U.S. Yells "Uncle" on F-35

When American military commanders run out of money, you know something is very wrong.

U.S. defence planners have run the numbers and figure there'll be no 60 or 80-a year buy of F-35's as once planned.  Putting it bluntly they said the USAF will be "struggling to afford 48 F-35s a year."

So what's a girl to do when she runs out of mad money?

The U.S. Air Force may solicit bids for 72 new Boeing F-15s,Lockheed Martin F-16s or even Boeing F/A-18E/Fs as budget issues put planned production rates for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter out of reach, according to senior service and industry officials at the Defense IQ International Fighter Conference [in London].

In the typical Dr. Strangelove lexicon, air force officials said modernized F-15s would be used to "augment the F-35 and F-22 in a high-end fight." Now, in case you're not up on US Air Force lingo, "high-end fight" means a peer-on-peer air war which itself is code for war on Russia or China or, almost certainly, both.

The U.S. Air Force activity parallels U.S. Navy fleet planning; the Navy, likewise, is considering reductions in the planned F-35C production rate to fund life-extension efforts for the Super Hornet.

Okay, what does all that mean for Canada and other F-35 partner nations? A reduced American buy means only one thing - higher unit costs for everyone. Lockheed's pricing is built on a projected US military buy in big numbers. As those US Navy and US Air Force numbers get whittled down, the price per aircraft goes up for everyone, including foreign customers. That's very bad news for an aircraft that is still plagued with delays, cost overruns, performance issues and a "perishable" stealth technology.

Even the air force guy running the programme, General Christopher Bogdan, has alluded to the F-35's pricing problems in the context of a "death spiral" in which, as orders are trimmed or canceled and, in the result, prices soar, the warplane becomes increasingly unviable.

For Canada there's a potential silver lining in all of this. Boeing has designed major upgrades for both the F-18 and F-15 that make them more capable and even somewhat stealthy. Either of those aircraft would probably outperform the F-35 for Canada's home defence needs and by a wide margin.

Until recently it seemed the Boeing's F-18 and F-15 production lines would soon be shut down, eliminating those options for Canada. Now it seems the US military may just be keeping them open. At this point what matters most - being invited to the opening strikes of some "high end" attack on Russia and China or being able to patrol and defend Canada's vulnerable airspace in the far north?

By the way, the Russians are using their air war in Syria for some live fire practice using Backfire bombers to launch medium-range (1,700 km.) cruise missiles at ground targets. They're not using those aircraft and those costly weapons to take out a few inconsequential targets in Syria. They're just training in case they need to use them against some other country, perhaps our own.

Climate Change Makes the Case for Renewable Energy Alternatives

Charleston, S.C., October, 2015

In America's southeastern states they call it "sunny day flooding." That's when coastal towns experience flooding caused only by high tides and sea level rise. That's distinct from the flooding triggered by high tides, sea level rise, hurricane force storm surges and deluge rainfalls - the real buggers that reshape coastlines and the houses that line them.

Coastal communities in America's southeast are just becoming accustomed to sunny day flooding, a.k.a. "nuisance flooding."  The population of Charleston is waking up to a problem that's only going to get much worse and sooner than had been imagined.

It's becoming more and more difficult to beat back the tides in Charleston. Not a month goes by now without city streets being washed out and closed off until the water recedes. Whether you call it nuisance flooding or a major threat may depend on whether you've had to abandon your car after stalling out in knee-high water. Either way, Charleston's flood problems are just getting started.

"Right now in Charleston, you get somewhere around 20 or 24 tidal flooding events per year, and that is really just when the tides get so high because you've got high tide on top of sea-level rise, they cause flooding, even on sunny days. Then when it rains, it just makes it much worse," says Nicole Hernandez Hammer, Southeast climate advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "With the mid-range sea-level rise projections, you'll probably get around 78 of those events by the year 2030, and you're going to be looking at 187 of those events per year by the year 2045. As problematic as it seems now, this is the beginning of living with sea-level rise impact."

Hammer says her home state, Florida, is in more dire straits.

"What we're doing here in Florida is we're putting in pumps and we're putting in barriers and sandbags, not very sophisticated stuff, and that's in the high-end places. The areas with very few resources, they're getting nothing," Hammer says. "The city of Miami Beach, which is just 18 square miles, a very tiny piece of Florida and Miami-Dade County, is spending half a billion dollars to deal with sunny-day flooding, and that really just amounts to pumps, raising roads, and those are the two kinds of things that are being done. You can imagine the costs associated with adapting an area if those are the figures you're looking at for a small stretch of Miami."

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that a great deal of the power infrastructure and grid is susceptible to storm surge inundation, which, it claims makes the argument for alternative, clean energy.

"You reduce the importance of any one asset on the grid the further you get away from a centralized system, and I think one of the great things about resilient, renewable resources beyond them being clean is that they can generate money for you even if the power hasn't gone out," says [UCS researcher Julie] McNamara. "You can still be making money off of your solar panels when everything is fine. You can't say that for diesel generators. It's been widely reported that during Hurricane Sandy some 50 percent of diesel generators failed in New York City. When you aren't running them very often, you have a higher rate of failure just because of inactivity or failed maintenance."

While Paris Mourns, Netanyahu Makes His Move

With all eyes weary from trying to follow the Paris attacks, the G20 and APEC summits, our favourite peace lover, Benjamin Netanyahu, marked the occassion by "authorizing the marketing of (stolen Palestinian) land for the construction of 454 homes in occupied East Jerusalem."

That'll teach ISIS, right Binny? Or maybe it'll just give them more fodder for recruiting and raising funds.

Well played, Benjamin, you're all class.

Well That Wasn't Very Polite. Putin Outs ISIS Supporters.

This is certainly awkward. The West's favourite Bad Boy, Vlad Putin, brought some interesting info to the G20 summit. He brought intelligence data naming what he claims are the 40-countries that are funding or aiding ISIS. Some of them, according to Vlad, are members of the G20. Oh, yes, I think I see one right over there.



What's so infuriating is that Putin didn't let any cats out of the bag. We, the Five Eyes nations, also know full well many of those countries backing ISIS and we haven't done a damn thing about it. We would rather wage wars of gestures, dropping bombs on pickup trucks out in the desert.

Stephen Harper knew and yet he still greased the deal to sell $15-billion worth of Canadian built armoured fighting vehicles to one of the ISIS patrons. It's beyond hypocrisy. In my opinion it's borderline treason.

Update: I thought I'd cruise the mainstream media sites for their accounts of Putin's G20 presentation. Can't find it. Ain't there. Putin outs G20 members and two score of nations in total that are facilitating the flow of under the table money to ISIS and our editors spike the story. Hmm, I wonder why that is? Could it be that we'd rather not dwell on those Gulf State sheikhs and princes propping up murderous Sunni Muslim extremists? Could it be that we're afraid of opening a political can of worms by observing ISIS is being commanded by a number of ex-Iraqi army generals the Americans threw out of their jobs? Do we have some reason for not interdicting truck convoys by which ISIS exports their stolen oil?

Muslim, Jew, Doesn't Make Much Difference. We Don't Like Them When They Come Looking for Help.

A timely reminder from the Washington Post about how compassionate we are to refugees fleeing murderous persecution. It comes in the form of a flashback to
1938 when European Jews tried to escape Nazi controlled Europe. Some things, it seems, don't change.

He's Here!

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has released their latest projections for el Nino.  At the bottom of this chart you'll see a band of dark red that stretches across the Pacific. That's el Nino and it could be a record breaker.

The dark patches west of Vancouver Island, off the Washington/Oregon border and from southern California to Cabo san Lucas - that's "the blob" that we've been dealing with since at least last spring. It looks like something similar is underway along America's eastern seaboard extending into the Maritimes.

The RedHead Girl in the Back of the Chevrolet

I've been writing some, no, a lot, of pretty grim essays lately. Sorry but that's how I see what's unfolding around us.

This stuff gets to me too, maybe even more than some others. Still I write but what keeps me going is reliving moments even as whimsical as this:




"Drank a lot of take-home pay.." yeah, fair enough. But there was an intensely progressive side to Billy Joel:



And the title track from his last album, 1993 - it's been that long.

Dear "Fair Vote Canada" - Back the Hell Off

Fair Vote Canada has launched a campaign seeking volunteers to circulate petitions demanding the Liberal government implement proportional representation. They're piggybacking their preferred option, proportional rep., on the back of Justin Trudeau's promise to introduce some sort of electoral reform.

I'm more than a bit leery of Fair Vote Canada and their campaign for pro-rep. Part of that is because I don't know enough about proportional representation or any of the other options such as the single, transferable ballots and all of their permutations. I have read that the option FVC is pushing would favour the NDP while the weighted ballot might favour the Libs.  I don't know but I'd sure like to understand the ramifications of all the options before I throw in with any one of them despite Fair Vote Canada's strident urgings.

At the end of the day I want Canadians to have their say and I'll live with that. We should all get a democratic voice something we won't have if we give in to the squeaky wheels.

First past the post is a deeply flawed system in any multi-party Parliament. Convincing voters of the obvious failures of FPTP shouldn't be difficult. Giving them full information and a suitable slate of alternatives also should not be difficult. If you can't sell that at this point you never will but if Canadians choose FPTP then that's their will and you can't further democracy by defying their democratic choice.

My difficulty with proportional representation is that it provides for political parties to appoint MPs who have never faced the electorate. To whom are these people accountable. How can we have a Parliament with two classes of members, those chosen by voters and others chosen by party hacks in backrooms? By what moral right are these unelected place holders to vote on issues affecting my life and my children's? There's something unsavory to that.

I take the new prime minister at his word that he will deal with this during his term of office. The squeaky wheels of Fair Vote Canada can get by squeaking a little longer.

Here's a Thought.

An observation this morning from regular commenter, Toby:

At the barber shop this morning I got an earful of nonsense about the Paris attacks, about Trudeau doing everything wrong, about awful immigrants (Syrian, East Indian) gang warfare and how Harper did such a good job. Very little actual facts. One wonders how the eternal gabfest creates the fantasy.

One thing is obvious: if the Paris attacks had happened two days before the Canadian election Harper would have another majority.

Let that sink in for a couple of minutes and then breathe a deep sigh of relief.

The Moral War

I'm deeply confused by the outpouring of sentiment over the Paris terrorist attacks, especially the resounding clamour for prime minister Trudeau to reverse his decision on withdrawing Canada's six-pack of CF-18s from the air campaign in Iraq and Syria.  This is a sentiment that seems widely shared among Liberals and Conservatives alike although the Tories, true to form, are decidedly uglier and more racist in their criticisms.

Most of this stuff I just dismiss as the sort of emotionalism that always follows atrocity, excepting instances where our side is at fault (ask Medicins sans Frontieres if you need clarification). That goes for most of our populist journos also. The Star's Rosie Dimanno is a perfect example along with the editorial staff of the Globe and PostMedia.

I tend to make an exception for people like the CBC's Neil Macdonald who, in my opinion, seems to bring a bit more reason and balance to his punditry. When it comes to our hapless air campaign, Macdonald boils down the West's options as just keep going (i.e. bombing) indefinitely or leave.

"Everyone knows airstrikes will not decide this fight. And the U.S.-led campaign to arm and train "moderate" rebels in Syria and troops in Iraq has been an embarrassment, to put it mildly.

"Generally, whenever ISIS or its affiliated extremists have shown up, America's proxies have cut and run, often leaving their U.S.-provided guns and hardware for the enemy to scoop up.

"But disengaging and letting the Middle East sort itself out would involve a hideous price for the populations on the ground.

"ISIS operates by its own grotesque set of the Hama rules, and the massacres that would without question follow an ISIS expansion would validate Pope Francis's observation that what we are seeing today is a piecemeal version of World War III.

"For Washington and Paris and London and Ottawa and all the other coalition members, this is a horrible set of options.

"There is no Solomonic solution available, and, to make it worse, the brutal truth is that America's so-called coalition of the willing, which invaded Iraq on a false pretext, effectively created ISIS (which, unsurprisingly, has several of Saddam Hussein's former generals among its commanders).

"The West sowed dragons' teeth, which grew into armed fanatics now bent on taking the battle back to the West. And ahead of them, massive rivers of miserable refugees are trudging toward Western soil.

"We can pray for Paris to our hearts' content, and light up monuments in the colours of the French flag, and trade peace sign memes of the Eiffel Tower. But what Western militarism created cannot be sung or wished away.

"Hafez al-Assad and his Baathist colleague Saddam Hussein were both monsters. But compared to what the West unleashed on itself, they seem, in retrospect, like incarnations of stability."

Macdonald cites the "Hama Rules." The name comes from a campaign waged by Bashar's dad, Hafez.

"After surviving an assassination attempt by the militant Muslim Brotherhood, Assad sent out death squads with orders to slaughter every Brotherhood member held in Syria's prisons, of which there were hundreds.

"And he was just getting started. His security forces initiated a lethal crackdown that culminated in February 1982 when Syrian tanks and artillery units arrived in Hama, a Brotherhood stronghold.

"Over the next few weeks, the army destroyed entire sections of the city, killed tens of thousands of people, and bulldozed the rubble flat.

"Hafez al-Assad never had another problem with the Brotherhood."

Such may be the tactical lingua franca of the battle against Islamist radicals. If you want to win you must be prepared to resort to barbarism an order of magnitude greater than your adversary. You must not hesitate to kill innocents as well as your enemies. Of course it's one thing when it's Muslim on Muslim butchery.  

Which brings us to the strategy currently in vogue with Israel's political and military leadership, Dahiyeh. It's a policy of deliberately targeting civilian populations instead of military units or installations that was widely practiced on all sides during WWII (i.e. carpet bombing, firestorms and, of course, nuclear attack) but which was thereafter outlawed as inhumane. The thinking is that those civilians provide support to the enemy and whether that's voluntary or under compulsion is irrelevant.

This is all well and good except we have forsworn that sort of barbarism and readily condemn it in others (except our ally, Israel, of course). Besides, it's one thing in the Muslim on Muslim context, quite another when it becomes Infidel on Muslim. That might reverberate for a while with unwelcome results.

It would help if we could come to a working understanding of what warfare has become in the 21st century. We go to these affairs prepared to engage in "old war" - the state-on-state stuff with standing armies vying for victory ending in peace on one side's terms. Instead we're embroiled in "new war" in which there's a confusing mix of state and non-state actors, pursuing what are often distinct agendas leading to drawn out conflicts in which there is neither victory nor peace to be had at the conclusion.  The age of unwinnable war without end may be upon us. All the King's horses and all the King's men can't be relied upon to produce favourable outcomes.

What is the moral dimension of waging war without end? Where is the morality in going to war until the voters at home finally grow bored with it and the political caste finds it necessary to call the whole thing off? What is our moral obligation to the defenceless hordes we leave in our wake as we depart? How do we deny them sanctuary as refugees?

Is this a function of original sin? You lied your way into this war and now the Pottery Barn rule applies (you broke it, you own it).

I'm hopelessly confused and yet I have studied this "new war" theory and have some grasp on what it portends. It's one of those things that the more you explore it the murkier it becomes. All I've garnered out of those studies has led me to formulate a precautionary rule. Don't get into wars that you're not willing to win and, even then, not without knowing how you will win, how long that will take, at what cost, how you will know if you've won and if you've lost, and how you will get out. Those preconditions all sound so reasonable and yet, if applied to our military adventures in the Muslim world since the turn of this century, we would have stayed home.

Forget this bullshit about moral wars for it's the most heinous, most barbaric side that sets that morality bar in these new wars. There's no moral consolation prize that doesn't leave mountains of suffering and dead in its wake.

A Must-See. The Charlie Hebdo Cartoons

The Independent has reprinted the cartoon responses of  Charlie Hebdo's Joann Sfar. They're really inspirational. A lot of us can use a bit of this wisdom.

The Sea is Coming. Vancouver is Fighting Back with Sand Bags - For Now.

Take pity on the multi-millionaires whose homes line the waterfront in Vancouver's West Point Grey neighbourhood. Those magnificent homes are generally low lying and the rising sea is closing the gap.

Rising sea level, high tides and the threat of storm surge recently had Vancouver municipal crews out sandbagging beautiful Locarno Beach.

It held, this time.

But sandbags won't hold the sea back forever and, as seen from these photos, the beach itself wasn't defended from inundation and erosion. It's the erosion from successive and worsening events, not flooding, that causes the real and lasting damage. It's the erosion that sculpts the shoreline.

It could be worse. Think of all those stars in Malibu who built their incredible mansions along the once spectacular beaches.

Those beaches are now gone, taken by the rising sea.

Now the seas reach out to the concrete barricades at the edge of their lawns. In some areas the sea has taken the lawns as well. Not hard to figure out what's next.

It's hard to imagine what the salt spray is doing to their houses. I live a block from the sea and I have to deal with a bit of corrosion. These places in the picture above, they'll have saltwater corrosion everywhere inside their homes and out. Their window glass must be horribly etched.

It's a curious thing to observe. We have a neighbourhood of fine but low-lying waterfront homes at the south end of town and a row of far bigger but also quite exposed and low-lying "McMansions" just north of me. The homeowners to the south are in a jam. Once or twice every year a high tide worsened by a storm surge and a mountain river overflowing its banks leaves them inundated and cut off. The municipality won't grant a permit for any construction in that area, not so much as a garden shed. And, if your house burns down or eventually succumbs to the effects of repeated flooding, your only option is to leave. Doesn't do much for the property values.

There's an article in the Toronto Star about the American experience. That's where you see living, breathing socialism for the rich in action in the Carolinas.
Another report in the series lightly explores the reality of sea level rise in Canada.

Provincial and local governments are still working from the now very old estimate of 1-metre of sea level rise this century. One municipal engineer I discussed this with said it's probably going to be 2-metres, perhaps even 3, but no one wants to go there because preparing for 1-metre is more than we're prepared to tackle.

Cognitive dissonance? Sure, especially in places like Miami where they're building condos and shopping malls with abandon even as sea level rise threatens to take down the local sewer and water systems. We're somewhat better but not very much.

People don't want to pay taxes to build systems that may protect some rich dude's waterfront property twenty years from now. Politicians, looking at their finite terms in office, don't have much incentive to bring down upon themselves the wrath of reluctant taxpayers just to "do the right thing."

It takes a good while for reality to set in. The Dutch struggled for decades to hold back the sea from land they had reclaimed in the past. Only recently have they begun to accept that parts of their coast will have to be surrendered to the sea. That is notional wealth lost, destroyed. There is no salvage. Folks have to write off their assets and start over. Governments aren't going to be able to cover their losses, not for very long.

It's already begun. Sea level rise is beginning to exact its toll and next year's sea levels will be higher again and on and on and on. This is yet another example of how anthropogenic global warming is changing the world beneath our feet. We're little more than reluctant spectators at this point.

Of Courage and Cowardice

I'm beginning to fear that our society is more seriously, intractably divided than I had imagined.

The Harper Decade of Darkness was spent focusing on the dark art of wedge politics  with fear mongering and appeals to base instincts and biases. These are the tools Harper employed on his supporters. He made them fear the "other" lurking about waiting to pounce on rightwing righteousness.

Harper knew that he didn't have to get that many voters to claim power, even an outright majority. He knew that, with the fearful and the bigots, he was a shoo-in.

In the wake of the Paris bombings I've read a lot of rightwing reaction to Justin Trudeau's decision to end Canada's participation in America's hapless bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria. They uniformly slam Trudeau for cowardice.

Cowardice? What is that but a fear reaction in the face of some threat of death or bodily harm? If withdrawing those six CF-18s is cowardice then sending them must somehow be courageous. When it came to Harper I never saw any sign of courage. In fact the only event I can remember is when Harper bolted into the janitor's closet leaving his caucus to possibly face the gunman firing outside. That was cowardice. Ordering a little dollop of jet fighters hither and yon isn't courageous, it's politically expedient.

Yet as I read these remarks there was something almost Tea Partyish to them. They seemed disconnected from fact. I began to sense that Harper may have actually radicalized at least a good segment of the rightwing base which may ensure that we'll remain a sharply divided society. These types are quite venomous. We've had their kind on the Left also but we didn't really tolerate them much less cultivate them. The Right, however, may see these radicals as the building blocks for their restoration and I think that should worry all of us.

The presence of a radical right could well surface if the moderates seek to reclaim the Conservative Party from its Reform wing. We'll just have to wait as the leadership candidates emerge.  If the radical right is cultivated, mobilized for the leadership contest, then I think we're looking at the continuation of a sharply divided society for years to come and just at a time when we need social cohesion more than ever.

A divided society is not simply unpleasant. It's a weakened society, one that invites, even rewards, somewhat more extreme political ideologies. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to find the common ground that unites all of us. Politics becomes a feud. I so hope we don't succumb to that.

Cross your fingers.

The Paris Attacks Weren't Caused by a Want of Bombs

It didn't take long for the usual suspects to demand that Justin Trudeau reverse his decision to withdraw Canada's penny packet of CF-18s from the hapless bombing campaign against ISIS.

Linking the two is beyond puerile, it's well into the realm of sophistry. It suggests that the Paris bombings were somehow connected with the bombing campaign underway in Iraq and Syria or perhaps even that our decision to withdraw our minuscule contribution might have had some bearing on it. Now, they argue, we must return and bomb some more.

Okay, this is the stuff of belief-driven politics, the sort of thing we thought we had freed ourselves from by ousting Harper.  Bombing Muslims, civilian and insurgent alike, has achieved precisely what? Oh, sorry, that would be evidence-based thinking. That sort of thing isn't in vogue especially when it comes to Western adventures in the Middle East.

About the only rational argument I can come up with for a bombing campaign is one that strikes at the snake in the only place it really matters - the head. Off with its head.

That would mean finally admitting we have an intractable problem with the leadership of the Sunni states: the generals, sheikhs and princes from Egypt all the way to the farthest reaches of the Persian Gulf.

Go to the catalogue of our grievances. Begin with the embassy bombings and right through to the attack on the USS Cole, the first World Trade Center attack, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the attack on London, both attacks on Paris; and let's toss in al Qaeda and ISIS for good measure. What do all of those have in common? They're all rooted in Sunni Islam and the worst of them embrace the radical Islamism practiced by the House of Saud, our ally. Sure ISIS beheads captives. So do the Saudis. Sure ISIS tortures victims. The Saudis cherish crucifixion.

Osama bin Laden? He's from a Saudi Sunni family that originated in Sunni Yemen. The 9/11 attackers? They were mainly Saudi with a few Yemeni tossed in. al Qaeda - yeah, Saudi. ISIS, well they're a little more eclectic now that recruiting has become easier but where did they get their start, their financing? Yeah, it was all those sheiks and princes of the Gulf States, our allies.

Notice who is not in on any of this? It's that awful "state sponsor of terrorism" Iran.

But the Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Qatar and the others were with us in our air war on ISIS, right? Well, not so much. Very quietly, and without a murmur of protest from us, they hightailed it home. Now they're busy bombing Houthi civilians and rebels in Yemen, the same Houthi who are battling ISIS and al Qaeda forces in their homeland. The Saudis are essentially flying air support missions for ISIS in Yemen. And we're okay with that.

Our bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria isn't a SNAFU. No, it's well beyond that. It's a FUBAR - F__ked Up Beyond All Recognition. We're not making a dent against ISIS. We have no idea how to defeat them nor do we have the will even if we had the means. And the people pulling the strings? Well they've gone home where they're safe and sound.

Trudeau's right. This is a mug's game. Too bad there are some self-identified Liberals who don't get that.

Trudeau Axes Northern Gateway

The prime minister has ordered a moratorium on oil tanker traffic along British Columbia's northern coast. No tankers, no pipeline - this appears to be the end of the Northern Gateway fiasco.

What Mr. Trudeau may have overlooked is that this will draw the focus of dilbit opponents to the Kinder Morgan southern pipeline. That's for another day.

A "Whole of Government" Effort on Climate Change Challenges

It's amazing how many voices are coming out of the woodwork demanding that Justin Trudeau do this or do that and damned smartly too. Jesus, I didn't think the Dippers would take their entirely self-inflicted election drubbing that hard but apparently I was wrong. I know this won't quiet them but they should really give it a rest.

You see, C-51 isn't the pressing issue of the day. Neither, in fairness, is the TPP. What matters right now, to the virtual exclusion of anything short of an existential threat to Canada, is climate change. That is what matters right now.

Next month world leaders will convene in Paris for what many experts consider mankind's last best chance to reach an effective pact on a mitigation/adaptation plan that could avert runaway global warming. We're hoping to give ourselves a reasonable chance of not pulling the trigger on natural feedback loops that will cause uncontrollable, unsurvivable global warming and a host of equally cataclysmic events such as ocean acidification.

Harper revealed the nihilistic face of neoliberalism through his efforts to thwart any meaningful action on climate change during Canada's decade of darkness. He didn't give a shit how abbreviated your grandkids' lifespans might be.

Good news. Harper is gone. Trudeau is in and the new prime minister is making climate change this government's top priority.

All Liberal cabinet ministers have been charged with ensuring the success of thenew government’s commitments on climate change, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said in an interview Wednesday as he prepares to engage the country’s diplomatic corps in the international fight against global warming.

...Mr. Dion said that the effort will be much broader, suggesting all major economic decisions will face a climate-change test.

“The old system was to give the file of the environment to the minister of environment and say to her or him, ‘Deal with it, be the hero of the environmental groups but don’t bother us because we have jobs to create and an economy to grow,’” he said. “That will not work. … [Ms. McKenna] will succeed only if all of us [in cabinet] have a green orientation and sensitivity.”

Mr. Dion served as environment minister under former prime minister Paul Martin, and he controversially campaigned on a proposed carbon tax when he was Liberal leader in the 2008 election in which the Conservatives secured their second minority government. He is clearly thrilled to be back in a position where he can pursue an environmental agenda.

“The reason we worked so hard is because we have a plan for the country and we wanted an opportunity to implement it. And for that, we needed a mandate,” he said. “Within this mandate, you have the ability for Canada to be part of the solution to climate change and not only part of the problem. And that’s fantastic.”

To succeed in a world battered by global warming, he said Canada needs to adopt more energy-efficient lifestyles and business approaches, switch from fossil fuels to renewables and adapt to more extreme weather events that cause flooding and other damage. And that requires not only a federal effort, he said, but provinces, municipalities, corporations and individuals taking action.

Mr. Dion pledged that Canada will work for an ambitious agreement in Paris, likely to be reviewed after five years to ensure the world is on track. He said Ottawa will pursue a North American climate and energy accord with the United States and Mexico. And he said the country’s diplomatic and aid effort will focus on the instability and human tragedy that will result from the growing climate crisis.

Think for a minute that Mulcair would have done half as much? If you do, you're delusional.

In Defence of Constitutional, Liberal Democracy. There's Not Much Time to Spare.

None of us has (or can have for that matter) a reliable vision of what awaits our society and every other in the decades ahead. We're very nearly at the cliff's edge. We either must find new modes of organization - economic, social and political (domestic and international) - or the inertia of the old models will drag us over the side.  The promise of globalization has proved hollow and the political and economic ideologies it spawned or allowed to find traction are backfiring in many ways. As Conan Doyle would put it, "the game's afoot."

I think many of us sense that things aren't working. Just as we stare into an array of looming, potentially existential threats the models we fashioned in the assumption they would serve and protect us are failing. The Golden Age from the 50s through the 80s are now a fading memory.

Some contend even Canadians have a "pretend/quasi democracy" which mirrors the transition to less liberal democracies underway worldwide. How much of the elation you felt in the wake of the last election came from the ouster of Harper, how much from the installation of Trudeau and his (so far) seeming intent to stage a progressive restoration? Both factors were present and seemingly inseparable but I suspect that each was somewhat distinct of the other. Taken together, however, they reflected a righting of the political keel in a nation that had, for a decade, listed sharply toward illiberal democracy.

The politics of fear and division were the stock in trade of Stephen Harper. Curiously (and despicably) enough these were tools or weapons he employed to greatest effect on his own supporters. He corralled his base with visions of the dangerous incompetence of his rivals; their amoral, godless ways; the risk of the nation falling into the control of the "other" and, to be honest, by appeals to his supporters' basest instincts and biases. If you were a bigot, it was music to your ears. 

It was fascinating to watch how, in trouncing first Dion and then Ignatieff, Harper quite deliberately avoided having to run on either his record or his vision. He turned both campaigns into referenda on the opposition leader and merely offered the public a pretence of "competent management" in lieu of any actual platform. That was about as close as we got to honesty from Harper. He didn't propose to lead but only to manage, administer, rule.

In Harper's approach was the essence of illiberal democracy. You still get to vote but your vote doesn't matter much except to decide by whom you'll be ruled, the decision-making process in turn shaped by a corporate media peddling messaging that rendered the electorate misinformed, conditioned, almost powerless. Once installed, Harper corrupted the institutions of government, transforming them into his partisan, political agencies which required that they be sequestered, gagged, cut off from the public. This polluted democracy isolates the governed from those who rule, a gap wide enough to accommodate the influence of new interests - corporatism. This is the inevitable outcome of neoliberalism indulged, even nurtured. In the States it's called "political capture" which is so evident in Republican hopefuls courting the billionaires - the Kochs, the Coors family, Sheldon Adelson - whose money largely determines the leadership contests.

Illiberal democracy quickly becomes the engine of mass political disenfranchisement that extends into problems such as inequality; the collapse of social mobility; the economic and then political hollowing out of the middle class; and the host of social ills that flourish in its wake.

Illiberal democracy enshrines the religion of neoliberalism - free market fundamentalism and the mystical governance of the "invisible hand." It is religion. It is not evidence-based. It is faith based and plucked out of a host of competing, equally faith based ideologies. Radical Islam with its Sharia law does not hold a candle to this ideology. Radical Islam won't enslave you, neoliberalism already has.



I posted this discussion between Chris Hedges and John Ralston Saul last week but if you missed it you should watch it now. We all need to understand how our entire political apparatus - Tory, Liberal and New Democrat - has succumbed to this ideology and how, through them, that entraps all of us including you and yours. Only when you see how it is structured, how it operates and all the contradictions and fallacies that it conceals, can you understand how it has arisen and why we must break its hold on our politics and our society. You will also see how Harper rode the ideology of technocracy to claim the highest seat of power.  After that it was simply a matter of manipulating a minority of the public to seize absolute political control over all of us.

I recall when this free market fundamentalism, deregulated capitalism on steroids, came into vogue. I knew of Adam Smith from undergrad economics but I hadn't really read his works especially his seminal work, the 1776 "The Wealth of Nations" that the neoliberals cited as their gospel. So I bought it and I read it and, as Ralston Saul observes in this interview, it was obvious that Smith had very different thoughts than what they claimed.  Only those who hadn't read Smith could swallow the words and thoughts they were attributing to him. And again, the same thing with Edmund Burke, the supposed founding father of conservatism. As I read Burke it became inescapable that these modern prophets of conservatism were not conservative at all. They were something alien to conservatism as expressed by Burke and practised by the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

These people are quacks in the same way as Christian fundamentalists serve up a perverted excuse for Christianity that at once suppresses the teachings of Christ and thereby creates theocratic voids that they can fill with really nasty shit plucked out of the Old Testament. They proclaim Biblical inerrancy, heavily and conveniently edited to suit their purposes of course.

We need to begin thinking of neoliberalism as a contagion, something to be identified and purged from our body politic, a shackle on our nation and our people that must be broken. That will be a truly Herculean task that will have to be meticulously undertaken if we're to avoid simply replacing one false ideology with another of our choosing.

I would suggest a couple of starting points. One is with democratic reform, a process that must begin with the restoration of an informed electorate which necessitates the dismantling of the corporate media cartel and its replacement with a genuinely free press.  The other is the reclaiming of those incidents of state sovereignty often surrendered, thrown away for no good reason through neoliberal trade agreements. 

If we don't breathe new life into our democracy we risk losing it to the rising power of authoritarianism. That's already upon us and it has to be beaten back.

Let's do this thing.

Happy Remembrance Day, Everybody !!

Remembrance Day, ah yes, the autumnal ritual in which we sleep in late, getting up just in time, maybe, to turn on the set and watch better people in their winter finery turn out to throng statues, take in a prayer or two and the odd poem, maybe a fly past overhead as a wreath is laid and, for the really lucky, perhaps even a cannonade. Bagpipes and bugles galore and beret-capped old men in overstuffed blazers and grey flannels in their ranks and files standing at attention and saluting absent friends.

I feel for those old guys. For them it's an actual rite of remembrance, a mix of their own horrors or wartime boredom and the young guys they grew up with who never grew old.

The rest? Well they show up for any number of reasons. For some it's the politically correct thing to do. Some turn out mainly to be seen turning up. For others it may be the allure of group participation.  Remembrance. Remember what? Remember the dead. What dead? Who? Name them. Where did they die, how, why? What about their death do you venerate other than the fact that they stopped living?

Of course, it's their sacrifice to which we pay our humble respect. Interesting word "sacrifice." Verb and a noun. Did they sacrifice their lives or did we sacrifice them? Not many went out to sacrifice their lives. They didn't set out to die. They set out to kill the other guy but it just didn't work out that way. They did, however, follow orders under which they could and often were sacrificed - for "the cause," the greater good of course.

We fed them - by their squads, platoons, companies and regiments - into wars of attrition, the "last man standing" sort of warfare. There's sacrifice for you, lambs to slaughter.

But there's always "Lest We Forget." We mustn't forget because... oh, I know! Those who forget their history are bound to repeat it. If we forget we're going to wind up in another war. So we remember.

This all began after the Great War. We had to remember their sacrifice so we didn't ever get dragged into another global meat grinder. Only 20-years later we were at it again and I don't think it was for want of remembrance in the interval. There was even more sacrifice in that one, especially those millions of civilians - kids, women - who got to make the "ultimate sacrifice" too. They're just as dead but we don't venerate them do we, no sorry.

Up until the 20th century, deaths from war were pretty steady at 80% military, 20% civilian. That all got reversed in the 20th century. WWII was 20% military, 80% civilians and it speaks to our twisted morality that we consider four out of five of the dead as "collateral" casualties, mortal detritus, human cordwood.

There'll be no wreaths for them, no bagpipes, no solemn poems - nothing. I suppose it wouldn't be in keeping with the martial theme of the event. Besides we gotta wrap this up, the malls open at 1p.m.

Python Says, "Always Look On the Bright Side of Life." Beijing Agrees

The Chinese just set a new record.  The northeastern industrial city of Shenyang took top honours for PM 2.5 particulate matter concentrations in the city's air. The World Health Organization safety limit is 25 parts of PM 2.5 per cubic metre of air. Those busy beavers in Shenyang managed to get their levels up to 1400 parts per cubic metre.

Now I know that sounds pretty horrific given that about 1.6-million deaths in China each year are caused by air pollution and, sure, it's going to get worse as that particulate matter embedded in their tissue begins to spawn an epidemic of lung cancer and other diseases, but the Chinese know that every cloud has a silver lining.



A couple of years ago, China Central Television's web site listed some of the pluses most Chinese might not appreciate, including:

1. It unifies the Chinese people.
2. It makes China more equal.
3. It raises citizen awareness of the cost of China’s economic development.
4. It makes people funnier.
5. It makes people more knowledgeable (of things like meteorology and the English word haze).

And China's military chimed in pointing out that, even as the smog was slowly killing them off, it was also helping defend the Chinese people from foreign threats.

“Smog may affect people’s health and daily lives … but on the battlefield, it can serve as a defensive advantage in military operations,” said an article on the website of Global Times, a nationalist newspaper affiliated to the Communist Party’s mouthpiece the People’s Daily.

Missile guidance that relies on human sight, infrared rays and lasers could be affected by smog in varing degrees, the article said. It explained that tiny particles in the air contributing to air pollution could hinder missile guidance systems.

The article said that during the Kosovo war, soldiers of the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia used smoke from burning tyres to hamper Nato air strikes. The smoke reduced visibility, hindering reconnaissance efforts, the article said.

Photographic reconnaissance equipment employed by satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and reconnaissance vehicles would be rendered useless by smog it added.

The article also said that during the first Gulf war, sand storms reduced the identification distances of thermal imaging equipment on US tanks from 2,500 metres to 800 metres, while optical detection of Iraqi tanks was reduced to almost nil.

So there you have it. But, of course, don't take it just from the Chinese not when you've also got the crew from Monty Python:

Imagining Climate Change, 2015

Human civilization dates back about 11,000 years. Just 11,000 years, a blip in the history of our 5-billion year old planet.

Temperatures over that interval have been remarkably stable barring disruptive events such as major volcanic eruptions and such. We even designated it a geological epoch, named the Holocene. Here's a tidy summary from Wiki:

The Holocene also encompasses the growth and impacts of the human species worldwide, including all its written history, development of major civilizations, and overall significant transition toward urban living in the present. Human impacts on modern-era Earth and its ecosystems may be considered of global significance for future evolution of living species, including approximately synchronous lithosphericevidence, or more recently atmospheric evidence of human impacts. Given these, a new term,Anthropocene, is specifically proposed and used informally only for the very latest part of modern historyand of significant human impact since the epoch of the Neolithic Revolution (around 12,000 years BP).

As geological epochs go, the Holocene was particularly truncated. That's on us. Thanks to man-made global warming, we've now kicked the Holocene into the Anthropocene. This is where it gets complicated. Mankind is now embarked on an uncertain path.

Climate change is set to pass the milestone of 1C of warming since pre-industrial times by the end of 2015, representing “uncharted territory” according to scientists at the UK’s Met Office.

2015 is also set to be the hottest on record, as the temperatures are so far beating past records “by a country mile”, they said. The World Meteorological Organization further announced on Monday that 2016 would be the first year in which the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is over 400ppm on average, due to the continued burning of fossil fuels.

The trio of landmarks comes just three weeks ahead of a crunch UN summit in Paris where world leaders including Barack Obama, Xi Jinping and David Cameron meet in Paris in a bid to reach a new deal on cutting emissions.

Here's something to mull over. In 2014, we reached the 0.9 C mark. One year later that's reached 1.0 C. That's 1 degree Celsius per decade. Not per century, per decade. At that rate, by 2025 we could break right through the dreaded 2 C mark which would leave us on course for runaway, globally cataclysmic climate change.

There are things we might do to mitigate the onset of warming. That begins by immediate and drastic cuts in our greenhouse gas emissions, something that would necessitate what Schellnhuber refers to as the "induced implosion of the carbon economy." That means the near-term abandonment of Athabasca and every other high-carbon/high-cost fossil fuels. Sorry Alberta that can't be helped. Think of it as taking one for the team, the team being humanity. Surely none of would begrudge Ottawa supporting clean energy development in the Wild Rose province.

This is decision time. It's decarbonize or perish. That means shutting down the carbon economy and decarbonizing our society. That also means adjusting federal and provincial treasuries to meet the demands for adaptation strategies beginning with a wholesale overhaul of our aging and decrepit infrastructure. It means building as much resilience as possible to minimize the risk of falling victim to unanticipated impacts as they arrive.

It's a common theme that runs through the history of civilization that societies fall when they're overtaken by events that trigger collapse. Often the calamity is foreseen. They know it's coming and what it likely portends. Yet it turns out the society does not institute proactive measures. It does not act quickly enough or effectively.

Will we act in a timely and effective manner as we must if we're to have much hope of blunting the worst impacts of the looming challenges?  If we're to do that we have to begin by recognizing the forces that stand firmly in our path, corporatism and neoliberalism foremost among them. They won't budge simply for the asking.

Change, It's the Only Constant. We Don't Like It. We Don't Have To.

It's not that we're really all that troubled by the idea of change. In fact we like it so long as it's gradual and heading in our preferred direction. More often than not, however, we don't get the sort of change we'd like. We get things like wars and natural disasters; more disruption and less certainty.

Change is the subject of a fascinating essay by geo-paleontologist John Feffer posted at TomGram. Feffer opines on the death of the dinosaurs. No, not T-Rex and such, but the lumbering beasts of the 20th century - Czarist and Soviet Russia, Mao's China, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and perhaps, before long, the European Union and even the United States of America.

Back in my youth, we imagined that lumbering dinosaurs like Russia and China and the European Union would endure regardless of the global convulsions taking place around them. Of course, at that time, our United States still functioned as its name suggests rather than as a motley collection of regional fragments that today fight over a shrinking resource base.

Empires, like adolescents, think they’ll live forever. In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. When death comes, it’s always a shock.

...When dinosaurs collapse, they crush all manner of smaller creatures beneath them. No one today remembers the death throes of the last of the colonial empires in the mid-twentieth century with their staggering population transfers, fierce insurgencies, and endless proxy wars -- even if the infant states that emerged from those bloody afterbirths gained at least a measure of independence.

My own specialty as a geo-paleontologist has been the post-1989 period. The break-up of the Soviet Union heralded the last phase of decolonization. So, too, did the redrawing of boundaries that took place in parts of Asia and Africa from the 1990s into the twenty-first century, producing new states like East Timor, Eritrea, South Sudan. The break-up of the Middle East, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the “Arab Spring,” followed a similar, if far more chaotic and bloody pattern, though religious extremism more than nationalist sentiment tore apart the multiethnic countries of the region.

Even in this inhospitable environment, the future still seemed to belong to the dinosaurs. Despite setbacks, the U.S. continued to loom over the rest of the planet as the “sole superpower,” with its military in constant intervention mode. China was on the rise. Russia seemed bent on reconstituting the old Soviet Union. The need to compete on an increasingly interconnected planet contributed to what seemed like a trend: pushing countries together to create economies of scale. The European Union (EU) deepened its integration and expanded its membership. Nations of very different backgrounds formed economic pacts like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Even countries without any shared borders contemplated such joint enterprises, like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and, later, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the “BRICS” nations).

As everyone now knows, however, this spirit of integration would, in the end, go down to defeat as the bloodlands of the twentieth century gave way to the splinterlands of the twenty-first. The sense of disintegration and disunity that settled over our world came at precisely the wrong moment. To combat a host of collective problems, we needed more unity, not less. As we are all learning the hard way, a planet divided against itself will not long stand.

Feffer sees 2015 as the year that begat what he calls "the great unraveling."

Water boils most fiercely just before it disappears. And so it is, evidently, with human affairs.

Just before all hell broke lose in 1914, the world witnessed an unprecedented explosion of global trade at levels that would not be seen again until the 1980s. Just before the Nazis took over in 1932, Germans in the Weimar Republic were enjoying an extraordinary blossoming of cultural and political liberalism. Just before the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Soviet scholars were pointing proudly to rising rates of intermarriage among the many nationalities of the federation as a sign of ever-greater social cohesion.

Before 2015, almost everyone believed that time’s arrow pointed in the direction of greater integration. Some hoped (and others feared) that the world was converging on ever-larger conglomerations of nations. The internationalists campaigned for a United Nations that had some actual political power. The free traders imagined a frictionless global market where identical superstores would sell the same products at all their global locations. The technotopians imagined a world united by Twitter and Instagram.

...Few serious thinkers during the waning days of the Cold War imagined that, in the long run, nationalism would survive as anything more significant than flag and anthem. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm concluded in 1990, that force was almost spent, or as he put it, “no longer a major vector of historical development.”

As it turned out, however, commerce and its relentless push for comparative advantage merely rebranded nationalism as another marketable commodity.

The fracturing of the so-called international community did not happen with one momentous crack. Rather, it proceeded much like the calving of Arctic ice masses under the pressure of global warming, leaving behind only a herd of modest ice floes. Rising geopolitical temperatures had a similar effect on the world’s map.

Feffer sees in the near future the E.U., China and even the U.S. and their empires experiencing if not outright chaos then an unraveling, disintegration.

The centrifugal forces first set in motion in 2015 tore apart the great multiethnic nations in a terrifying version of Yugoslavization that spread across the planet. Farseeing pundits had predicted a wave of separatism in the 1990s. They were wrong only in terms of pace. The fissures were slower to appear, but appear they did. In South Asia, separatist movements ate away at both India and Pakistan. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Myanmar fractured along ethnic lines. In Africa, the center could not hold, and things inevitably fell apart -- in the Congo, the Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Chad, among other places.

There was much talk in the early twenty-first century of failed states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Haiti. Looking back, it’s now far clearer that, in a certain sense, all states were failing. They had little chance against the governance-eroding winds of globalization from above and the ever-greater upheavals of non-state actors from below.

And to the enormous burden of disintegration and the failure of globalization was added the monstrous impacts of climate change.

Perhaps under the best of environmental conditions, these forces would have pushed empires, federations, and trade pacts to the edge but no further. As it happened, however, despite conferences and manifestos and sort-of-binding agreements, the global thermometer continued to rise. The effects of climate change turned out to be the proverbial tipping point. Water shortages intensified conflict throughout China, as did food shortages in Russia. The tropics, the islands, the coastlines: all were vulnerable to the rising waters. And virtually every country entered into a pitched battle over drinking water, clean air, indispensible minerals, and arable land.

...What no one anticipated was the impact climate change would have on nationalism. But how else would people divvy up increasingly precious natural resources? National sentiment proved to be the go-to principle for determining what “our” people deserved and those “others” didn’t. As a result, instead of becoming an atavistic remnant of another age, nationalism has proved to be this century’s most potent ideology. On an increasingly desperate planet, we face not the benevolence or tyranny of one world, but the multiple confusions of many worlds.

Feffer's conclusion - as a species, humanity has just two options. We embrace cooperation - which means a great leavening to sharply reduce inequality among the haves and have nots - or we see society as we have known it perish and adapt, as best we can, to dystopia.

Yes, I can anticipate your criticism. Perhaps it’s true that, in 2050, we are at a nadir of cooperation and some new form of centralization and globalization lies ahead. Clearly, the jihadis, who operate their mini-caliphates around the world, dream of uniting the faithful under a single banner. There are diplomats even today who hope to get all 300-plus members of the United Nations to agree to the sort of institutional reforms that could provide the world with some semblance of global governance. And maybe a brilliant programmer is even now creating a new “killer app” that will put every single person on the same page, literally.

As a geo-paleontologist, I am reluctant to speculate. I focus on the past, on what has actually happened. Anyone can make predictions. But none of these scenarios of future integration seems at all plausible to me. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” we used to say when I was a kid. And a cookie can only crumble in one direction.

Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out something that many have noted over the years. We have been fragmenting at precisely the time when we should be coming together, for the problems that face the planet cannot be solved by millions of individuals or masses of statelets acting alone. And yet how can we expect, with desperate millions on the move, the rise of pandemics, and the deepening of economic inequality globally, that people can unite against common existential threats? 

...At the beginning of the great unraveling, in 2015, I was still a young man. Like everyone else, I didn’t see this coming. We all lived in a common home, I thought. Some rooms were in terrible disrepair. Those living in the attic were often exposed to the elements. The house as a whole needed better insulation, more efficient appliances, solar panels on the roof, and we had indeed fallen behind on the mortgage payments. But like so many of my peers, I seldom doubted that we could scrape together the funds and the will to make the necessary repairs by asking the richer residents of the house to pay their fair share.

Honderich Rips PostMedia's Godfrey a New One.

Toronto Star chairman, John Honderich, is calling out PostMedia CEO, Paul Godfrey, for gagging his papers' editors and forcing them, all 16, to endorse Stephen Harper in the last election.

“Since God made babies, I think (endorsement editorials) were always made that way,” longtime Conservative Godfrey explained later, reacting to the uproar. “If anyone thinks otherwise, I think they were dreaming in Technicolor.”

Really, Mr. Godfrey?

You might want to examine the policies of other newspaper chains that tell an entirely different bedtime story of the so-called “proprietor’s prerogative.”

No one can dispute the tradition of an individual publisher or owner calling the election shots for their local paper. Godfrey did that regularly when he was publisher of the Toronto Sun.

But to dictate the choice across an entire chain – and nation. That is an entirely different tale.

Consider the previous owners of Postmedia papers, the venerable Southam family.

It went to great lengths to emphasize individual publishers in each city were responsible for all editorial content, including election endorsements. “It was even in my letter of engagement,” remembers veteran Southam publisher Clark Davey. “It said what appeared in the (Vancouver) Sun rested on my conscience.”

The reason, of course, was self-evident. What was important or relevant to readers in Vancouver might not be so in Montreal, Ottawa or Windsor.

Owning a newspaper, in my view, is a privilege not a right. Nor is it the same as owning a pizzeria or car wash. Newspapers are an essential informing part of the democratic process and their first responsibility must be to the local readers they serve.

The old Thomson chain in Canada, owned by the richest family in the land, had a similar practice of non-interference in local editorial issues.

South of the border a similar tradition has existed for decades. In the last presidential election, America was a patchwork quilt of competing newspaper endorsements.

The huge Gannett chain states that “diversity is strength. By encouraging and expressing a mix of opinions, backgrounds, stories and ideas, Gannett improves results.”

An executive for the large Knight-Ridder chain put it more pithily. “We bought them (newspapers). But we don’t own them.”

Godfrey's integrity is wobbly at best. Some point out that PostMedia was in the bag to the Harper government for approving a de facto takeover of the chain by American vulture capitalists. Then there was the decision that PostMedia would 'partner' with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and begin peddling petro-propaganda.


We can only hope that The Guardian is right and PostMedia is on a one way path to the graveyard. When it comes to PostMedia and its newly acquired Sun chain, Canada can do without quite nicely.

You Say You Want a Revolution. Tough, You Can't Have One.

Revolution is no longer an option. At least according to Byung-Chul Han who argues that the revolutionary remedy is foreclosed by neoliberalism.


Why is the neoliberal system of domination so stable? Why is there so little resistance to it? Why does the resistance that does occur so quickly come to naught? Why, despite the ever-expanding divide between rich and poor, is revolution no longer possible? To explain this state of affairs, we need a precise understanding of how power and domination function today.

In disciplinary and industrial society, system-preserving power was repressive. Factory workers were brutally exploited by factory owners. Such violent exploitation of others’ labour entailed acts of protest and resistance. There, it was possible for a revolution to topple the standing relations of production. In that system of repression, both the oppressors and the oppressed were visible. There was a concrete opponent — a visible enemy —and one could offer resistance.

The neoliberal system of domination has a wholly different structure. Now, system-preserving power no longer works through repression, but through seduction — that is, it leads us astray. It is no longer visible, as was the case under the regime of discipline. Now, there is no longer a concrete opponent, no enemy suppressing freedom that one might resist.

Neoliberalism turns the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise. Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themself and feels ashamed. People see themselves, not society, as the problem.

...According to Naomi Klein, the state of social shock following catastrophes such as the financial crisis in South Korea — or the current crisis in Greece — offers the chance to radically reprogram society by force. Today, there is hardly any resistance in South Korea. Quite the opposite: a vast consensus prevails — as well as depression and burnout. South Korea now has the world’s highest suicide rate. People enact violence on themselves instead of seeking to change society. Aggression directed outward, which would entail revolution, has yielded to aggression directed inward, against oneself.

Today, no collaborative, networked multitude exists that might rise up in a global mass of protest and revolution. Instead, the prevailing mode of production is based on lonesome and isolated self-entrepreneurs, who are also estranged from themselves. Companies used to compete with each other. Within each enterprise, however, solidarity could occur. Today, everyone is competing against everyone else — and within the same enterprise, too. Even though such competition heightens productivity by leaps and bounds, it destroys solidarity and communal spirit. No revolutionary mass can arise from exhausted, depressive, and isolated individuals.

Neoliberalism cannot be explained in Marxist terms. The famous “alienation” of labour does not even occur. Today, we dive eagerly into work — until we burn out. The first stage of burnout syndrome, after all, is euphoria. Burnout and revolution are mutually exclusive. Accordingly, it is mistaken to believe that the Multitude will cast off the parasitic Empire to inaugurate a communist society.

So, if Mr. Han's dystopian vision is right, it's time to put down your pitchfork and pick up your bucket and mop. Clean up on Aisle 4. Get busy.

Give Russia the Boot

As expected, the World Anti-Doping Agency has released a report concluding that performance-enhancing doping of Russian athletes is so rampant and systemic that Russia should be suspended from competition by track and field's governing body.

It seems that Russia has become a little bit - okay, a lot - like what we came to expect from East Germany.

A Business View of the TPP. Will We Heed the Warning? Is It Too Late?

Now that he's been consigned to irrelevance, NDP leader Mulcair is denouncing the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal as the worst ever. I never put much stock in Mulcair's views as it was just too hard to keep up with what they were from one week to the next.

That said, I place a lot more credence when an established Canadian businessman describes the TPP as the worst thing Harper did to Canada.

Jim Balsillie warns that provisions tucked into the Trans-Pacific Partnership could cost Canada hundreds of billions of dollars — and eventually make signing it the worst public policy decision in the country's history.

After poring over the treaty's final text, the businessman who helped build Research In Motion into a $20-billion global player said the deal contains "troubling" rules on intellectual property that threaten to make Canada a "permanent underclass" in the economy of selling ideas.

"I'm not a partisan actor, but I actually think this is the worst thing that the Harper government has done for Canada," the former co-chief executive of RIM said in an interview after studying large sections of the 6,000-page document, released to the public last week.

"I think in 10 years from now, we'll call that the signature worst thing in policy that Canada's ever done...

"It's a treaty that structures everything forever — and we can't get out of it."

Life's a Funny Old Thing

Isn't it curious how, when it comes to trade deals, governments willingly, sometimes foolishly, even rashly, surrender some pretty important incidents of state sovereignty, but when it comes to climate change and, especially, agreements to slash greenhouse gas emissions, the national sovereignty issue is used to thwart any outside interference.

We'll agree, promise even, to cut emissions by this amount or that by this year and that, but don't you dare monitor us. We'll tell you how we're doing and you'll just have to take us at our word. Don't even think about enforcement, actually holding us to our word. No, no, no - sovereign states don't tolerate that sort of meddling.

When it comes to climate change, one of the top voices is that of Hans Joachin "John" Schellnhuber of Germany's Potsdam Institute. He's Angela Merkel's 'go to guy.'  Same, same for Pope Francis.

Schellnhuber is guardedly optimistic that the Paris climate summit in December might just spark something unstoppable - other than global warming. What he's hoping for is nothing less than an implosion of the global carbon economy.

“If some countries really honour their pledges, including China, Brazil, South Africa, US and Europe, I think we will get a dynamic that will transform the development of the century. This is not sheer optimism – it is based on analysis of how incumbent systems implode.”

In July, Schellnhuber told a science conference in Paris that the world needed “an induced implosion of the carbon economy over the next 20-30 years. Otherwise we have no chance of avoiding dangerous, perhaps disastrous, climate change.”

“The avalanche will start because ultimately nothing can compete with renewables,” he told the Guardian. “If you invest at [large] scale, inevitably we will end up with much cheaper, much more reliable, much safer technologies in the energy system: wind, solar, biomass, tidal, hydropower. It is really a no-brainer, if you take away all the ideological debris and lobbying.”

The hook here is, "if some countries really honour their pledges." If. 

The key, he said, was that these pledges are honoured and future reviews deliver the rest of the cuts needed. But he warned there will be no international force to check and enforce carbon cuts, as nations would not allow such a challenge to their sovereignty.

“The verification will not be delivered by an international scheme,” he said. “You will not send in emissions inspectors like people wanted to send to Iran [for nuclear technology inspections].” Instead, he said: “It is prestige, it is image, it is a moral issue, it is how you appear to the world. If the Chinese, for example, make a pledge, they want to keep it. They do not want to lose face.”