I purposely leave my copy of Chris Hedges new book Wages of Rebellion, the Moral Imperative of Revolt on my breakfast table. It suits me to take it a few pages at a time over a light lunch and then set it aside for another day.
This is what I took in over a BLT today. See if you recognize yourself in any of it.
Clive Hamilton, in his 'Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change' describes the dark relief that comes from accepting that 'catastrophic climate change is now virtually certain.' This obliteration of our 'false hopes' requires not only intellectual knowledge but emotional knowledge, which requires us to accept that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery, and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept the impeding disaster, to attain the visceral understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The crisis before us is the culmination of a 500-year global rampage of conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth - as well as killing by Europeans and Euro-Americans of the indigenous communities that stood in their way. The technical and scientific forces that created unparalleled luxury and unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite are the forces that now doom us. Ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel - thirteen of the fourteen warmest years since weather record-keeping began over a century ago have occurred in the opening years of the twenty-first century - we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. Anthropologists, including Joseph Tainter in 'The Collapse of Complex Societies,' Charles Redman in 'Human Impact on Ancient Environments,' and Ronald Wright in 'A Short History of Progress,' have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to the breakdown of complex societies, which usually collapse not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. 'One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,' Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. The last days of any civilization, when populations are averting their eyes from the unpleasant realities before them, become carnivals of hedonism and folly. Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity assume political control. Today charlatans and hucksters hold forth on the airwaves, and intellectuals are ridiculed. Force and militarism, with their hypermasculine ethic, are celebrated. And mania for hope requires the silencing of any truth that is not childishly optimistic. ...Our major preoccupation is pleasure. Margaret Atwood, in her dystopian novel 'Oryx and Crake,' observes that as a species 'we're doomed by hope.' The mantra is to be positive, to be happy. This mania for optimism - for happiness - leads to fantasy being mistaken for reality. Reality is dismissed when it is unpleasant. 'We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real.' Daniel Boorstin writes in 'The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.' 'We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are hoaxes we play on ourselves.'
Okay they're listening and I've unwittingly let them in my house.
We were somewhat troubled to learn, several years ago, that certain game consoles had cameras that could allow others to watch what people were doing without them knowing of it.
Now I might have fallen for something along the same lines. I've developed a heart issue that is somewhat sleep related. I read about this fitness tracker plus thingee offered by Jawbone, the UP3, that has additional sensors that monitor, record and report things such as resting heart rate and detailed sleep data according to light, deep and REM sleep and waking intervals.
The software is amazing. It provides daily reports on activity, exercise, sleep, heart rate and such. These stats are then crunched into weekly and monthly summaries. All this info is stored in "the cloud" for up to five years or at least you can supposedly access five years of your own data.
The other morning I woke up parched and immediately downed two glasses of water. When I looked at the morning UP3 summary, I was surprised that my resting heart rate was a good bit higher than normal. My smartphone app then went on to conclude that I had probably become dehydrated and urged me to drink 8 glasses of water that day. I have to say I was pretty impressed.
The Cloud. That's a network of remote servers and that's about all you'll ever know about them. They're supposedly secure but don't tell that to the celebrities who risque selfies were hacked and then leaked online.
Now I'm not particularly worried. I don't see how anyone would be interested in my health data or could possibly benefit by stealing it. That said, I think others could be quite vulnerable. Employers are becoming more focused on the health of their workers or those applying for openings. What about insurers? They really want that information and they don't have a great reputation for being too scrupulous about getting it.
Some months ago my daughter received an invitation through Amazon Prime (US) to purchase an Amazon Echo device at half price. These are apparently much sought after. She wasn't interested but she thought it would be great for me, living alone and all.
It's a black cylinder sort of thingee that operates by voice command. Some of its functions resemble iPhone's Siri or Android's "Okay Google." You can ask it things like directions to some destination or trivia such as who won the 1956 World Series and it spews out the info.
The Amazon Echo goes a few steps beyond. You might turn your smartphone off to save battery power between charges but the Echo is plugged in so it's always on. You activate it by saying its name "Alexa." It has a wonderful voice synthesis technology that doesn't sound robotic. You can ask Alexa for information. If you're cooking you might need to know how many grams in an ounce or how many teaspoons in a tablespoon, that sort of thing. Trivia is a specialty. Whose faces are on Mt. Rushmore, that sort of thing, or who succeeded Joseph Stalin - your sense of curiosity is the limit. It'll summarize the latest news, give you the local weather, tell you want time it is in Dublin or Tokyo. It has a bluetooth speaker so it'll play whatever music you request, handy when you're doing something time consuming like making a batch of ravioli.
Amazon, of course, is a mega retailer so it's not surprising that Alexa can make up shopping lists. "Alexa, put paper towels on my shopping list." Done. Then, when you're ready to go the shopping list is on your cell phone and you're away to the races. Once you set up an account with Amazon, Alexa can also order directly from Jeff Bezo's outfit. "Alexa, order Pears Soap from Amazon Prime." After that you just wait for the parcel to show up at your doorstep.
It all sounds too good to be true and it probably is. Your communications with Alexa can go out via bluetooth and wind up somewhere in the Cloud. I'm damned sure Amazon will be logging everything you put on your shopping lists, building up your consumer profile to target you for advertising.
What would happen if you began each morning with "Alexa, how can I contact al Qaeda?" or "Alexa, what household ingredients are required to make explosives?" In this era of total information awareness is there some computer out there, maybe a horde of them, scouring the ether for these sorts of buzzwords, identifying the source, adding them to watch lists?
The thing is, I'm not sure Alexa and I are going to have a wonderful relationship. I might just wind up having to drown her in the bathtub - not that I would know anything about that sort of thing you understand.
As the Vancouver Observerpoints out, day in and day out Canadian journalists themselves are willing victims of Harper's tyrannical ways.
We like talking to him. It's our job, even when he makes it hard.
And he does. Harper takes only 3 questions at each public appearance (or none at all).
Reporters wishing to ask a question must be pre-approved by his team. If we're approved, we get one question. No follow-up for clarification. No discussion.
Same goes for his ministers, who stick to a script. This is bad for democracy. This damages the public's right to know.
The essence of democracy, its very legitimacy hinges on the consent of the governed. But consent itself is predicated on an informed decision maker, in Harper's case the Canadian people. It's their consent to give or withhold but it can only be validly given if their government informs them of what it intends to do and explains why and is prepared to answer questions.
When journalists can't question government officials, get the full story, their corporate bosses might not mind but they're abrogating their responsibility to the public. When "don't make waves" becomes the standard for journalists, the erstwhile "watchdogs of government," it's bludgeoning democracy.
Oxfam has identified three factors, the Toxic Triangle, it considers most likely to defeat our efforts to prevent runaway global warming - political inertia, financial short-termism, and vested fossil fuel interests.
“The fossil fuel industry has conjured a toxic triangle that is trapping us into a warming world. Governments and investors are helping the industry to recklessly protect its own profits at the expense of us all. The world’s poorest are already being hit hardest and millions more will be made hungry by climate change,” the Oxfam chief executive, Mark Goldring, said.
Oxfam says the “toxic triangle” supported spending of more than $674bn (£423bn) on fossil fuels in 2012. Investment in the industry was propped up by tax breaks, government incentives and an estimated $1.9tn of subsidies a year. More than $500,000 a day was being spent on lobbying US and EU governments, it says.
It'll be millions, that's for sure. More likely many hundreds of millions. If you add in collateral events such as war, it could well end up in the billions. Nobody really wants to pin the tail on that donkey, the one representing 4 degrees Celsius of global warming.
Yet that is the future that proponents of high-carbon fossil fuels would bequeath us, a world of chaos and mass death of unprecedented, unimaginable scale. Here in Canada we've got those very people running the place or waiting in opposition to replace them and pick up where they leave off. You can think of them as diabolical plague rats.
Look at this picture.
In a way it resembles photos of Chinese factory workers assembling iPhones only the product here is infants. They're being treated for respiratory illnesses at the children's hospital in Xi'an, China. Ever see such a thing? If we don't stop Harper and the rest of the Tar Sanders on Parliament Hill on both sides of the aisle, maybe some day you will.
Germany's climate change centre, the Potsdam Institute, with the sponsorship of the World Bank, recently presented an excellent online course exploring what awaits us in a world beset by 4C warming. There are plenty of reasons that's not discussed in polite company. It is certainly not fit for dinner table conversation.
A report just issued by the British medical journal, Lancet, in conjunction with London's UCL (possibly the best university you've never heard of) concludes that climate change threatens to wipe out half a century of advances in global health (see photo above).
“We see climate change as a major health issue and that it is often neglected in the policy debates,” said Professor Anthony Costello, director of the UCL Institute of Global Health and co-chair of the commission.
“On our current trajectory, going to 4C [of warming] is somewhere we don’t want to go and that has very serious and potentially catastrophic effects for human health and human survival and could undermine all of the last half-century’s gains. We see that as a medical emergency because the action we need to do to stop that in its tracks and get us back onto a 2C trajectory or less requires action now – and action in the next ten years – otherwise the game could be over.”
Game over, indeed.
There are only two camps, an we're all in one or the other.
One camp accepts science and fact, especially in the face of such an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. It recognizes the enormity of the challenge and the incredible sacrifices necessary to meet it.
The other camp is for denialism. There are the active denialists who reject the scientific consensus on the strength of belief as well as those who have personal interests to defend. There's also another group in the denialism camp, the really large group who simply find climate change far too ominous and overwhelming to accept and who, instead, either ignore it or grasp for nonsensical responses about how the Earth has always warmed and cooled, it's all a scientific conspiracy and a massive hoax, or global warming has stopped. Another substantial element just can't deal with it. It's more than they can handle. There are plenty of Liberals and New Democrats in this last subsection. Theirs are the votes that will keep the plague rats in power.
Of course as Canadians we'll be the last and least affected by the ravages of climate change. We've got our own "sin eaters" - the poorest and most vulnerable in the most hard scrabble corners of the world. They didn't accept that role but our prosperity prescribes it for them. Can't be helped. I suppose.
The worst can still be avoided but it's going to demand real sacrifice. We'll have to decarbonize our economy and our society. Not in 40 years, not in 20 years. We have to start now beginning with our highest carbon fossil fuels and a major clean energy initiative to replace that energy source. By some estimates we've got 10 years left to make this happen.
While we're at it, we're also going to have to tackle our rampant consumerism and over-consumption. Has to be done. Our concept of GDP has to give way. We have to break the chains that shackle us to perpetual, exponential growth. We have to discover that we can live smaller and actually enjoy a better, happier life.
Once we're committed to moving forward with decarbonization and a new mode of consumption that substitutes quality for volume, then we will finally be able to engage the global community on the issue of overpopulation. We probably need to get our numbers down to around 3.5-billion and there are safe means to do that within just a generation or two. There are plenty of other ways to get that result also but haven't we had enough killing?
But if we're not willing to do these things, and I expect we're not, then let's stop pretending that we're liberal much less progressive. You can't be a progressive only when you're immersed in comfort and ease. Being a progressive demands a willingness to do the necessary and right things even when they aren't easy and aren't comfortable.
It's generally accepted in the scientific community that it takes one to several centuries, on average, for species to truly adapt to a 1 degree Celsius shift in temperature, up or down.
Look around today and you'll see species "running" for their lives, continually migrating ever further away from the equatorial zone. Some species, particularly those that swim or fly, have a big advantage when it comes to migration. Plants aren't quite so lucky yet it's calculated that, in totality, they too are migrating at about 8-inches every year.
From my perch out here on the Pacific we see lots of signs of this migration out of the south. Humpbacks have returned to our waters in big numbers. Large schools of white sided dolphins have arrived bringing pods of transient orca with them. California has lost its once abundant anchovies which might be the same populations that have recently shown up here. Victoria now even has a resident flock of brown pelicans that have taken up residence between the provincial capital and Race Rocks.
This may be a case where the race goes to the swiftest in which event there'll be plenty of losers.
One of the most prominent experts in this area is the University of Hawaii's Camilo Mora, whose specialties include biogeography, geology and climate data modeling. Mora and his fellow researchers made headlines a couple of years ago when they produced a study that forecasts 2047 as the year by which every year that follows - every year - will be hotter than the hottest year that area has experienced over the previous century and a half, a phenomenon called "climate departure." Some places will reach that point long before then:
Mora forecasts that the unprecedented heat starts in 2020 with Manokwari, Indonesia. Then Kingston, Jamaica. Within the next two decades, 59 cities will be living in what is essentially a new climate, including Singapore, Havana, Kuala Lumpur and Mexico City.
In an interview last year with Yale University's e360 Project, Mora touched on the frustration caused researchers by the public's and their leaders' reluctance to respond to the plain science.
You don’t see any action on these things. And the problem is that these things die away pretty quickly. The press coverage of this paper lasted two days. We were in the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN. And next week, people were talking about something else. So as scientists, we are struggling to figure out how we can increase public awareness on this issue.
Pope Francis stirred up a lot of reaction last week to his papal encyclical on climate change in which he focused on climate change and over-consumption, especially by the advantaged countries, that were wrecking the environment. The pope, however, disingenuously gave overpopulation a pass. Mora disagrees. To him our population loading is already excessive.
Well, it’s paramount because people need food. And the planet is limited in the amount of resources that it can produce. We already have calculated that the planet has on the order of 11 billion hectares that can be harvested in a sustainable manner. Of course we can increase the number by increasing technology, but that’s been happening for the last three decades. The worldwide population is 7 billion people, and we know that to sustain a human being you need on the order of two hectares per person. That means that the world human population every year consumes on the order of 14 billion hectares. The planet only has eleven to give to us.
This doesn't take into account the more recent research about global soil degradation and the mounting threat to food security. In March, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released a report on the ongoing degradation of our stocks of arable land, warning that a lot of our topsoil over the next 60-years will be ruined by intensive agriculture and the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Like Mora's research and the Living Planet Report, 2014 finding that we have lost half our wildlife over the past 30 years, the UNFAO study was almost immediately flushed straight down the memory hole, completely forgotten.
Much of Mora's claims about overpopulation is borne out by research conducted by the NGO, Global Footprint Network, which tracks the biomass deficit that has set in around the world (only a handful of countries, Canada being one, remain in a biomass surplus). From this the GFN issues an annual release to mark "Earth Overshoot Day," the date on which we exhaust a full year's supply of the planet's renewable resources. Just a few years ago, Overshoot fell in mid October. Now it has advanced to August. For the balance of the year we deplete Earth's resource reserves and the rate at which our over-consumption is accelerating is a warning that we're depleting those reserves rapidly too.
In 2014, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 19. This year it will arrive on August 15. For more on that and GFN's take on the papal encyclical, you can go here.
Professor Mora faults the environmental community, including the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for deliberately ducking the overpopulation issue.
Mora: It’s pure fear. It seems amazing, but friends of mine recommended to me not to publish that paper. They said, “This paper is going to be damaging to you. You don’t get it. You don’t need it.” What is remarkable, though, is that after the paper got published, I had multiple people calling me to endorse it.
e360: Did they endorse it publicly?
Mora: No, just to me. This is really the problem. But why we don’t take it on? I have no clue. Because the data are very clear. I guess the problem is that it can backfire. We have seen, historically, situations in which a scientist has taken on an issue and there are people who have been fired, or attacked by interest groups. So I guess the problem is fear of retaliation.
If he's right, if the scientific community is already too intimidated to address the issue of overpopulation, then we're genuinely screwed. The pope hit two of three - climate change and over-consumption - but if you can't address overpopulation, you have almost completely undermined your chances of effective action on the other two.
We're already seeing the impacts of climate change but doing little to prepare for what those early impacts tell us is coming. For now we're forestalling the consequences of ever increasing over-consumption by raiding the Earth's diminishing resource reserves. We have no collective will to even begin tackling overpopulation.
We comfort ourselves by talking in terms of what might happen by 2100. Oh hell, we'll all be gone by then anyway so, no big deal. But, if Mora's research is accurate, "climate departure" begins to set in by 2020 and then spreads across the world until every country is hit by 2047.
That the Confederate flag still flies atop the South Carolina state capital is an affront to decent people everywhere. For white trash southerners, they'll defend it as a symbol of the civil war, a war fought for "state rights." Of course they're pretty good at avoiding any mention that the state right in question was the right to enslave human beings.
For "black folks" that flag has an enduring meaning.
"It" is the blatant affront to the laws of war practised by Israel and now known as "Dahiyeh". It's a war crime that has become central to Israeli tactics against Lebanon, Gaza and presumably anywhere else lacking the means to retaliate in kind against Israeli non-combatants, civilians.
Israel, with the complete backing of Canada and our political leadership, knows full well it can deliberately and relentlessly slaughter civilians and get away with it. So cocksure has Israel become that it's now openly threatening to visit Dahiyeh on the people of Lebanon if another conflict breaks out.
The laws of war absolutely prohibit the deliberate targeting of civilians and their infrastructure - power plants, sewage and water plants, hospitals, schools and such. Yet this is precisely what Israel visits on those territories it attacks.
The Israeli army will show ‘no restraint’ in attacking civilian centers in south Lebanon and Beirut should another war break out with Hezbollah, a senior Israeli military official told the German Die Zeit newspaper.
Israeli Air Force chief Major-General Amir Eshel warned Hezbollahin a recent interview picked up by The Jerusalem Post Saturday thatIsrael would not hesitate to attack military command centers situated in civilian buildings in Lebanon.
"[The Israeli Army] would not show restraint due to the immoral war tactics of our enemies,” he noted.
Dahiyeh, Lebanon - Before and After
Israel does it because it has just enough support to get away with it. Israel counts on the open arm embrace of Canada's political leaders and that ever crucial UN Security Council veto that America never hesitates to deliver. So for every woman or child they slaughter, every hospital they rocket, every school they destroy, we deserve our fair share of the credit.
Know what would stop this? The threat of intervention by a country capable of inflicting retaliatory strikes against Israeli infrastructure - its power plants, its sewage plants, its water plants including its desalination plants. No hospitals, no schools, no targeting of residential neighbourhoods. What would also stop this is for Israel's political and military leadership to be made to stand trial for their war crimes. Put thugs like Netanyahu and his top generals behind bars for life without parole.
Know what would be a good place to start? We could start by breaking all ties with any ally that thinks it can flout international and humanitarian law and the laws of war. When we don't, what they do is on us.
As an aside, ever notice how these stories never, but never get carried in Canada's major mass media? Never. That's curious.
You can usually tell when someone has given up. The house may be badly in need of a coat of paint. The garden is overrun with weeds. Maybe there's now cardboard where once there was glass.
How can you tell when a country has given up? Is it when a gaggle of misfits, lunatics and jesters seek to become president? Is it when the poor are reformulated to become destitute, their kids going hungry, while the wealth of the rich soars? Is it when a punk with an assault rifle lays waste to kids in an elementary school or some malignant shit cuts loose on a bible study group in a black church in South Carolina?
We hear a lot about the United States being in decline. It's being overtaken by China and, perhaps eventually, the whole BRIC gang. But America's decline isn't from the ascendancy of emerging economic superpowers. It's coming from the cancerous rot inside.
At times it seems that dysfunction has become the default operating system of the United States of America. Look at the Bush/Cheney days. Tax cuts followed by more tax cuts for the rich while the country waged two, trillion dollar wars financed by foreign borrowings. That was pretty nutty. How about cops killing unarmed black people from coast to coast? That's kind of fucked up. The dismantling of America's social safety net in the face of rising poverty and burgeoning inequality. The rise of corporatism and the mutation of what is now a "bought and paid for" Congress and a corporatist Supreme Court. That's institutional dysfunction at the highest levels. Major cable news outlets that quite deliberately churn out outright lies and confusion. The rise of the "permanent warfare state." Mass murder - in theaters, in schools, in churches. A people who have rejected knowledge in favour of belief. Declining standards of living and levels of education. A nation that exemplifies the chokehold of neoliberalism.
When it comes to decline, the United States needs no help from foreign rivals. It's already given up on itself. Isn't it about time that we, the branch plant to the north, figured this out?
Today's papal encyclical took some awfully strong positions and not just on climate change. Francis also condemned our cult of consumerism which stands as the beating heart of neoclassical, growth-driven, free market economics. In this era of neoliberalism it has become our default economic operating system and you don't need the pope to see that it's utterly destroying our civilization.
The pope seems to think the people of the most advantaged countries - that would include you - need to stop buying so damned much crap.
Francis writes: “Those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms”. The failure to respond, he says, points to the loss of a “sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded”.
He calls access to safe water a “basic and universal human right” and says depriving the poor of access to water is akin to denying the right to a life.
The Argentinian pontiff heaps praise on efforts made by scientists to find solutions to man-made problems, and lashes out at those who intervene in the service of “finance and consumerism”.
“It is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, even more limited and grey,” he says.
Pope Francis has released a 180-page encyclical calling on the rich and powerful to start taking responsibility for the mess they've made of our planet. Francis writes that we have transformed our biosphere into a "pile of filth."
The pope’s 180-page encyclical on the environment, released on Thursday, is at its core a moral call for action on phasing out the use of fossil fuels.
But it is also a document infused with an activist anger and concern for the poor, casting blame on the indifference of the powerful in the face of certain evidence that humanity is at risk following 200 years of misuse of resources.
Up to now, he says, the world has accepted a “cheerful recklessness” in its approach to the issue, lacking the will to change habits for the good of the Earth.
“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods,” the papal statement says. “It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”
The pope refused, however, to consider overpopulation's role in our environmental degradation. When it comes to the Roman Catholic church it still is and presumably always will be the more the merrier.
The item continued to suggest that Somalian Ali Omar Ader is taking the Canadian taxpayer for a ride by falling back on legal aid for his defence against the charges relating to the Lindhout kidnapping.
Wait a second. This is still Canada isn't it? We still hold to the conviction that everyone accused of a crime is presumed innocent and those we place on trial are entitled to a proper defence, or at least I thought we did.
There's a real, FOX News/Roger Ailes character to this story. A manufactured grievance that perhaps plays on this accused's nationality and, for some, his colour.
If this guy, Ader, is truly guilty of kidnapping Lindhout, let's get him properly tried, convicted and sentenced. You can't do any of that without a fair trial and you can't have a fair trial without the accused being afforded a proper defence.
That this manufactured controversy should even appear in the pages of the Ottawa Citizen is a telling reflection on where Canadian journalism is heading.
Our Furious Leader suffers from FDS and so do a good many of his supporters. It's an affliction as curious as it is ancient.
FDS, or "faith-derangement syndrome," was discussed in a recent item at Salon.com exploring the derangement of America's notorious Supreme Court judge, Antonin Scalia. What is FDS? The signs are unmistakable.
Sufferers of faith-derangement syndrome (FDS) exhibit the following symptoms: unshakable belief in the veracity of manifest absurdities detailed in ancient texts regarding the origins of the cosmos and life on earth; a determination to disseminate said absurdities in educational institutions and via the media; a propensity to enjoin and even enforce (at times using violence) obedience to regulations stipulated in said ancient texts, regardless of their suitability for contemporary circumstances; the conviction that an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient authority (commonly referred to as “God”) directs the course of human and natural events, is vulnerable to propitiation and blandishments, and monitors individual human behavior, including thought processes, with an especially prurient interest in sexual activity.
Secondary symptoms exhibited by sufferers of FDS comprise feelings of righteousness and sensations of displeasure, even outrage, when collocutors question, reject or refute the espousal of said absurdities. Tertiary symptoms, often present among individuals self-classifying as “evangelicals”: Duggar-esque hairdos and Tammy Bakker-ian makeup, preternaturally sunny dispositions and pedophiliac tendencies, sartorial ineptitude and obesity.
Obviously, Sideshow Steve and Company, don't have all of the symptoms - not that we know of - but they sure fit the overall profile.
In an act that the Vatican has denounced as sabotage, someone has leaked a draft of the Pope's encyclical on climate change. A copy was obtained by L'Espresso magazine and published on Monday.
At the start of the draft essay, the pope wrote, the Earth “is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her. We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorised to loot her. The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things.”
If you follow the unfolding climate change wars, you'll know that things are sure heating up. Pope Francis is about to issue a papal encyclical urging the world's Catholics to get behind the fight against climate change and it's got the denialists running scared.
Congressional denialist in chief, senator James Inhofe, has lashed out, telling Francis to mind his own business and leave all this climate change issue to Congress where it can be shelved and buried. Everyone else on the Right from FOX News to the Heartland Institute is likewise sniping away. It must get exhausting.
There's a palpable desperation in the Right's strident and pre-emptive pushback. At the core of their denialism is one objective - delay. They know that anthropogenic global warming is happening and that it's accelerating in its impacts. It has become an inescapable presence in people's lives whether it arrives as droughts, floods, species and pest migration, change in growing seasons or sea level rise. It's a wave they can't hold back and they know that wave is going to break over their heads.
That's not to say they're giving up, not yet anyway. They're calling out all the troops. In the Globe and Mail 2.0, they're even breathing life back into the stale arguments of economist Bjorn Lomborg. This guy's niche is interesting. He's no longer a denialist. His shtick is distraction. Yet it's directed to the same purpose - delay.
Here's the thing that concerns me. No matter which side you're on, the factual or the irrational, everyone is making the same fatal mistake, one that will almost ensure that even the best efforts will fail. They're all treating climate change, anthropogenic global warming, as a stand alone issue.
Reality check time. The only way that climate change can be addressed is to recognize it as an integral component of a far greater and more existential challenge that also incorporates overpopulation and over-consumption. It's only when climate change is taken in this larger context that the common threads linking these challenges emerge and the necessary responses become obvious.
Irrationality isn't exclusive to the denialists. The very way our society is organized is irrational, dangerously so. For example, we still cling to our pursuit of perpetual, exponential growth in GDP. To maintain that delusion, you must ignore the reality that ours is a finite planet, with finite resources both renewable and non, a planet our species has vastly overpopulated.
To keep that delusion from collapsing under its own weight, you must ignore that our ecosystem, our biosphere, Planet Earth, has a maximum carrying capacity that we're already well passed. The evidence is everywhere. It's visible to the naked eye from the orbiting International Space Station. It's tangible, palpable, measurable.
From our orbital perch we can monitor the vanishing sea ice, the retreating glaciers. We can observe receding lakes and rivers that no longer run to the sea. We can plot the spread of deforestation and photograph the massive dust clouds that rise over China, the result of desertification, and cross the Pacific to North America. We can record the loss of mountain snow pack and the increasing rate of forest fires. The Grace satellite system detects the surface subsidence resulting from the depletion of our groundwater, our aquifers, for irrigation. This stuff is all observed, recorded, measured, photographed and logged. And it all speaks to the same truth, that we are living far beyond our planet's maximum ecological carrying capacity.
Back down on terra firma there's more evidence. This comes in many forms. Among them are the collapsing fish stocks as our industrial fishery depletes the ocean, species by species, as it fishes "down the food chain." Add to that ocean acidification, itself a potential extinction event, caused by the excessive CO2 loading of our atmosphere. Even the denialists steer well clear of that one. It's hard to argue with litmus paper. There's habitat and species loss. A report this past year concluded we have lost half of the wild life on Earth since we ushered in the Age of Market Fundamentalism, the neoliberal era, some 30-years ago. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that we're degrading our farmland so rapidly that most of our topsoil could be lost over the next sixty years. Then there's the steadily worsening accumulation of waste and pollution evidenced in such things as major rivers that have become toxic, blue green algae choking our lakes and growing oceanic dead zones.
There's no point in going on with more examples. The case is made and it's irrefutable. Our civilization - national, regional and global - has become mortally dependent on a state of existence that cannot continue. Yet neoliberalism is not working. It is not designed to meet these sorts of problems and challenges. To the contrary, it is both cause and effect of our descent into illiberal democracy, a decline that seems unstoppable.
Unsure of how to wrap up this post, I decided to take a break for brunch. As I devoured my eggs and turkey bacon, I got into reading Chris Hedges new book, "Wages of Rebellion," which I picked up a couple of days ago. That's when I ran headlong into this passage:
"As poorer societies around the globe unravel - many of them no longer able to impose the order of organized states - and as our own depressed communities are wrecked again, the same inchoate hatreds and bloodlusts for vengeance and retribution that I witnessed in disintegrating states such as the former Yugoslavia will be unleashed. Crisis cults, those bizarre messianic movements defined by a belief in magic and mystical religious fervor, will raise, as they did in medieval and Reformation Europe and among the Sioux at the end of the Indian wars. The armed thugs and gangs of warlords - which were common in the war in Bosnia - will storm through blighted landscapes looting, pillaging, and killing. This is already a reality to those affected by the severe droughts in Africa. Recent migrants, religious and ethnic minority groups, undocumented workers, foreign nationals, and homosexuals, indeed all who do not conform to the idealized image of the nation, buttressed by a mythical narrative about the lost golden age, will become the enemy and, for many, the cause of our distress. "Hunger and constant drought, especially in the poorer parts of the globe, will force populations to carry out armed raids and internecine wars to survive and lead many others to flee for more temperate zones. An estimated 200 million climate refugees, most from the equatorial regions of the globe, will descend by the middle of this century on Europe and other industrialized countries, according to figures cited in a study from Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network. The industrialized states, anxious to preserve dwindling resources and avoid being overrun by destitute hordes, will become ringed fortresses. Democratic rights and constitutional protections will most likely be obliterated. This may be the best we can hope for. The worst will be the complete collapse of our ecosystem and the extinction of the human species. Neither scenario is pleasant. "No act of rebellion can be effective, much less moral, unless it first takes into account reality, no matter how bleak that reality. As our lives become increasingly fragile, we will have to make hard decisions about how to ensure our own survival and yet remain moral beings. We will be called upon to fight battles, some of which we will have no hope of winning, if only to keep alive the possibility of compassion and justice. We will depend on others to survive. This is not the world most of us desire, but it is the world that will probably exist. The greatest existential crisis we face is to at once accept what lies before us - for the effects of climate change and financial instability are now inevitable - and yet find the resilience to fight back."
If we're to have much hope of finding "the resilience to fight back" we're going to have to sweep away the cobwebs of delusion under which we've been living. We will need new modes of organization - economic, social and political. We will need to acknowledge that 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics have played an instrumental role in bringing us to the perilous state we're in today.
This begins by recognizing that, while the future may be dystopian and it may be beyond our means to avert that, we still have in our power the ability to make it far worse than it need be. What's in play right now is this margin of difference between unpleasant and catastrophic. There are things we must do to make this better but there are far more things we're already doing that will make it far, far worse for those who must follow us.
You don't have to be malevolent to invite catastrophe. It's enough if you're willingly delusional.
post script
It's hard not to agree with Hedges that, unless we - our governments, our societies - change course pretty abruptly, we're likely to become destabilized through a combination of internal circumstances and external forces. Out of instability comes unrest, usually met with suppression, which can in turn trigger revolt of some form and degree.
Suzuki makes the point that you can't have a healthy economy without a healthy environment. You can't have a healthy society either. Inequality becomes exacerbated by environmental degradation and poor people are the most exposed and the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. Rich people enjoy this thing called "options," critical advantages not available to the impecunious.
At some point there's a very good chance most of us will have to choose to either submit or to resist. The state of social cohesion plays a powerful role in this choice. Isolated, as we're conditioned now to be, we're weak and pretty easy to pick off. This brings to mind an Alan Watts' YouTube video I first found posted by Lorne at Politics and Its Discontents:
How do we then restore social cohesion? One way is communication. Individually we might be reduced to despair and frustration. Collectively, however, we can transform our frustration into resistance. And it all begins with communication, reaching others to let them know that there are like-minded people ready to resist. That all sounds good but how does it work, how can you go from concept to something tangible?
Years ago, during the darkest part of the Bush/Cheney era, I happened to cross paths with a very courageous, genuinely progressive American woman who calls herself "The Freeway Blogger." She began a campaign to pique the public consciousness, a campaign that has expanded from war resistance to environmental action.
What she does is, in the early morning hours, she affixes signs to freeway overpasses in her native, southern California area. She gets a massive captive audience of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of commuters stuck in rush hour traffic. Here are a few of her offerings from years past.
TFB's web page has a very useful archive and also a "how to" page with tips on how to make signs and how, where and when to place them for maximum effect. If you live in a place with freeways and overpasses and rush hour gridlock, this might be an option to consider. Break into people's consciousness, remind them of what's happening, connect with them.
You need to believe. You need to believe that change is essential but, more important yet, you need to believe that change is possible and you can play a significant role in making it happen. That begins by understanding what change is and how it occurs. If you can find it, read Malcolm Gladwell's book, "The Tipping Point, How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference." Let Gladwell introduce you to the "epidemic theory," the "law of the few," and the "Stickiness Factor." Then he will take you through case histories of situations in which mass movements seemingly came out of nowhere to drive enormous change. We can do much the same - if we want it enough. Odin help us all if we don't.
Israel has officially absolved itself of any wrongdoing in the murder of four Palestinian kids killed on a Gaza beach last summer.
The kids - they were children - had a soccer ball in play when an Israeli patrol boat opened fire on them with explosive shells. Unfortunately, for the Israelis, foreign journalists witnessed the slaughter.
The New York Times’s Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Tyler Hicks, who witnessed the incident, though from a different angle to the Guardian, wrote in a blog at the time: “A small metal shack with no electricity or running water on a jetty in the blazing seaside sun does not seem like the kind of place frequented by Hamas militants, the Israel Defence Forces’ intended targets.
“Children, maybe four feet tall, dressed in summer clothes, running from an explosion, doesn’t fit the description of Hamas fighters, either.”
Oh well, it was only four kids and, besides, they were Palestinian kids, worse yet they were Gazans. All three Canadian parties supported Israel's "Dahiyeh" campaign against Gaza that saw civilians butchered by the hundreds so what's four kids in the greater scheme of things?
And, yes, those are news photos of those kids (the three who survived the first round) running for safety just seconds before they too were killed.
And people think I'M stupid! Where did Harper find her?
The Supreme Court of Canada seems to have given health minister Rona Ambrose yet another concussive head injury. Ragin' Rona went off on a tizzy over the court's decision that medical marijuana didn't have to be smoked but could be consumed in cookies or tea or the ever popular pot brownies, giving official sanction to "wake and bake."
Health Minister Rona Ambrose, speaking to reporters, said she is “outraged” by the ruling, and she accused the Supreme Court of steering young people toward marijuana use in the same fashion as Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who has proposed decriminalizing the drug. She said it should not be judges but medical experts at Health Canada who set the rules.
“This expansion of a pre-existing court-imposed program to now include cookies and candies makes marijuana more attractive and accessible to youth and reflects Justin Trudeau’s campaign to legalize and normalize marijuana,” she said in a prepared statement.
Outraged, she is. You could practically hear the wiring in her skull arcing and sparking, wafts of smoke emerging from her ears, as she denounced the "pre-existing court-imposed program." Just for the record, Turd Blossom (Karl Rove doesn't deserve the title any longer), the court imposed nothing. And medical experts have weighed in on this at length, just not your trained chimps at Health Canada.
Listen up, airhead. You lost. Your government lost before the British Columbia Supreme Court. You took that loss on appeal to the British Columbia Court of Appeal and, gosh, you lost again. The Supreme Court of Canada got involved only when your government chose to try, try, try again and appealed the Court of Appeal's decision. You lost, seven-nothing. That's nothing as in zero, Rona. There's a message in that and it concerns the complete lack of merits of your government's position. Three courts handed you your ass and still you can't seem to find it with both hands.
Look, Rona, Democracy 101. There's this thing called "the rule of law." Without it there can be no viable democracy. You're supposed to respect the courts, not attack them when you don't get your way because you're wrong. You need to respect the courts because, without them, you've thrown away the last remaining shards of your own government's legitimacy. So, Rona, grow up. Try to act like an adult. Once you've mastered that you might move on to learning to act like a cabinet minister.
10 minutes? That's not an audience with the Pope. It's a drive by. Yet Canada's world renowned prime minister was ushered in - and out - of the Pope's chambers in what must be a record for brevity, a scant ten minutes.
Maybe the Pope just knows the Devil when he sees him. Old Beelzebub after all doesn't have a whole lot in common with Pope Francis. The Pope is focused on climate change and the threat it poses to our civilization, especially the poor and vulnerable. In another week the Vatican will release the Pope's encyclical calling on Catholics to act. Steve, however, isn't Catholic and his climate change focus is on making life a living hell for those same poor and vulnerable. At least he didn't get the Pope's door slammed in his face.
Even the obligatory photo op was a bust. Francis is the pope who always seems to be smiling. Not this time. The picture is a bit cringeworthy, right down to Sideshow Steve's forced smile.
We should all read Brian Stewart's essay yesterday on "the rise of the precariat." Everything he reports has been thoroughly analyzed and disclosed over the past few years.
Most of us with 30-something children know the losing struggle that many of them face - lousy jobs, lousy pay, dubious benefits, little if any security. They remain in a precarious state of financial insecurity.
I believe it was Citibank that coined the term "precariat" and former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan who actually endorsed it as good for the American economy. Greenspan's thinking, which he quickly retreated from when outed, was that people who are economically insecure are willing to work more, work harder, and demand ever less. Welcome to Red State America.
Here's the thing. If you don't want your kids to endure life in the precariat you have to turn to the people who made it possible. You know them. You elected them. It was all legislated by governments worldwide who chose corporate interests instead of the welfare of their people.
They made it. They can clean it up. But if you want that cleaned up, if you want the sort of healthy, robust middle class we knew in the postwar decades, you're going to have to force their hand.
That's not going to be easy. What had been the Left in Canada has closed up shop and moved to a seemingly more advantageous perch in the center. They've signed on to the neoliberal, market fundamentalist, corporatist agenda. If you want change, you're going to have to knock them off that perch.
Look at what's happened in the States and realize that's where we're headed too if we continue to lay on these tracks waiting for the train.
If you want to get up off those tracks, you had better do it soon. What do you really know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP? Personally I don't know that much about it but I know someone who does, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, and he's written a dandy warning for all of us in The New York Times.
Read his warning. Then read his book, "The Price of Inequality." Learn what we're up against, what awaits us and our kids, and who is really responsible for making servitude our reality. Then, when you've had your fill, go to your stooge of choice - Tommy Boy or Junior - and ask them how they're going to undo this national headache before it becomes a full blown and permanent migraine.
If they won't act, don't vote for them. If you do, don't complain about what you've got coming.
An autopsy report concludes that Michael Zihaf-Bibeau, the Hill gunman, received 31 bullet wounds, all sustained within the Centre Block. The all seeing, all knowing coroner also found that the gunman died from the 31st round, a shot to the back of his head. In other words, after being riddled with 30 wounds, Zihaf-Bibeau remained a threat and warranted being dispatched by a coupe de grace shot.
How do you make sense of 31-bullet wounds? Well you might be familiar with the end of American bandits, Bonnie and Clyde. They were ambushed in their car. There were six officers waiting on the pair, each armed with a pistol, a shotgun and an automatic Thompson "tommy gun" submachine gun. As Clyde slowed the car, all six opened up with their submachine guns, pouring 150-rounds into the front seat of Barrow's car.
"Each of us six officers had a shotgun and an automatic rifle and pistols. We opened fire with the automatic rifles. They were emptied before the car got even with us. Then we used shotguns ... There was smoke coming from the car, and it looked like it was on fire. After shooting the shotguns, we emptied the pistols at the car, which had passed us and ran into a ditch about 50 yards on down the road. It almost turned over. We kept shooting at the car even after it stopped. We weren't taking any chances."
The coroner found Clyde Barrow's body was hit 17-times, Bonnie's 25-times. That's a shooting gallery at nearly point blank range against two stationary targets.
Makes you wonder how many rounds had to be fired to get 31-slugs into the body of Zihaf-Bibeau? It wasn't a staged shooting. There was a great deal of panic, lots of running - and ducking. The guys on the Hill were after an active shooter quite ready, apparently, to take them out.
I'm guessing that 31-rounds would have brought down Hercules with enough left over to take down Hector and Lysander to boot. And I'm guessing that this kid was "hors de combat" long before that 31st and "final" shot to the back of his head.
Word is that the cops won't be releasing video that shows the shootout in the Centre Block. That's probably for the best. It might raise too many questions.
The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine is devoted to espionage, spying, and the magazine reports that today's Ground Zero of spying is the Arctic.
For the countries that border the Arctic Ocean— Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark (through its territory of Greenland)—an accessible ocean means new opportunities. And for the states that have their sights set on the Lomonosov Ridge—possibly all five Arctic Ocean neighbors but the United States—an open ocean means access to much of the North Pole’s largesse. First, though, they must prove to the United Nations that the access is rightfully theirs. Because that process could take years, if not decades, these countries could clash in the meantime, especially as they quietly send in soldiers, spies, and scientists to collect information on one of the planet’s most hostile pieces of real estate.
While the world’s attention today is focused largely on the Middle East and other obvious trouble spots, few people seem to be monitoring what’s happening in the Arctic. Over the past few years, in fact, the Arctic Ocean countries have been busy building up their espionage armories with imaging satellites, reconnaissance drones, eavesdropping bases, spy planes, and stealthy subs. Denmark and Canada have described a clear uptick in Arctic spies operating on their territories, with Canada reporting levels comparable to those at the height of the Cold War. As of October, NATO had recorded a threefold jump in 2014 over the previous year in the number of Russian spy aircraft it had intercepted in the region. Meanwhile, the United States is sending satellites over the icy region about every 30 minutes, averaging more than 17,000 passes every year, and is developing a new generation of unmanned intelligence sensors to monitor everything above, on, and below the ice and water.
If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage during the Cold War, a hub of safe houses where spies for the East and the West debriefed agents and eyed each other in cafes, it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads of technical espionage today. According to an old Inuit proverb, “Only when the ice breaks will you truly know who is your friend and who is your enemy.”
...Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Santa Claus is a Canadian citizen and announced plans to claim ownership of the North Pole. “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic,” Harper had said in a 2007 speech at a naval base outside Victoria, British Columbia. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it.” The idea, according to Harper’s “Northern Strategy,” is to assert Canadian presence in the Arctic by “putting more boots on the Arctic tundra, more ships in the icy water and a better eye-in-the-sky.”
...Over the past few decades, [Arctic countries] have happily assumed something akin to Arctic squatters’ rights, taking special liberties to explore the ocean’s bounty while simultaneously expanding control, both mechanical and human, as the ice continues to shrink. With or without a U.N. decision, the Arctic countries likely aren’t budging anytime soon.
...Russian President Vladimir Putin views the far north in a vehemently nationalist light. “The Arctic is, unconditionally, an integral part of the Russian Federation that has been under our sovereignty for several centuries,” he said in 2013. To put muscle behind this statement, in March 2015 the Russian military launched a massive five-day show of force in the Arctic involving 38,000 servicemen and special forces troops, more than 50 surface ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft. Two months earlier, the first of about 7,000 Russian troops began arriving at a recently reopened military air base at Alakurtti, north of the Arctic Circle; 3,000 of them will be assigned to an enormous signals intelligence listening post designed to eavesdrop on the West across the frozen ice cap.
Greetings, Comrade!
More than a dozen additional bases are slated for construction. In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, told the Russian Defense Ministry’s public council that Moscow plans to build 13 airfields, an air-to-ground firing range, and 10 radar posts. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed the council, “In 2015 we will be almost fully prepared to meet unwelcome guests from east and north.”
...Norway is also becoming nervous about Russia. In March 2015, around the same time that Moscow showed off its 38,000 troops, Norway acted similarly, dragging out 5,000 soldiers and 400 vehicles for its own Arctic military exercise. But rather than spying on Russia with satellites, Norway is putting its spies to sea. In December 2014, Prime Minister Erna Solberg christened the $250 million Marjata. Built for the Norwegian Intelligence Service and expected to become operational in 2016, the vessel will be among the world’s most advanced surveillance ships, according to information released by the Norwegian military.
With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S. defense systems to detect. According to an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, the “alarmingly sophisticated” Russian fleet “will likely dramatically alter the world’s future geopolitical landscape.” The author, veteran submariner Lt. Cmdr. Tom Spahn, said the armament on the Yasen, Russia’s new fast- attack submarine, includes supercavitating torpedoes that can speed through the water in excess of 200 knots, about the equivalent of 230 miles per hour. This “makes her truly terrifying,” Spahn wrote. The new Russian subs, that is, will be stealthier and far deadlier than any ever known.
One evening in November 2014, U.S. radar operators spotted six Russian aircraft—two Tu-95 “Bear” long-range bombers, two Il-78 refueling tankers, and two MiG-31 fighters—heading toward the Alaskan coast. They had entered a U.S. air defense identification zone, airspace approaching the American border where aircraft must identify themselves, and they were getting closer when two U.S. F-22 fighter jets were dispatched to intercept them. About six hours later, Canada detected two more Russian Bear bombers approaching its Arctic airspace. Like the United States, Canada scrambled two CF-18 fighter jets to divert the bombers within about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coast.
Although the Bears are designed to drop bombs, they are also used to collect intelligence and eavesdrop on military communications. This was most likely their purpose in flying close to the U.S. and Canadian Arctic coasts. To be clear, Moscow wasn’t doing anything Washington doesn’t do itself: The United States regularly flies its RC-135 aircraft—a variant of a Boeing 707 that sucks signals, from radar beeps to military conversations to civilian email, from the air like a vacuum cleaner—near Russia’s northern territory.
If Harper is planning to blunt Putin's sharp elbows he's going about it in a curious way - defunding the armed forces, degrading the readiness of the navy, air force and army alike. Canada's military budget has plummeted to just 0.89% of GDP and our 'missions' to the Baltics and the ISIS air war eat up a good chuck of that.
Who? Harper? Nyet!
In other words it's Vlad Putin's military muscle versus Harper's hot air. Harper was on the money when he said that we have to exercise our sovereignty in the north or risk losing it. That, however, was 2007, before the Great Recession. Harper was presiding over a government he inherited from the Libs with a balanced budget and money in the bank. That was before he began defunding the government and degrading the readiness of all of our military forces - army, navy and air force. Today his focus is on pipelines and jury-rigging government revenues and expenses to create the illusion of a balanced budget before Canadians choose their next government.
When NATO stages Arctic air exercises and Canada is a "no show", we're running on fumes which is music to the ears of a guy like Putin.
