Of Trump and Le Pen and Populism, Xenophobia and Neo-Nationalism

Not even the Globe's Margaret Wente can imagine Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination much less the White House. I would like, for once, to think Maggie is right but there's a lingering unease to this question.

Many countries experience the phenomenon that results when populism mates with extremism resulting in a hyper-nationalism blended into a particularly vulgar xenophobia. Usually these things run their course and then get rejected, spat out. Think 'Tail Gunner' Joe McCarthy. Every now and then, however, the extremist seed sprouts and is nurtured and grows into fruition, an event that often leads to persecution, oppression and wars.

There seems to be some tipping point, past which a new (yet carefully contrived) reality supplants, even erases the past. It's not evolution but revolution and the past is utterly eclipsed, its values and precepts and institutions swept aside. These things of the past have to go because they're incompatible, irreconcilable with or even simply repugnant to the new order.

You'll find plenty of histories recounting the transformation of the German republic when Weimar was eradicated to make way for the Third Reich. What is less well recounted is how the German people were harnessed to this new and incredibly powerful ideology.

German POWs, Juno beach

I caught a glimpse into this by reading a couple of cheap Kindle books that contained interviews of German soldiers who had participated in the Allied invasion of France on D-Day, 6 June, 1944. These interviews were conducted ten years on when West Germany was beginning its economic revival. The subjects were infantrymen, tankers of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, and just one Luftwaffe pilot.

By the time of the interviews the war was over and the subjects had probably spent a year or two as prisoners of war before being released. They were no longer being fed NAZI propaganda but it was clear they still held to a lot of their engineered beliefs.

Of all the subjects one, just one, accepted the moral justification of the Allied landings. That individual was reconciled to the monstrous brutality of the NAZI regime, especially the murder of millions of Jews. None of the others mentioned it. The exceptional veteran saw in the Normany invasion the liberation not only of occupied Europe but also of his own Germany.

As for the others, they saw no moral justification for D-Day. Many of them saw themselves as actually defending France against the territorial ambitions of Britain, American "bankers" (code for Jewish financiers) all in league with the Bolsheviks to crush Germany.

About half of the interview subjects were insistent that they had a legitimate cause, the defence of what they saw as "United Europe." To them, Hitler hadn't conquered and occupied old Europe. He had bestowed a benevolent unity to these other countries to the benefit of all. They fashioned their Fuhrer as a latter day Napoleon. To their mind, the Allies were the enemies not just of Germany and the Axis powers but of all the occupied countries of Europe. The British and Americans were merely sapping Germany's ability to defeat and destroy Stalin's Communists. It was all a grand conspiracy.

The hypocrisy in their observations and criticisms was just phenomenal and it became obvious that required an intensely warped perception of reality cloaked in a pretty nasty ideology to sustain. It was almost as though it was constructed in multiple layers, each building on others and becoming ever more brittle and strident as Germany's wartime fortunes collapsed.

Perhaps the lesson in this is that, once that ideological tipping point is passed, the narrative can metastasize until reality - fact and evidence-based - is discounted to the point of irrelevance, replaced by a dark and deeply embedded delusion - something, anything to cling to as desperation overwhelms and nihilism takes hold.


Update:  Somewhat off topic.  Among the interview subjects were a number who were captured by Canadian soldiers at Juno beach. While Germans captured by the Americans or British recounted instances of their captors gunning down surrendering soldiers, those captured by Canadians were uniformly high in the praise of their captors. They all said that the Canadian soldiers fought like animals but once the need for shooting was over, the murderous animus simply left them.

Nowhere to Run. Nowhere to Hide.

Greenhouse gas emissions and how to wrestle them to the ground are key elements of the Paris climate summit, COP 21. The negotiations have an element of a poker game to them. Nations argue, cajole and connive based on the state of their own and other nations' emissions. There can be a powerful incentive for some to bluff, to lie and, so far, it has worked moderately well.

What to do with those countries, inevitably the major GHG emitters, who might have reason to fudge (downward) their own numbers? That's where a "spy in the sky" could come in.

Satellites that could monitor and track greenhouse gas emissions are under development.

Most estimates of greenhouse gas emissions are now based on calculations of energy use and other proxy data, rather than on-the-ground measurements, leaving a huge margin of error when nations submit their figures to the United Nations.

While space-based measurement is unlikely to be mentioned in any deal agreed by the nearly 200 countries negotiating in Paris, the European Union is leading a push for a universal system of measuring, reporting and verifying emissions data.

European and Japanese satellites have been monitoring overall carbon concentrations in the atmosphere since 2002, but calculating emissions at a national or local level is far harder.

For example, the margin of error for China, presumed to be the world's top carbon polluter, is greater than the entire carbon footprint of Europe, according to experts.

Earlier this year, new data showed that China had consumed substantially more coal in 2014 than earlier reported, causing big revisions to carbon calculations. An earlier report showed its carbon output between 2000 and 2013 was about 3 billion tonnes less than previously estimated.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), launched its first satellite to measure atmospheric CO₂ in July last year.

The challenge now is to convert the images – which pick up carbon concentrations in the form of yellow, orange, and red blobs – into emissions data, Steven Pawson, chief of the Global Modelling and Assimilation Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, said.

NASA scientist Lesley Ott said that the satellite, named OCO-2, also showed there was potential to zoom into urban areas to record carbon pollution. A new device with that capability, OCO-3, has been developed for use on the International Space Station, but has been delayed by budget constraints, she said.

It would be a huge advance to have verifiable emissions numbers for major emissions sources such as the Athabasca Tar Sands, or Christy Clark's 'out of sight/out of mind' natural gas development in northern British Columbia, or America's gas fracking fields. It would also be a canary in the coal mine to have accurate, timely data on feedback loops such as the discharge of seabed methane or the methane and CO2 emissions from tundra fires and the thawing permafrost beneath.

The sooner, the better. Knowledge is power. In this case it could be the power to survive.

PHOTO: An artist's depiction of NASA's "Afternoon Constellation" or "A-Train" comprising five Earth-observing satellites.  Last year, OCO2, NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory was added to the A-Train.

Scalia's Open Racism

When moral corruption has infected your nation's highest court, how broken is your judicial system?

The court to which I refer is the United States Supreme Court, as politicized a court as we've seen in the English-speaking world for many centuries. It's a place that nurtures neoliberalism and lards it with hefty dollops of racism when and as required.

Enter Antonin Scalia, such a batshit crazy right winger that even Bush/Cheney brought in an outsider rather than hand him the Chief Justice slot. This is what rolled off Scalia's lips today:

Justice Scalia: There are—there are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to—to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less—a slower-track school where they do well. One of—one of the briefs pointed out that—that most of the—most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.

Mr. Garre: So this Court—

Justice Scalia: They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re—that they’re being pushed ahead in—in classes that are too—too fast for them.

Blacks can't function at quality schools, ergo they're better off at "lesser (i.e. black) schools".

Where are America's lawyers in all of this? Where is the once powerful American Bar Association? Their silence is their acquiescence in Scalia's racist outrage and it becomes their complicity.

I am very uncomfortable with the parallels being drawn between post-9/11 America and fascism of an earlier era yet some are inescapable. Scalia's observations seem reminiscent of the "unter-menschen" ideology of racist inferiority that should be repugnant in any free, democratic state.

Who Writes this Guy's Stuff, Donald Trump? Turkey's PM Accuses Russia of Ethnic Cleansing in Syria.

Turkey, renowned home of the Armenian Genocide and legendary oppressor of Kurds both within and beyond its borders, is accusing Russia of waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Syria.

Turkey’s prime minister accused Russia on Wednesday of attempted “ethnic cleansing” in northern Syria, saying Moscow was trying to drive out the local Turkmen and Sunni Muslim populations to protect its military interests in the region.

Ahmet Davutoglu’s comments could further harm strained relations between Moscow and Ankara, already at their worst in recent memory after Turkish forces downed a Russian warplane near the Turkish-Syrian border late last month.

“Russia is trying to make ethnic cleansing in northern Latakia to force (out) all Turkmen and Sunni population who do not have good relations with the regime,” Davutoglu told foreign reporters in Istanbul.

“They want to expel them, they want to ethnically cleanse this area so that the regime (of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) and Russian bases in Latakia and Tartus are protected,” he said, speaking English.

Duffy Fingers Tkachuk

There'll be blood on the floor of an Ottawa courtroom before this day is over.

Senator Mike Duffy has opened fire on the senior Tory Senate leadership who ruled the roost during the heyday of the Harper regime. He began with veteran senator Dave Tkachuk:

“He was a senior member of the leadership of the Conservative caucus in the senate, he was deputy chair of the Senate committee on budgets and internal economy,” Duffy said, under questioning from his own lawyer, Donald Bayne. “He was the No. 2 man on the committee that ran the business of the Senate … and our guru on all things related to Senate operations.”

The longtime Ontario resident’s appointment as a P.E.I. senator was instantly challenged by political opponents, including a prominent Island legal expert, and Tkachuk told him claiming the housing allowance was important for shutting those opponents down.

“The housing allowance is to defray part of the cost of your second home. There’s no reason for you to be penalized, no parliamentarian, for having two homes,” Tkachuk said, according to Duffy’s testimony. “It’s very important that you claim all the claims and allowances. Because if you don’t, if you create any light between you and any other senator who’s on travel status while in Ottawa, but most particularly any Prince Edward Island senator, then the professor will come back and say, ‘See, he’s different, he’s not an Islander.’”

Duffy himself didn’t believe he should claim “per-diems” for meals he ate in his own home, he testified. “(Tkachuk) said you’ve got to claim them. Because not to do so could create controversy around whether you’re truly a Prince Edward Island senator … You must do this.”

Tkachuk also told him that whenever he travelled to boost the Conservative party profile, he was doing Senate work and should charge his expenses to the Senate, Duffy testified. Such claims are part of another set of charges Duffy faces.

Tkachuk's political career began as principal secretary to premier Grant Devine who led the most corrupt government in Saskatchewan history.

Trump Seems to Like His Terrorism with an Irish Lilt

Here's a delightful pair - Jerry Adams and Donald Trump - at a Sinn Fein fundraiser in New York in 1995 a few months before the Canary Wharf bombings by the Provisional IRA.



Hey, guess what's flying off the shelves in Mexico just in time for Christmas? It's the wildly popular Donald Trump pinata.

See, if you hit him with a stick often enough, you might find there is something great inside.

My Bad

My favourite self-proclaimed Liberal posted a photo under the title, "Old snapshot of unknown religious refugee family, hiding in a barn, after being denied a home by a politician." 

I tried to leave a comment asking if this meant he'd finally heard of the Palestinians. Naturally, it was blocked - no response.  I guess he didn't see the parallels. Guess we'll never know.

Come to think of it, weren't both persecuted by the then governing Israeli authority? Didn't Herod order that baby put to death?

Phillie Mayor Sums Up Donald Trump in One Word - You Won't Want to Miss It.

It's the "Trump Phenomenon" and Philadelphia mayor, Michael Nutter, captures it in one almost elegant (for Trump) word.



A 'nasshole'? Not sure I've heard of such a thing. Must be something the kids made up. I'm sure we didn't have any nassholes back in my day.

What's that? Oh, oh okay, yeah, I get it. We did have more than a few of those back then too. Only Trump's seems bigger, all-consuming in a way.

BTW - you know where Trump got all his stats about Muslim extremism and disloyal, even treacherous Muslim-Americans? He got it from this guy, his fellow sphincter, the major domo of batshit crazy, neo-con conspiracy theorists, Frank Gaffney. This raging Islamophobe is straight out of Sideshow Steve Harper's tailpipe.

Monitoring Climate Change - From Space

Sometimes the best way to make sense of climate change on Earth is to leave Earth. Satellites can efficiently and accurately scan the entire planet, day in and day out, tracking our rapidly changing climate.

The European Space Agency is presenting an online course, "Climate from Space," in conjunction with the Paris climate summit, COP 21. It began last week but there's still plenty of time to catch up. You can access it via FutureLearn. It's important, it's timely and it's free.

Here's a trailer that may pique your interest.

The Cavendish Cottager Takes the Stand. Duffy Fights Back?

The life and times of Michael Dennis Duffy is getting top billing at Ottawa's courthouse today.  Duffy is on the stand and he's taking the court and spectators on a trip down Memory Lane.

Kadey O'Malley is live blogging the event.

Update:

There's certainly some interesting reading in O'Malley's posts. It's pretty obvious that, in true Don Bayne fashion, Duffy's testimony is going to be relaxed and extensive and, yes, that's code for "long winded."

Yet we see a few subtle digs. For example, Duffy testifies that Harper never directly told his minions to do things. He had his staffers relay his orders to protect Harper's plausible deniability.

So far Duffy's testimony has touched on Harper, Wright, Senators Wallin, Tkachuk, Stewart-Olsen and Lebreton. I wonder where this is heading but it sure sounds foundational.

Seeing Is Believing. Right There, in the Washington Post.

Exxon representatives made a pretty startling admission recently when meeting Washington Post editors.

"With no government action, Exxon experts told us during a visit to The Post last week, average temperatures are likely to rise by a catastrophic (my word, not theirs) 5 degrees Celsius, with rises of 6, 7 or even more quite possible."

Now let's take that piece by piece. We know that even with 2 degrees Celsius of warming, just 1C past where we stand today in 2015, we and just about every other living thing are probably screwed. How exactly we'll be screwed depends on how and where you're living when the screwing arrives. There's no end of possibilities, none of them particularly pleasant.

And so Exxon foresees 5C of heating, possibly 6 or 7, if we going along with business as usual. Germany's Potsdam Institute presented a great online course earlier this year exploring what life would be like in a 4C world with lectures by top climate scientists from Europe and North America. In one word, it would be "unlivable."

Potsdam's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber told reporters last July that avoiding runaway climate change required nothing short of an "induced implosion of the carbon economy." That is about as blunt as it gets. That's the "government action" we need.

Exxon thinks carbon taxes will do the trick but there's a bit of cognitive dissonance in the energy giant's position. Exxon's bottom line is to keep extracting fossil fuels and just raise the prices with a layer of carbon taxes.

Here's the thing. We know that to have any reasonable chance of avoiding runaway global warming we have to leave 80% of known fossil fuel reserves untouched, in the ground. Corporate and, in some jurisdictions, criminal law requires the board and executive of Big Fossil companies to disclose to shareholders and investors material change in circumstances and having to write off trillions of dollars of assets from their balance sheets is about as material as it gets. These companies have some massive liabilities that are offset by these energy reserves at market prices. Tell them they have to leave those reserves untouched and the financial viability of some of the biggest corporations on the planet falls through the collapsing floor. Havoc ensues across world markets. Institutional investors and a good chunk of the 1% take a bath.

As a vehicle to stop fossil fuel production, carbon taxes are going to have to be brutally high, well beyond a mere cost of doing business. And the money raised by those carbon taxes will be needed to speed the transition to alternative energy sources. It has to be used to drive the fossil fuelers out of business. Now what do you think a targeted plan like that would do an investor's energy stock portfolio? Can't be helped.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (if you can call Paris a "ranch"), the Trudeau government continues to surprise and delight.

Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna told a stunned crowd that she wants the Paris agreement to restrict planetary warming to just 1.5 Celsius warming —not two degrees. It was the first time she has made such a statement.

In the room was former CBC meteorologist Claire Martin, a Green Party observer at the talks. “I was freaking out,” she said. "I was writing it all down like a nut."

Reading from her notes, Martin reported the minister’s remarks like so: "'We want to send a strong political signal.’ The necessity, that she sees, is one in which we transition sustainably.”

“But she was quite clear —‘I support the goals of 1.5’— and echoed the comments of another party about human rights and indigenous peoples. Canada supports legally binding provisions, and we are committed to following through.”

Wowser, 1.5C it shall be. That doesn't leave much wiggle room for carbon taxes. It's a tall order, almost Herculean. (That should be enough to knock the hinges off every Dipper's backhouse door) Even the Greens are in awe.

To recap - Exxon seems to be coming around but they're still full of shit. We will have to put the boots to them. And the Liberal government just keeps on rolling out the hits.

Too Good to Be True?

Jimmy Carter says he's now cancer free. America's most progressive president of the postwar era says a recent MRI scan found no signs of the original cancer or any new problems. Carter had been diagnosed with melanoma in his brain.

The New York Daily News Comes Down on Gun Terrorism in America - Fingers LaPierre

The front page says it all.

Be Wrinkled, Be Happy

Who knew? Grey hair and wrinkles bring happiness.

Here's a discussion on the latest research claiming to show that, the older you get, the less you.. oh, I don't know... maybe the less you give a shit?

This I do know. With climate change and all its associated impacts, the other looming existential threats, overpopulation, over-consumption of essential resources, malignant wars seemingly without end and so on, the prospect of departing this mortal coil isn't quite as grim as it used to be.

UPDATE:

Friend Ray sent this along. I think you'll readily get his point.

Trudeau Calls it Right on ISIS Air War

The Globe's Jeffrey Stevens criticizes prime minister Trudeau's decision to pull Canada's CF-18 sixpack out of America's aerial coalition bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Stevens complaint is that our "allies will remember" what he contends is Canada's feckless abandonment of the collective cause.

Stevens, of course, doesn't know his ass from his elbow about the Kabuki theatre underway in the Syrian air war and, quite obviously, couldn't care less. Enter a guy who does know a good deal about these things, Gwynne Dyer.

Mr. Dyer points out that when it comes to Syria, NATO is being played for a sucker by Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan.

President Putin said bitterly that Erdogan and his colleagues were "accomplices of terrorists". That's hard to deny: Erdogan is so eager to see Syria's President Bashar al-Assad overthrown that he left the Turkish-Syrian border open for four years so that recruits and supplies could reach the Syrian rebel groups, notably including Islamic State (IS).

Putin also observed that "We have long been recording the movement of a large amount of oil and petroleum products to Turkey from IS-occupied territories. This explains the significant funding the terrorists are receiving."

Black-market oil is Islamic State's largest source of revenue, and almost all of it goes to Turkey - which could not happen without the Turkish government's active connivance. And when the Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, was driving Assad's forces back in northwestern Syria last spring, Turkey jammed the Syrian army's telecommunications to help the rebels win.

Erdogan is utterly determined that Assad must go, and he doesn't really care if Assad's successors are Islamist extremists. But he also wants to ensure that there is no new Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border.

That is a problem for him, because that state already exists in embryo. It is called Rojava, a territory that the Syrian Kurds have carved out in the far north of the country along the Turkish border, mainly by fighting Islamic State. Indeed, the Syrian Kurds are the US-led coalition's only effective ally on the ground against IS.

When Erdogan committed the Turkish air force to the Syrian war in July, he explained it to the United States as a decision to fight against Islamic State, but in fact Turkey has made only a token handful of strikes against IS. Almost all Erdogan's bombs have actually fallen on the Turkish Kurds of the PKK (who had been observing a ceasefire with the Turkish government for the past four years), and above all on the Syrian Kurds

Erdogan has two goals: to ensure the destruction of Assad's regime, and to prevent the creation of a new Kurdish state in Syria. He was making some progress on both objectives - and then along came the Russians in September and saved the Syrian army from defeat, at least for the moment.

Worse yet, Putin's strategy turns out to quite pragmatic, and even rather attractive to the United States despite all the ritual anti-Russian propaganda emitted by Washington. Putin wants a ceasefire in Syria that will leave everybody where they are now - except Islamic State, which they can all then concentrate on destroying.

This strategy is now making some headway in the Vienna ceasefire talks, but it is utterly abhorrent to Erdogan because it would leave Assad in power in Damascus, and give the Syrian Kurds time to consolidate their new state. How can he derail this Russian-led project?

Well, he could shoot down a Russian plane, and try to get a confrontation going between Russia and NATO.

If there was ever a time for NATO members to sit one out, this would be it.

Son of Falwell Out to "End Those Muslims."

I don't know how to break this news but it turns out there's a Jerry Falwell Jr. and he's the president of something called Liberty University.

President Falwell is urging Liberty U students to start packing heat. He wants them to carry concealed weapons to class.

“It just blows my mind when I see that the President of the United States [says] that the answer to circumstances like that is more gun control,” he said. “I’ve always thought if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.”

Falwell is the son of the late Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, who infamously blamed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on abortionists and homosexuals.

Several Republican presidential candidates have spoken at Liberty this year, including retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also spoke on campus.

Liberty U is aptly located in Lynchburg, Virginia. Check'em out. They've even got online courses.

ISIS, From the Horse's Mouth

It's a powerful an indictment of Tony Blair, George w. Bush and Dick Cheney: without their war of choice against Iraq, there would be no ISIS today.

In November, Der Spiegel published an interview with former US with former Defense Intelligence Agency director, General Michael Flynn, in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. Some of his remarks are chilling in the context of the recent massacre in San Bernardino.


There were all kinds of strategic and tactical warnings and lots of reporting. And even the guys in the Islamic State said that they were going to attack overseas. I just don't think people took them seriously. When I first heard about the recent attacks in Paris, I was like, "Oh, my God, these guys are at it again, and we're not paying attention." The change that I think we need to be more aware of is that, in Europe, there is a leadership structure. And there's likely a leader or a leadership structure in each country in Europe. The same is probably similar for the United States, but just not obvious yet.

In Osama bin Laden's writings, he elaborated about being disperse, becoming more diffuse and operating in small elements, because it's harder to detect and it's easier to act. In Paris, there were eight guys. In Mali, there were 10. Next time, maybe one or two guys will be enough.

On ISIS leader, Abu Bakh al-Baghdadi:

It's really important to differentiate between the way Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri represent themselves when they come out in public and how al-Baghdadi represented himself when he declared the caliphate. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sit in their videos, legs crossed, flag behind them, and they've got an AK-47 in their laps. They are presenting themselves as warriors. Baghdadi brought himself to a mosque in Mosul and spoke from the balcony, like the pope, dressed in appropriate black garb. He stood there as a holy cleric and proclaimed the Islamic caliphate. That was a very, very symbolic act. It elevated the fight from this sort of military, tactical and localized conflict to that of a religious and global war.

We used to say, "We'll just keep killing the leaders, and the next guy up is not going to be as good." That didn't work out that way because al-Baghdadi is better than Zarqawi, and Zarqawi was actually better than bin Laden.
...Zarqawi tried to bring in foreign fighters, but not in the way that al-Baghdadi has been able to do. At the peak of Zarqawi's days, they may have been bringing in 150 a month from a dozen countries. Al-Baghdadi is bringing in 1,500 fighters a month, from more than 100 nations. He's using the modern weapons of the information age in fundamentally different ways to strengthen the attraction of their ideology. The other thing is how they target. Zarqawi was absolutely brutal -- he randomly killed guys lining up for jobs in downtown Baghdad. Al-Baghdadi is much smarter and more precise in his target selection, but still very vicious.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In February 2004, you already had Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in your hands -- he was imprisoned in in a military camp, but got cleared later as harmless by a US military commission. How could that fatal mistake happen?

Flynn: We were too dumb. We didn't understand who we had there at that moment. When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, "Where did those bastards come from? Let's go kill them. Let's go get them." Instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from. Then we strategically marched in the wrong direction.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The US invaded Iraq even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.

Flynn: First we went to Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was based. Then we went into Iraq. Instead of asking ourselves why the phenomenon of terror occurred, we were looking for locations. This is a major lesson we must learn in order not to make the same mistakes again.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Islamic State wouldn't be where it is now without the fall of Baghdad. Do you regret ...


Flynn: ... yes, absolutely ...

SPIEGEL ONLINE: ... the Iraq war?

Flynn: It was huge error. As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him. The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.

For a Country That Admires Bibi Netanyahu More Than Pope Francis, This Probably Makes Sense

Well, at least this takes American Muslims off the hook for the San Bernardino massacre. Blame it on abortions. Here's Christo-fascist Alex McFarland to explain:

A Vancouver Woman's War on ISIS

46-year old Hanna Bohman of Vancouver is in Iraq fighting alongside Kurdish women soldiers against ISIS forces. She's got her own opinions of the guys she's shooting at.

From her experience of fighting the extremist group, Ms Bohman said the West's perception of Isis as a powerful force is misleading.

"They're not some giant, holy juggernaut of ultimate damnation for unbelievers," she told Business Insider.

"They’re just a bunch of filthy, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging pigs who run away at the first sign of resistance."

"Really nothing more than a thorn in the side."

..."It's not what people expect," she told Business Insider. "We're not constantly locked in a life or death battle with bullets and mortars flying back and forth."

She also said the most pressing issue was not Isis itself, but who Isis works for.

Ms Bohman said the extremist terrorist cell was working in part for President Erdogan of Turkey, who she said wanted the terrorists to eliminate the Kurdish "threat" to Turkey's national sovereignty.

"It's Turkey's genocidal Erdogan...who will eventually turn Turkey into a dictatorship while trying to kill off the Kurds," she told Business Insider.

I wonder how many F-18s Ms. Bohman is worth. More than you might imagine, I expect.

And Just How Well Is That Working For You?

The United States Air Force is running low on stuff to toss at Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria. To date the USAF says it has 'delivered' (you know, like Amazon) some 22,000 bombs and missiles in its campaign, going through the stuff "faster than we can replenish them."

Now that's just the US air force. The American navy and marines have their own records. And it doesn't include America's coalition - Australia, France, Britain, ex-Canada and the three or four bombs dropped in the sand by the Saudis and their Gulf State allies.

In 2014, American estimates put the overall strength of ISIS forces at 20-31,500. I guess some of them would just have to share a bomb.

That, however, may be wishful thinking. Senior Kurdish leaders says that, while we've been earnestly bombing Islamic State forces their numbers have increased perhaps upwards of 200,000.


Proof that Isis has created a large field army at great speed is that it has been launching attacks against the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Iraqi army close to Baghdad at the same time as it is fighting in Syria. "They are fighting in Kobani," said Mr Hussein. "In Kurdistan last month they were attacking in seven different places as well as in Ramadi [capital of Anbar province west of Baghdad] and Jalawla [an Arab-Kurdish town close to Iranian border]. It is impossible to talk of 20,000 men or so."

The high figure for Isis's combat strength is important because it underlines how difficult it will be eliminate Isis even with US air strikes. In September, the CIA produced an estimate of Isis numbers which calculated that the movement had between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters. The underestimate of the size of the force that Isis can deploy may explain why the US and other foreign governments have been repeatedly caught by surprise over the past five months as IS inflicted successive defeats on the Iraqi army, Syrian army, Syrian rebels and Kurdish peshmerga.

Where is John "Bomber" McCain now that we need him to tell these ISIS guys that we've got them whipped?

The Grey Lady Challenges America on Gun Control

For the first time in 95-years, the New York Times has printed its editorial smack dab on the front page. America's "Grey Lady" is demanding an end to the "gun epidemic" in the US, beginning with assault rifles.



All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.

But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency?

Reality Check:

Here's Nevada state representative Michelle Fiore's Christmas card. Michelle is the blonde.

An Eye-Opener from Brookings Institute

There's a Brookings survey of American attitudes toward the Middle East.

One question asked respondents who was the world leader they most admired.

In first place, not surprisingly, was Barack Obama, 16%. Reagan claimed second with 7%.

Third place honours went to Benjamin Netanyahu at 6%, just a bit shy of Reagan. Vlad Putin cinched fifth at 3%. Sandwiched between and betwixt Netanyahu and Putin was Pope Francis in fourth place at 5%.

Really, Pope Francis in 4th, trailing Netanyahu. There is something seriously f__ked up with those people.

Here's a link to the report findings.

We Know It's Going to Get a Bit Ugly Soon. Sooner Than We Might Have Wished.

The Liberals are on top and the opposition parties will very soon come gunning for them. It's called Parliamentary democracy and a new day is upon us.

During the Harper 'Age of Darkness', self-styled Progressives of the 'anything left of Harper Conservative' stripe reached an uncomfortable and often ignored truce to concentrate on toppling Beelzebub. It's only too bad that they didn't do that of their own volition just one election earlier. Harper would never have won his majority absent Layton's determined attack on Ignatieff - all to score, for one term, the cherished spot of Loyal Opposition.

It's good to keep these realities in mind as our former, albeit somewhat frosty, friends turn on the ABC government they still think ought to have been theirs.

I'm a Green but, to you Reds, I say this. In going ahead with your agenda, which so many Canadians embrace, remember you're sailing alone. The biggest challenge will remain from the Conservatives, Canada's neo-Republican party.

It's not them you need to fear, however. It's the New Democrats. If Layton and Mulcair have proven anything, it's that today's NDP will never allow principle to thwart their quest for power.  They've shown that they would do whatever it took for a result even if it meant Harper ruled with a false majority to the sustained and possibly indelible detriment of the country.

They're pissed off. After they abandoned the Left and became indecently center-right, Justin and the Libs reclaimed the center and flooded into the Left. Mulcair was left sitting there with his pecker in his hand as he watched his party's support bleed out.

We may be embarking on a return of old-school Liberalism. The opposition parties are physically wounded and in a vacuum politically. The divisions are no longer in the arc of the center. It's well to the Right of that, exactly where the NDP should not be.

To get decisively left of the Liberals today would be to abandon any aspirations beyond the old NDP of yesteryear. Just at the worst moment, they chose to abandon questing for power from the Left. In many ways that's what we need today more than ever but the NDP chose to follow another direction.

This thing is going to become ugly. The old school Tories will be fighting for the heart and soul of Conservatism. The dominant Reform crowd  were pretty nasty during Harper's reign. I know that Harper intimidated dissent within the PC contingent.

Some of those old school Conservatives voted for Trudeau in the last election. Others gave the polls a pass. Their party understands this. What I've been told is that the Party has heard that some of these former Tory stalwarts won't be back until the PC faction is again in control. And this rift won't impair the Cons as Parliament goes through this term? Wait and see.

A similar keel-righting ordeal awaits the NDP. The Leftist 'heart and soul' of the party had been essentially silenced as first Layton and then Mulcair sought to transform the party into a copy of Blair's Labour. They had before them all the ills that emerged from the Blairification of the Labour Party, but they wanted the NDP to follow suit regardless.

This Parliament may wind up unique in the amount of political energy and capital on the part of both opposition parties expended on in-house jousting. Some senior Tories seem to dread the event, asking that the leadership contest be postponed far into the future. The New Dems also don't seem to have much appetite for scathing self-examination.

Interesting times await just ahead.

Bombs Won't Stop ISIS From Shooting Up Some Canadian City.

It's probably only a matter of time before some maniacs start shooting up some venue in Canada in the name of the Islamic State. It doesn't matter how much we bomb or don't bomb. It's not a military problem but a security problem that depends more on intelligence and police techniques more than the heavy metal of tanks, artillery and strike fighters.

As revealed in the scientific journal, Nature, these atrocities are being orchestrated by "entrepreneurs" who are immersed in Islamist ideology and use their expertise with social media to recruit, radicalize and dispatch suicide bombers, gunmen, whatever it takes wherever they choose.

We need a concerted effort, probably some new technologies as well, to track down these entrepreneurs because they could be anywhere that chaos reigns - Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan.

In the meantime we have to steel ourselves for some terrorist outrage, probably in one of our major cities. Recognize that the risks to most of us are minuscule. These thugs cannot begin to take down our society, our government. We absolutely must reject the unscrupulous who will exploit an incident to extract political points. There's no government in the world - French, German, British, American, Canadian - that can guarantee there'll be no terrorist attack on their soil. It simply can't be done.

Germany's MemoGate. The BND Fingers the Saudis.

Angela Merkel isn't happy about this. Somebody, presumably from German intelligence, leaked a memo to the media concerning the Saudi leadership and how it's destabilizing the Middle East.

The memo was distributed to selected German journalists on Wednesday. In it, the foreign intelligence agency, known as the BND, offered an unusually frank assessment of recent Saudi policy.

"The cautious diplomatic stance of the older leading members of the royal family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention," said the memo, which was titled "Saudi Arabia - Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation" and was 1 1/2 pages long.

The memo said that King Salman and his son Prince Mohammed bin Salman were trying to build reputations as leaders of the Arab world.

In its memo, the BND said that Saudi rivalry with Iran for supremacy in the Middle East, as well as Saudi dependency on the United States, were the main drivers of Saudi foreign policy.

The Saudi-Iranian rivalry plays out throughout the region, the memo said, most recently and strikingly in the Saudi military intervention in Yemen. There, the memo said, "Saudi Arabia wants to prove that it is ready to take unprecedented military, financial and political risks in order not to fall into a disadvantageous position in the region". 

The leak sent the German foreign ministry into panicked denial.

The intelligence agency's memo was flatly repudiated by the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, which said the German Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had issued a statement making clear that "the BND statement reported by media is not the position of the federal government".

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, "is in regular contact with his Saudi colleague Adel Al-Jubair, and has always stressed that the federal government counts on constructive cooperation with Saudi Arabia," the statement added. 

"The BND certainly does not speak for German foreign policy, and definitely not through third parties" like the media, the government official said, adding that political advances in Syria and the Middle East in general could be achieved only with "constructive cooperation with Saudi Arabia."

Once again we're seeing how, in the West, the political caste closes ranks around the House of Saud and the instrumental role it plays in the turmoil that wracks the Middle East.

The Science and Myths of Modern Terrorism

It's an odd subject to find its way into the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, but, sure enough, there you may find a report on a scientific exploration of modern terrorism, as experienced recently in Europe, and the myths that can mislead us in dealing with the problem.

The first myth is that these terrorist attacks are rooted in the Muslim religion. Apparently not so:

The rise of jihad in Europe has led to an assumption that there is a radicalization of Muslims more generally across the continent. Yet research suggests that most extremists are either people who returned suddenly to Islam or converts with no Islamic background, says Olivier Roy, who specializes in political Islam and the Middle East at Italy’s European University Institute near Florence — and as many as one in four French jihadists is a convert. Roy summarized the latest research at a conference organized in Mainz on 18–19 November by the German Federal Criminal Police Office.

Violent extremism emerges first, with a religious justification tagged on after, adds Rik Coolsaet, head of political science at Ghent University in Belgium, who studies jihadis and foreign policy. He notes that two young British men who were jailed last year on terrorism offences after fighting in Syria had earlier ordered online the books Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies.

Most terrorists are radicalized not by their religion but out of their resentments.

The characteristics that extremists seem to share are resentment directed at society and a narcissistic need for recognition that leaves them open to a narrative of violent glory, said Roy.

Social factors can contribute to such frustrations, according to Farhad Khosrokhavar, a CNRS researcher who works at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. Almost all European extremists and terrorists are second- and third-generation immigrants, whom Khosrokhavar says are often “stigmatized, rejected and treated as second-class citizens”.

Terrorism Breeds in Prisons

The three terrorists involved in the January attack in Paris on the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, as well as some of the 13 November attackers, had all done time.

Many French terrorists have a history of petty crime that landed them in prison. Stays there often proved seminal experiences on their path to radicalization, says Khosrokhavar, who spent several years interviewing some 160 staff and inmates at 4 large French prisons, including 15 inmates sentenced for terrorism offences. He says that prisoners often come under the influence of — and form lasting bonds with — radical Islamists and terrorist networks.


Terrorism has its own Entrepreneurs. They Run the Show.

Most of those who get involved in jihadi terrorism in Europe are “misfits and drifters” — people who joined militant networks during life crises or through friends and relatives on the inside, saysPetter Nesser, a terrorism researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment in Kjeller.

But he says that the key actors in terrorist activity are a much smaller number of “entrepreneurs”. These seasoned, ideologically driven activists are part of transnational terrorist webs linked both to extremist groups throughout Europe and to armed groups in conflict zones. They are the ones who bring structure and organization to the disaffected majority, through recruitment and indoctrination.

There is No Den of Terrorism. It's Not Confined to Ethnic Ghettoes.

Several of the terrorists involved in the latest Paris attacks, and the perpetrators of previous attacks in Europe, had lived in the Molenbeek district of Brussels, which has a large Muslim community, mostly of Moroccan descent. This has led some politicians and media outlets to label it Europe’s terrorism capital — and to blame factors such as social deprivation or an apparent lack of integration of Muslims.

“This is misleading,” says Nesser. Jihadi hot spots have emerged across Europe in environments ranging from poor suburbs, to universities and schools, to prisons. The key ingredient in the spread of jihadism in any location is a critical mass of jihadist entrepreneurs, he says.

A focus on Molenbeek obscures the fact that European jihadism is transnational, Nesser says, and that its main drivers are armed conflicts and militant groups involved in those conflicts.

And now a Few Prescient Words from John Raulston Saul. Steve Harper, I Think He's Describing You.

One of the delights of revisiting a book one hasn't read in many years is discovering information or perspectives you missed initially that have come to have greater meaning due to events in the intervening years. I'm finding much of that as I again read my way through John Raulston Saul's "The Collapse of Globalism."

In one chapter, Saul explores the rise of technocracy in Europe under the rule of leaders like Valery Giscard D'estaing of France and Germany's Helmut Schmidt. See if any of this resonates with you and how you see our country in 2015.

...Giscard came to power in the midst of those seminal crises of oil, inflation, unemployment and no growth. He counterattacked as best a technocrat could and made no impact. Interest rates were so high that they were bankrupting the private sector without controlling inflation. Giscard became bewildered. Discouraged.

Then one night he appeared on television to address the people. He told them that great global forces were at work. These were new forces, Forces of inevitability. Forces of economic interdependence. There was little a national government could do. He was powerless.

This historic appearance was probably the original declaration of Globalization as a freestanding force escaping the controls of all men. It was also the invention of a new leader; the manager as castrato. This approach created quite a fashion among leaders at all levels. The easy answer to the most difficult problems was increasingly to lament publicly that you were powerless. Impotent. That your large budgets, your public structures, the talents and determination of your population could make little difference. These were not problems to be solved. These were manifestations of the global reality. With your leader/manager friends in other countries you would do your best to round the sharp corners through management of the details.

You might say that globalization became an excuse for not dealing with important problems. Worse than that, this betrayal of the idea of public responsibility - that is, a belief in the possibility of choice - gradually undermined the citizens' confidence in their democracy. People like Giscard made the shibboleth of inevitability credible. It was the return of the fearful priests so central to the darkest moments of the Middle Ages.

...We were witnessing the arrival of the false rationality of managerialism. This was, in M.G. Smith's words, "the basic fallacy of the view that an all-dominating bureaucracy is a more rational or superior organ of government than a controlled bureaucracy." Or Camus: "Nothing being true or false, good or bad, the measurement will be the most efficient, that is the strongest. The world will no longer be divided between just nd unjust, but masters and slaves."

Harper, to his credit, never saw himself as more than a technocrat. As his BFF Tom Flanagan bluntly put it, Harper eschewed vision. It had no place in his playbook. He would embrace the shelter of inevitability and harness us to its yoke while he privately wrestled to manipulate it to serve his ideology.

L.A. Times - "The U.S. infatuation with guns is bordering on a society-wide suicidal impulse"

In the wake of yesterday's mass murders in San Bernardino, the L.A. Times tries to make sense of Americans' infatuation with guns.

When these mass murders occur, the instinct is to take a deep dive into the details to learn as much as is possible about who did what and why. That's important to the investigation of the specific incident, obviously, but it misses the bigger picture, which is that such attacks have become so routine they have almost lost their ability to shock. Phrases such as “active shooter” and “shelter in place” are now part of our lexicon. The Department of Homeland Security has posted a webinar for schools and churches on how to respond to shooters.


Enough. This nation's infatuation with guns — inflamed by the ludicrous stances of the NRA, and abetted by Congress' fear of that powerful but irresponsible group — is suicidal. There are too many guns, too easily obtained. Often they are in the hands of those who should not have them at all, such as the mentally ill.

...There is broad political support for stronger laws to address the nation's gun addiction, but gun control advocates have so far been unable to counter the money and organizational heft of the NRA. It's obscene that a single interest group is able to endanger an entire nation's safety.

The Supreme Court lent credibility to the fully-armed-America crowd in its 2008 Heller decision, which held that the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual's right to bear arms for “traditionally lawful purposes,” such as self-protection in the home. It's a wrongheaded interpretation of wording that for decades was rightly understood to mean that organized military units, such as the National Guard, have a right to keep and bear arms.

...There is no need for civilians to own military-style weapons, or magazines that hold large numbers of cartridges that maximize carnage. There is no justification for selling or transferring a firearm to anyone who has not passed a stringent background check, whether it's a father turning over a gun to a daughter, or a gun shop selling to a stranger. We need to get rid of most concealed-carry laws and make sure there are no guns on school campuses. We need more trigger locks, locked cabinets and gun buybacks.

Gee fellas, good luck with that.

Now, go show your sister...

Check Out? Check This Out!!

How Many Times a Week Does Obama Have to Call for Gun Control?

Every time there's a mass shooting in the States, Barack Obama winds up on TV pleading for sanity, also known as "gun control." I suppose he carries the standard speech in his back pocket wherever he goes because once or twice a week he's bound to need it.

San Bernardino.  The latest tally: 14 dead, 17 others wounded.  Police are looking for between one and possibly three shooters, each armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles. One shooter - murderous crank perhaps. Three shooters - terrorists, domestic or otherwise.

We remember the Sandy Hook massacre because the killer slaughtered 20-young children, first graders. The adults he killed have long been forgotten. Also forgotten have been almost all of those killed since that awful Friday in December, 2012.

Today Obama said the pattern of US mass shooting has no parallel anywhere else in the world. What, did he forget Syria?

Mona and the Age of Reason

The interim Tory leader, Mona Anderson er, Rona Ambrose gave Canadians a sneak peek at what the official opposition has in store for the Liberal government today when she blurted out that "rich kid" Justin Trudeau should pay for the nannies who care for his children.

Mona seems to be channeling her own American Idol, Michelle Bachmann, another flaming idiot with oh so big hair.  Really, Mona, that's it? Trudeau has announced a bucketful of legislative initiatives and you have to go for the nanny thing?

The CBC is offering up a dandy clip that has Tony Clement jumping on the nanny bandwagon. This would be the very same Clement who plastered his riding with $50-million in feel good handouts prior to the Toronto G20 summit. How many friggin nannies can you but with 50-million loonies, Tony? You hopeless peckerhead.

The New Dems couldn't wait to play the nanny card either. Then again now that they've reclaimed the cellar spot (probably in perpetuity) they have to take whatever they can get.

Isn't it nice that the Greens can find other things to talk about, things that actually matter to the country? Go Lizzie May, go!

A Third of our Arable Land Lost in Just the Past 40-Years.

It's that old saying about how "life is just one goddamned thing after another."

I really hope we work something out at the Paris climate summit but I'm not sure it's going to matter much to a great many people over the next thirty or forty years. That's because, like a malignancy, we're consuming the very Earth that sustains us and all life.

The Living Planet Report, 2014, found that, over the past 30-years, we had suffered a 50% loss in terrestrial life. This year's Living Planet Report explored marine life - fish, mammals and birds - and found about the same ratio. We're down 50% over the past 30 plus years.

This year mankind set another record, consuming the Earth's renewable resources at 1.7 times their natural replenishment rate. We're digging into our planet's resource reserves, our "seed corn", at increasingly rapacious rates. Not only that but we have become absolutely dependent on wildly excessive levels of consumption. It's a game that cannot end well.

So, what is it today? Word is that Earth - actually, that would be mankind - has lost a full third of our arable land over the past forty years.

The world has lost a third of its arable land due to erosion or pollution in the past 40 years, with potentially disastrous consequences as global demand for food soars, scientists have warned.

New research has calculated that nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality food-producing land has been lost at a rate that far outstrips the pace of natural processes to replace diminished soil.

The University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, which undertook the study by analysing various pieces of research published over the past decade, said the loss was “catastrophic” and the trend close to being irretrievable without major changes to agricultural practices.

This should come as no surprise. It merely follows several reports, including one last year from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, warning that we're exhausting the planet's farmland at a rate that could render almost all of it unusable within 60-years.

Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday.

About a third of the world's soil has already been degraded, Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a forum marking World Soil Day.

The causes of soil destruction include chemical-heavy farming techniques, deforestation which increases erosion, and global warming. The earth under our feet is too often ignored by policymakers, experts said.

This is a nightmare unfolding before our eyes, one that everyone is polite enough not to discuss. Well, not quite everyone. Sorry.

You see, here's the thing. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the loss of terrestrial and marine life, the depletion and degradation of our natural resources. and so much more - they're all linked, interwoven. These are existential crises. It doesn't do much good to sort out one only to succumb to all the others. You have to solve them all if you're to have much hope of solving any of them.

If you want mankind (and other life forms) to survive these dangers you have to want them fixed, all of them. Each and every one, the lot. Fortunately there are rational solutions that could still work but that's a window that's closing. It would take nothing less than to abandon 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics - the modes of organization that have, over the past 30 years, lost their utility and now threaten our survival instead.

The life raft is called "steady state economics" which is more than I can go into in a blog post. The Wiki entry should give you a fair idea of what it is and how it operates. Even Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), foresaw the end of growth back in his day. There are many fine books on the subject by Herman Daly, Thomas Prugh, Robert Costanza, Richard Norgaard, Paul Craig Roberts and many others if you want to look into it at greater depth.

Russia Fingers Erdogan, His Son, His Son-in-Law in Trafficking ISIS Oil

Turkish president Recep Erdogan seems to be a bit of a dirtbag. He's been in and out of the public eye over Turkey's 'tolerant' policies toward ISIS in Syria and the terrorist group's lifeline, oil from fields seized from Iraq and Syria.

And then Vlad Putin showed up. It began at the G20 when Putin claimed to have a dossier of 40-countries that were supporting the Islamic State, some of which he said were in the ranks of the G20. Putin specifically pointed out ISIS tanker truck convoys laden with oil crossing the border into Turkey.

With that, the coalition air campaign, which had been moaning about a lack of suitable ISIS targets, discovered the target rich Syrian border with Turkey. American jets rained destruction on at least one massive tanker truck convoy. Russia is said to have taken out others.

Then came the magical, 17-second air intercept when Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber that was briefly transiting their airspace. As facts emerged showing that the Turks had ambushed the Russian warplane, Erdogan got all huffy about the inviolability of Turkish airspace. NATO dutifully backed Turkey.

Then it emerged that Turkey routinely transgresses its neighbours' airspace - Syria, Iraq, Israel and especially Greece and conducts unauthorized bombing missions against Kurds in northern Iraq. Erdogan was even on record saying, several months before the Russian shootdown, that no nation had a right to shoot down another's aircraft for a harmless intrusion into its airspace. No nation except Turkey, it seems.

Now Moscow is directly accusing Erdogan and his family of being in league with ISIS.

“Turkey is the main consumer of the oil stolen from its rightful owners, Syria and Iraq. According to information we’ve received, the senior political leadership of the country - President Erdogan and his family - are involved in this criminal business,” said Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov.

“Maybe I’m being too blunt, but one can only entrust control over this thieving business to one’s closest associates.”

“In the West, no one has asked questions about the fact that the Turkish president’s son heads one of the biggest energy companies, or that his son-in-law has been appointed energy minister. What a marvellous family business!”

Well the Russkies do seem to raise a prima facie case. The Erdogan family is in the oil business. President Erdogan has appointed his son-in-law Turkey's energy minister. Someone with some pretty high level authority has been allowing ISIS oil tanker convoys to cross the border into Turkey and that someone may be related to the someone who, until NATO cracked down, allowed ISIS recruits free passage across Turkey into Syria.

NATO, of course, doesn't have much choice but to close ranks around Erdogan. The integrity of the alliance is at stake. We do have to deter Putin from getting his own back at Erdogan - at least for a decent interval. Later, well...



Alison from Creekside kindly sent along this clip of tankers crossing at the Turkish border.

Let's Not Get Drawn Into Erdogan's Tissue of Lies.

There's talk today that Turkey's NATO allies, Canada included, will be rallying to Ankara's side to defend Turkey against those awful Russians and their affront to Turkey's sovereign airspace.

I wonder if bullshit is too strong a word?

A couple of days ago Canada's former air attache to Turkey pretty much outed Erdogan as a damned liar. That seems consistent with this report from Politico last July about how routinely Turkey trespasses other nations' airspace, especially the Greeks'. And we all know how fond Erdogan is of sending Turkish fighter bombers into Iraq's sovereign airspace to bomb the Kurds in the north.

Erdogan is making chumps out of other NATO leaders, Trudeau included.

Sorry But I Think That Horse Has Already Left the Barn

DeSmogBlog reports that a majority of world leaders want to scrap the 2C warming target limit.

The idea has been that, if we can just keep global warming at 2C or less, civilization might avoid triggering runaway global warming from the Earth's own natural feedback loops. A lot of the research coming in lately has shown that the 2C target, itself a "political number," is unduly and dangerously optimistic. That's why we have the drive now to reset the target to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

There's a problem with these numbers. 2015 has seen man-made global warming reach the 1 degree Celsius mark, hotter than the Earth has experienced in around 800,000 years. Unfortunately, the atmospheric greenhouse gas loading that brought us to 1C is persistent and will keep warming the atmosphere for a century or more. 1C is where we are today, not where we're going to be even if we were to somehow decarbonize our global civilization tomorrow.

Those who have run the numbers conclude that the existing atmospheric GHG loading has already "locked in" 1.5C of warming over the course of this century. In other words that horse has already left the barn.

Every gigatonne of greenhouse gas we emit from here on in simply goes on top of that 1.5C. In preparation for the Paris climate summit, COP 21, every country submitted a GHG reduction pledge to the UN.  Those numbers show that if every nation actually met its pledge (a big "if"), we're still looking at something upwards of 3.5C of man-made warming.

Another problem is the major emitters. They're kind of stuck on the 2C number. It's the little countries, the poorest and most vulnerable states, that are pushing for 1.5C and they don't have a lot of clout, at least not yet. Still it's a concerted effort to move in the right direction, better than nothing.

Are We Living a False Reality? Bill McKibben Writes Big Fossil's Obituary.

Canadians, especially western Canadians, still see our country as a petro-state rich in oil and gas. Bill McKibben, of 350.org, says technology has already put that dream to rest. If he's right, we're in for an economic shock of seismic proportions.

Alternative energy technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years and, while it wasn't part of our national conversation during the Heavy-Oil Harper era, the rest of the world was paying attention.

I was somewhat surprised, pleasantly so, when in August, 2014 the world's largest private bank, UBS, wrote to institutional investor clients advising them to get out of conventional power generation utilities. The bank's experts concluded that it would soon "be cheaper and more efficient for households and businesses to generate their own energy to power their cars and store surplus energy in their own buildings - even without subsidies." On the heels of the UBS report, Tesla unveiled its breakthrough home power storage system, the PowerWall. This was the indispensible missing link in making the bank's projections reality.

Writing in Foreign Policy, McKibben summarizes what's been going on with the developments in technology and why it may buy mankind, indeed all life on Earth, some critical extra time, which we're going to need more than most of us imagine.

"The action happened not in Paris, but in the streets and in engineering labs over the last half-decade and has changed the equation markedly since the failed talks at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009. Those talks weren’t just a failure, they were a fiasco — the world’s leaders came together and then came apart, with bizarre and frantic improvised meetings that produced a one-page memorandum with no targets or timetables. No nothing, except a vague pledge to keep the planet’s warming below 2 degrees Celsius. It made Munich look like a diplomatic masterstroke.

"Paris will go better. Not well enough to save the planet, but maybe just well enough to save our chances of saving the planet. Here’s why.

"First, engineers have upped their game. It’s been remarkable to watch the sudden acceleration of renewable technology in the last five years. We aren’t talking technical breakthroughs — we’re talking quantum improvements in manufacturing and installation: Germany’s smart decision to lead the renewables revolution led to Chinese manufacturers learning how to make cheap panels, which in turn led to tomorrow’s hoped-for technology becoming today’s no-brainer. The price of a solar panel has dropped over 80 percent since 2008. That’s the key destabilizing economic fact of our moment.

"And it means that much is possible we couldn’t have dreamed of just a few years ago. Developing countries are suddenly starting to leapfrog the fossil fuel age or at least demonstrate it can be done. Bangladesh — Henry Kissinger’s original “basket case” of a developing country — will be the planet’s first fully solarized nation by 2020 or so. Its well-developed micro-credit networks are now funding 60,000 or 70,000 rooftop solar arrays a month, spreading electricity to places where a hundred years of fossil fuel could never reach. In Rwanda, a single newly inaugurated solar farm boosted Rwanda’s grid capacity by 6 percent — and it was designed, built, and connected in a single year. In India, solar power plants beat coal-fired stations for new contracts — they’re cheaper, even if you don’t include all the externalized costs of fossil fuel (which in, say, Delhi include irreversible lung damage for half the city’s children)."

"...the promises laid out in advance by various nations already tell us what the scoreboard will read come Dec. 11, though some details remain to be hashed out. Instead of a world that will become 5 degrees warmer — our post-Copenhagen trajectory — we’ll come out of Paris with promises from individual nations that, when you add them up, would warm the planet 3.5 degrees if they were kept.

"That’s historic, that’s remarkable — and that’s also a disaster. A world that warms 3.5 degrees would not be a world with civilizations that resemble ours. In fact, even the longtime negotiating goal of 2 degrees (the only thing that participants in Copenhagen actually agreed on) is clearly too high. We’ve heated the planet 1 degree so far since the industrial age began, and the U.N. said in November that that has produced a world where 4.1 billion people have been affected by extreme weather disasters over the last 20 years. So far this fall we’ve seen the highest wind speeds and the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in a storm in the Western Hemisphere. We’ve seen two rare cyclones plow into Yemen — and they came a week apart, dropping the normal equivalent of 10 years of rain in a few hours. We’ve seen — well, I could go on. The point is, 1 degree has been enough to melt most of the summer sea ice in the Arctic, fundamentally destabilize the Antarctic ice sheets, and make the oceans 30 percent more acidic. And we’re hoping for 2 degrees? And aiming for 3.5?"

"...After Copenhagen, the scoreboard read: Fossil Fuel Industry, 50; Planet and Physics, 0. Call that halftime.

"After Paris, the score will be more like 60-30. Reality is beginning to catch up, but it’s not halftime anymore. We hope it’s the end of the third quarter, but there’s reason to believe it’s actually much later in the game. 2015 looks set to be the hottest year ever recorded and October the hottest month we’ve ever measured — indeed it smashed the old record by such large margins that nervous climatologists called it “stunning,” “shocking,” and potentially the start of a new, even more dangerous, phase for the planet’s temperature.

"So that’s Paris. We won’t win the climate fight; we won’t even come close. But at least we’ll know the score — and we’ll know how much we have to do in the next few crucial years."

McKibben offers us a pretty grim, sober assessment of how much and how little we can expect from the Paris climate summit. Reminds me of Churchill's line: "This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning."

There's no chance we're getting out of this unscathed much less unchanged.  Our readiness to accept, if not actually embrace change will determine how harsh the future will be for our kids and grandchildren. The sooner we act, the more effectively we act, the better it will be for them.

Aye, and There's The Rub.

Environmental activist, Bill McKibben, of 350.org, has written a piece for Scientific American that cuts through the chaff to reveal what any hope of forestalling runaway climate change is going to mean. It's all in this paragraph:

...researchers have made it relatively simple to understand what we can and can’t do going forward. If the planet is to hold its temperature increase to two degrees Celsius—and almost every nation agreed to that target in 2009 at the international talks in Copenhagen—then we simply have to leave most of the carbon we know about underground; it can’t be burned. In fact, a powerful article in Nature last January listed all the carbon deposits that would need to go untouched: places like the tar sands of Canada or the oil and gas reservoirs beneath the Arctic.

Wait, did he just mention Canada's very own Tar Sands? Why, yes he did. Sorry, Alberta. Sorry, Saskatchewan. That stuff has to be left in the ground. It can't keep feeding into the fossil fuel stream. It's just too carbon intensive with today's technology.

Every developed country is going to have to make some pretty big sacrifices, especially the fossil energy exporters.