exploiting are also essential to every other form of life on our planet.  They're supposed to have their share too in a viable, sustainable environment.  Only we have decided to take their share and our share and then a good deal more all in service to ever more mouths with ever larger appetites.

The 2014 Living Planet Report revealed that in the 40-years since Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney ushered in the Age of Neoliberalism, we have eliminated half - that's right, half - of the wild life on our planet.  It came out, made a bit of a stir and, within a week, was straight down the Memory Hole.  We're now experiencing rates of extinction several hundreds of times greater than normal and we simply will not recognize the threat to our own survival.  We don't understand that those seemingly insignificant life forms, those minor species, are integral to our own continuation.  We don't get it and we don't care.

The photos used here are from a terrific photo-essay in The Guardian.  Do check it out.  Many thanks to Ray Smith for sending me the link.

Where Have All the Forests Gone?

The biggest source of lost forests is in Russia and Canada.  It's not forest lost to deforestation, logging or clearing land for agriculture, but boreal forest consumed by wildfires.  A climate change feedback?  Probably.

Some 43,000 square kilometres of northern boreal forest were ravaged in Russia, due mainly to fires, in 2013, while Canada shed another 24,500 square kilometres — amounting to a "very significant" loss in tree cover, according to Dr. Nigel Sizer of GFW, an interactive, online forest-monitoring and alert system based in Washington.

The data comes from GFW, the University of Maryland and Google.

Both Canada and Russia have seen unusually numerous forest fires in recent years, something Sizer says might be attributed to factors including climate change.
It's hard to imagine this would be a shock in either country where even the tundra is thawing and being consumed by wildfires.

The loss of 25,000 sq. kms. of boreal forest is pretty massive but keep it in perspective.  The province of Alberta, for example, has an area of 661,000 sq. kms.  Nunavut is over 2-million sq. kms.  Canada's lost boreal forest is more like five Prince Edward Islands (without five Mike Duffys).

We Simply Can't Stay Here Any Longer

Why do we find it so hard to recognize the decay that surrounds us?  Just about everybody agrees we're going in the wrong direction - democratically, economically, environmentally, socially even militarily.  It now takes more and more effort and money and, yes, lives to obtain outcomes that are steadily less secure, less safe, less lasting.  We know our grandkids are going to grow up in a world far harsher and more daunting than any we have known yet we're curiously okay with that.  We're okay enough with it not to take the steps needed to make their lives better or even less worse than need be.

It's like we've outgrown our skin and need to grow a new one.

Enter The Next System Project, co-founded by academic intellectual Gar Alperovitz, whose motto is, "It's time to face the depth of the systemic crisis we confront."

"It's time to talk about what's next."

Those are the words of academic and author Gar Alperovitz, founder of the Democracy Collaborative, who—alongside veteran environmentalist Gus Speth—this week launched a new initiative called the "Next Systems Project" which seeks to address the interrelated threats of financial inequality, planetary climate disruption, and money-saturated democracies by advocating for deep, heretofore radical transformations of the current systems that govern the world's economies, energy systems, and political institutions.

According to the project's website, the effort is a response to a tangible and widespread "hunger for a new way forward" capable of addressing various social problems by injecting "the central idea of system change" into the public discourse. The goal of the project—described as an ambitious multi-year initiative—would be to formulate, refine, and publicize "comprehensive alternative political-economic system models" that would, in practice, prove that achieving "superior social, economic and ecological outcomes" is not just desirable, but possible.

"By defining issues systemically," the project organizers explain, "we believe we can begin to move the political conversation beyond current limits with the aim of catalyzing a substantive debate about the need for a radically different system and how we might go about its construction. Despite the scale of the difficulties, a cautious and paradoxical optimism is warranted. There are real alternatives. Arising from the unforgiving logic of dead ends, the steadily building array of promising new proposals and alternative institutions and experiments, together with an explosion of ideas and new activism, offer a powerful basis for hope."

As part of the official launch, the team behind the project published a kick-off report—titled The New System Project: New Political-Economic Possibilities for the 21st Century(pdf)—which lays out the problems and the proposed set of solutions in more detail. Key goals of the project, as listed in the report, include:

- To crack through the national media silence and to radically shift the national dialogue about the future away from narrow debates about policies that do not alter any significant decaying trend to awareness that what must be changed is the nature of the political-economic system itself.

- To stimulate national debate about how best to conceive different possible models of a radically different system based on genuine democracy, equality, ecological sustainability, a peaceful global foreign policy, and a thorough-going culture of cooperative community based on non-violence and respect for differences of race, gender, and sexual preference.

- To give publicity to the many “next system” models and approaches now being developed and refined in many parts of the nation and around the world.

- To engage committed academics, on the one hand, and activist organizers and thinkers, on the other, in an ongoing process of close collaborative work and common development in furtherance of such work.

- To help develop concrete “elements” that will likely be required to deal with the structural reorganization of any next system design— and, at the same time, to invest in and work with others to help nurture a rising generation of young scholars who can carry the work forward over the coming decades.

We have to do this.  We have to construct new institutions, formulate new modes of governance.  Why?  Because we have no other choice.  The institutions and modes we abide by and live under are from a far different time with far less pressing threats and challenges.  For Krishna's sake, there's plenty of credible evidence to suggest we may already be into the Earth's 6th major extinction event.  Do you really need any more than that to accept that we need to ditch the same systems that are propelling us down that path to potential oblivion.

We need to get to a new place.  It will probably require transformative change such as the abandonment of unrestrained free market capitalism and the adoption of steady-state economics.  When did government of the people, by the people, for the people becomes such a dangerously radical notion?  We won't rescue our democracy from the neoliberals unless we demand it and, if need be, take it from them.

Two Americans Beg Canada - Don't Get Sucked Into America's "PermaWar"

David Swanson and Robert Fantina of worldbeyondwar.com add their voice to the growing chorus of those seeking to extricate Canada from America's incoherent war without end.  They point out that the public, through their ginned-up support, can give government the excuse to get into war but the public has damned little control when it comes time to get out.



Oh Canada, to thine own self be true, not to thine heavily militarized neighbor.

We need the message to reach you now before you follow the United States down a path it has been on since its creation, a path that used to include regular invasions of your land, a path impeded a little by your generous sanctuary for those refusing war participation, and a path that now invites you to ruin yourself along with us. Misery and addiction and illegality love company, Canada. Alone they wither, but with aiders and abettors they flourish.

At the end of 2013 Gallup polls asked Canadians what nation they'd most like to move to, and zero of the Canadians polled said the United States, while people in the United States picked Canada as their most desired destination. Should the more desirable nation be imitating the less desirable, or the other way around?

In the same poll almost every nation of the 65 surveyed said the United States was the greatest threat to peace in the world. In the United States, bizarrely, people said Iran was the greatest threat — despite Iran spending less than 1% of what the United States does on militarism. In Canada, Iran and the United States tied for first place. You seem to be of two minds, Canada, one of them thoughtful, the other breathing the fumes of your downstairs neighbor.

...A recent poll in Canada indicates that a majority of Canadians support going to war in Iraq and Syria, with support being highest, as might be expected, among Conservatives, with members of the NDP and Liberal parties offering less, but still significant, support. All this may be part of the Islamophobia that is sweeping much of North America and Europe. But, take it from us, the support is soon replaced with regret — and the wars do not end when the public turns against them. A majority of the U.S. public has believed the 2001 and 2003 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should never have been begun for the majority of those wars' existence. Once begun, however, the wars roll on, in the absence of serious public pressure to halt them.

The Canadian government, like the U.S. government, uses fear-mongering to implement its war policies. But again, there is cause for some limited optimism. A recently-proposed anti-terror bill, that legal experts have decried as depriving Canada of some basic rights, has received significant opposition, and is being amended. Unlike the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, which sailed through Congress with little if any opposition, Canadian bill C-51 which, among other things, would stifle dissent, has been widely opposed both in Parliament and in the streets.

Build on that resistance to every evil justified by war, Canada. Resist the degradation of morality, the erosion of civil liberties, the drain to the economy, the environmental destruction, the tendency toward oligarchic rule and rogue illegality. Resist, in fact, the root problem, namely war.

And Who Put the Match to It, You Nitwit?

John Boehner is currently in Israel giving Benjamin Netanyahu his well-earned reach around.  Here's what the Great Bronze Bullshitter let drop:

“I wouldn’t have believed that I would be involved in as much foreign policy as I am today,” Boehner said in his hotel near Jerusalem’s Old City. “And it certainly isn’t by choice. It’s just that the world is on fire. And I don’t think enough Americans or enough people in the administration understand how serious the problems that we’re facing in the world are.”

This guy demonstrates, yet again, why American politics is hopelessly broken. Just who does he think struck the match that set the "world on fire"?  Might that have been his last Republican president, George w. Bush, and his diabolical sidekick, Dick-by-name, Dick-by-nature Cheney?  Who were the best recruiters al Qaeda ever had other than those two?  The terrorists were genuinely on the ropes until Bush/Cheney decided it would be just dandy to conquer Iraq while they were in the neighbourhood.  

Yes, ever since 2003 the world has been on fire and this Republican greaseball doesn't have a clue, not the remotest idea, of how to put it out.

 

"Whack a Mole" is No Way to Wage War.

We spent a decade in Afghanistan playing whack-a-mole, essentially achieving nothing.  We had no coherent vision of what 'victory' might even look like much less how it could be achieved.  In the result we never committed anything remotely like the size force that would have been necessary to keep the insurgents at bay in Kandahar province long enough for the government to establish its authority there.

Now we're in for a bombing campaign against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria. What are we trying to achieve or is this just more whack-a-mole?  Now ISIS is in all sorts of places where we're not even thinking of bombing their forces - Yemen, some of the Gulf States, several North African countries, Indonesia, Pakistan, even - gulp - Afghanistan.

We're supposedly bombing ISIS because it, if anyone really knows what that constitutes, has declared war on Canada.  What, in a YouTube video?  That's all we need to spend half a billion dollars on a bombing campaign?  Oh, I know, they did mention the West Edmonton Mall and everything.  Sounds awfully ominous to me.

Just explain to me how a six pack of CF-18s flying out of Kuwait can deter an attack on the West Edmonton Mall?  Surely we would have to defeat ISIS outright to eliminate that threat.  Yet we're not even pretending that we're going to do that, nothing remotely close.  We're not bombing them in Yemen or the Gulf States. We're not bombing them across North Africa or in Indonesia, Pakistan or Afghanistan.  We're not even inflicting losses on them approaching the rate at which they're attracting recruits.

As I wrote a few days ago, our approach to fighting our declared enemy, ISIS, is very much akin to the Brits thinking they could defeat Hitler by liberating the Channel Islands.  So what in the name of Thor is the purpose of this nonsense?

If anything, we're doing just enough to get them sufficiently pissed off with us that they might actually figure it's worthwhile to bomb the West Edmonton Mall and, if they do, I'm sure I'll be sorry they got to it before I did.

Of course Harper never does anything without a collateral purpose and it's way past obvious that he's using his personal, mini-war on terror, to avoid his voters noticing just what a mess this belief-based prime minister has made of the Canadian economy.

This is not the first time that Harper has used "the troops" for his partisan, political advantage.

Oh yeah, one other thing.  Randy, the beached cod, Hillier stood up on his tail fin recently to condemn Parliamentarians who missed the vote on the ISIS mission expansion/extension.  Randy, a bit of self-criticism coming from you would be really refreshing at this juncture.  Why don't you explain how you made such a complete botch-up of our minuscule "mission" to Afghanistan?  What were you smoking when you assumed Canada could tackle the combat mission in all of Kandahar province with a piddling garrison force of just 2,500 soldiers?  Why did our numbers remain static as the Taliban's numbers in Kandahar soared over those wasted years?  What made you think you could defeat a determined insurgency with a minute garrison force anyway?  I remember when I first saw you.  It was when you were interviewed after conning the Martin government into the Kandahar combat gig when you assured Canadians we were going over there to wipe out "a few dozen... scumbags."  You were full of shit then, you've been full of shit ever since and you're full of shit now.  Sit down and STFU, if you please.

So, we're back into whack-a-mole warfare  and we're bound to achieve as much as whack-a-mole warfare ever can or does.  I think most of us cannot bring ourselves to grasp the notion that Canadian forces were decisively defeated in Afghanistan.  We did not achieve our objectives and when we fled the field, 'they' were still in charge.  Sorry, but that's defeat.

Can somebody remind me, what is it that follows Hubris anyway?

Five Days Until the Senate of Canada Stands Trial

It's been pretty obvious for a while now that the Mike Duffy corruption trial will likely be transformed into an indictment of the Senate of Canada.  "We all did it" seems to be a core element of Duffy's defence.  Andrew Coyne seems to agree. He writes that the already overdue audit reports will reveal that Duffy was in good and plentiful senatorial company with his approach to "expenses." According to Coyne, 40-senators have received warning letters from the Auditor General:

No amount of pre-emptive spinning is going to save the Senate’s reputation, if the report is anything like what it is expected to be. These are the people, remember, who sat in judgment on senators Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau and Pamela Wallin; who peremptorily waved away their suggestions that the “rules were unclear” or that “it had always been done this way” as the self-serving twaddle it was.

If it is shown that large numbers of them were essentially guilty of the same thing, well, we’ll have to invent a new word to describe that level of hypocrisy.

What's unclear still is just when the AG's audit reports will be released to the public record.  Will efforts be made to postpone the release until after the conclusion of the Duffy trial in mid-June?  This is the very sort of damage control exercise that Harper is so masterful at exploiting.  Get it out in the summer holiday season and let the idle months simply wash it away.

Getting Buried in the Babble

It's been a while since I posted on a) the polar ice melting or b) sea level rise or c) a whole lot of other things.  It's not for want of following those issues, it's from becoming too immersed in them.  On climate change problems, the research is coming in so fast that it's hard to keep the studies in any sort of coherent order.  It's sometimes quite difficult to tell which report supercedes another or when they should be taken together to reveal a more comprehensive picture.

It's a blur.

I know a lot about rearmament and arms races underway right now, almost too much to convey any accurate sense of it.

There's a powerful human element too.  It just becomes much too goddamned depressing to keep reading about something you realize can be critical to countless millions of people that is progressively worsening and so often little if anything effective is done to thwart it.

Taken cumulatively it leads to a powerful sense of resignation and defeat.  As I've mentioned before I have had some insightful but completely informal conversations with genuine, honest to Odin, climate scientists over drinks and it didn't take too many swigs for them to go from "we can do this" to "oh, we're so screwed."

It's easy to blame governments but many, I believe, are trying to respond to these looming emergencies only they're working from projections that are long out of date.  I've looked into how some West coast municipalities are preparing for sea level rise.  They're still going by early IPCC forecasts of 2-3 feet of rise this century when current research suggests 3-4 metres.  Which means that the time and money and effort they're investing in adaptation responses may be pointless.

There are other governments, such as Florida's, that thing the best response to sea level rise is to forbid government employees from speaking the words "climate change."  There's nothing laughable about it for it's an example of governments that claim the ultimate right to deal with such things just sweeping them under the carpet.

I know that climate change is real.  I have white-sided dolphins in their thousands, transient orca, humpback whales, California sea lions and countless millions of sardines that have migrated into our waters from the south and they're basically incapable of lying about what's really going on.  We've even got resident brown pelicans now.  I'm pretty sure those thousands of seal pups showing up starving on California beaches are in such dire condition because their food, those masses of sardines, have moved north.

I know climate change is real and it's here today from the fact that, once again, we had no real winter and the snow pack is gone from our lower mountains entirely.  You can still see snow covered peaks if you look 40-miles away to the mainland but that's doing us absolutely no good whatsoever.

Recent studies indicate that the 2 degree Celsius warming target our governments supposedly intend to stay within to have some reasonable chance of avoiding runaway global warming is overstated.  The science now suggests the tipping point is 1.5C.  Here's the kicker.  We know from the greenhouse gases we've emitted that we've already locked in 1.5C.  And we know that long after Year 2100 has come and gone the existing GHGs we've already emitted will still be warming the planet.  That's our goal, for humanity to survive in some state for another 85 years?  That's it?  Yet that does indeed seem to be the case.

I expect that's what comes from being the only species that can contemplate its own demise.  What an amazing quality to waste.

So, yeah, the polar ice caps are melting faster than we ever imagined and at a steadily accelerating rate.  Most of our glaciers are in retreat.  Species, plant and animal, marine and terrestrial, are migrating north and south away from the equator.  Even governments that are trying to respond wind up working from outdated projections that often render their efforts meaningless.

Better Off Without Him

There probably aren't many in Parliament with a less distinguished career than Conservative MP James Lunney's.

His pension now safely in the bag, Lunney has decided to formalize his legislative contribution by not running in the upcoming federal election.  He'll go down undefeated and very quickly forgotten.

Lunney gives "bible thumpers" a bad name.  A chiropractor in a previous life, Lunney has used his office primarily to promote his evangelical pursuits.  Even with Harper's astonishingly shallow caucus talent pool, Lunney remained in the deepest recesses of the back bench.

So, with nothing at all to lose, Dr. Lumpy has resigned from the Conservative caucus.

In a statement released Tuesday, James Lunney announced that he is withdrawing from the Conservative caucus voluntarily so as not to "entangle the most multiracial, multicultural and multi-faith caucus in parliamentary history" in his decision to defend his beliefs.

Earlier this month, Lunney came to the defence of an Ontario Tory MPP who caused a stir at Queen's Park when he told reporters he doesn't believe in evolution.

"Just stop calling evolution fact," Lunney tweeted.

In his statement Tuesday, Lunney said his comments "were inflated by media, blended with other unrelated but alleged heretical statements and became a top story on national media creating a firestorm of criticism and condemnation."

"Since two other politicians in Ontario and Alberta were targeted during the same period, it is clear that any politician or candidate of faith is going to be subjected to the same public scrutiny in coming elections," he added.

True enough, shit for brains, but you announced your decision to leave politics in 2013.  You weren't running anyway.  Just more of your standard bullshit.

If I sound like I'm taking this personally, perhaps it's because this buffoon sits as the MP for my riding.  That's how I know this character has been nothing but a placeholder since he went to Ottawa.

Lunney makes the case for a Parliamentary Power of Attorney by which he could simply stay home and have someone else cast his vote.

Your Morning Laugh

From Team Coco: