Turning Back the Hands of Time, Back Before Harper

Gitga'at Tribal Longhouse

Many British Columbians had never heard of the Gitga'at before that cold, black night when they launched their small boats to rescue the passengers from the stricken B.C. Ferries Queen of the North just before it sank to the seabed, 600 feet below. The Hartley Bay tribe earned our respect and gratitude that night and they've kept on winning hearts and minds ever since.

The Gitga'at live just around the point from the site designated for construction of a supertanker terminal for Alberta dilbit that was to be delivered via Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline. The Gitga'at and other nearby First Nations knew all too well what a supertanker sinking would mean to their coastal fishery and their traditional way of life and they weren't going to stand for it. They went to court.

They won.

Ordinary people defending the Extraordinary

The B.C. Supreme Court has ruled the B.C. government breached its duty to consult the Gitga'at and neighbouring First Nations on the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. The decision, announced Wednesday, is seen as a major victory for First Nations that could have an impact on future oil pipeline projects.

Coastal First Nations took the B.C. government to court in January 2015 in a bid to strike down an agreement that gave Ottawa decision-making authority over the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project. In June 2010, the B.C. Liberals signed an "equivalency agreement" with Ottawa, which effectively gave the federal National Energy Board final say over the environmental assessment process for five projects including the Enbridge Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

"Coastal First Nations brought this to the attention of the province before Northern Gateway was approved by the National Energy Board. We said, 'hold on here, you can't make a decision that affects our lives without talking to us first.'... So basically Northern Gateway is back where they started 10 years ago."

Coastal First Nations lawyer Joseph Arvay said the ruling effectively nullified the federal government's initial approval of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.

"What it means is, Enbridge now has to come back and get the (environmental) certificate from British Columbia," he said. "The ruling said the B.C. government abdicated its duty to conduct an environmental assessment, and its duty to consult with and accommodate First Nations."

The decision clears the way for similar First Nations' challenges to Kinder Morgan's pipeline expansion through southern B.C.

Reprieved

I'm incredibly proud of the Gitga'at and the other First Nations who fought the hard fight for all coastal British Columbians and refused to succumb to intimidation and bribes.  We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. I'd like to think even the Spirit Bear is grateful.

Increase Your Vocabulary - "Aroused Dissonance"

No, it has nothing to do with how you're feeling down below. "Aroused Dissonance" is, according to Bloomberg, a term coined by Ottawa U psychologists Karen Lavergne and Luc Pelletier to describe "the mental friction of not wanting to ruin the planet, but also not wanting to stop acting like a typical Western consumer."

People respond to such dissonance in one of two ways: They change their behavior, or they engage in "cognitive restructuring" -- "trivializing pro-environmental attitudes" to make themselves feel less guilty.

How can governments encourage more of the first response and less of the second? According to Lavergne and Pelletier, what matters is the way people are motivated to change: When they feel pressured, they dismiss the problem. Lavergne wrote by e-mail that a better approach is getting people to believe in the change they're supposed to make:

"This could be achieved by including stakeholders in the decision-making and policy formulation processes, offering people several options and alternatives to choose from in terms of adopting new pro-environmental behaviours, providing positive and constructive feedback to people about their progress towards their pro-environmental goals in real time, and acknowledging the day-to-day dilemmas, challenges, and barriers people are likely to face in a non-judgmental way as well as offering advice on how to overcome them."

The Bloomberg article goes on to examine other research that seems to suggest, when it comes to humankind, the "boiling frog" syndrome is very real.

Pushing Back

In Britain they had this ASBO thing. ASBO stood for Anti-Social Behaviour Order, a civil injunction whereby an individual, ordinarily a juvenile, could be ordered to refrain from offensive behaviours - spitting on passersby, swearing, public drunkeness - that sort of thing.

I mention ASBO only in support of a proposal whereby Canada should implement something similar, let's call it CASBO, a Corporate Antisocial Behaviour Order. Like ASBO, CASBO injunctions could be used to forbid corporate "conduct which causes or is likely to cause harm, harassment, alarm or distress" to the public.

Whereas in Britain an ASBO could be issued to curtail a graffiti artist from defacing public property, a CASBO could be used to forbid a company from abusing its advantage in wealth and power to resort to SLAPP suits, lawfare, to censor, intimidate and silence critics.

In Britain, ASBOs were used to curb a variety of ill-behaviours ranging from vandalism to public defecation, noise pollution, intimidation, disturbing the peace, fare evasion on public transit, mainly petty stuff that really pissed people off. It's not hard to come up with equivalent corporate misdeeds. In fact it's really easy.

Like ASBOs, CASBOs should be a civil injunction with provision to lead to criminal sanctions if the offending behaviour persists. Only CASBOs could have one additional feature. Once issued they should trigger a provision whereby, if the prohibited conduct persists, criminal liability should extend beyond the company to include the "directing minds" responsible for it - management and the executive. Give them a criminal record and a little time in the Greybar Hotel to go with it.

Why should we entertain this idea? For starters, the balance of power and control between governments and corporations, especially transnationals, has shifted in recent decades due to globalization. Corporations have benefited from the absurd surrender of important incidents of state sovereignty to be able to act at times as though they were above local law. When their conduct becomes particularly egregious they may simply pack up and leave the fallout behind.

Some corporations, pipeline operators for example, spend lavishly to persuade the public that they're good corporate citizens whereas their track record is more befitting the fifth century Vandals who sacked Rome. Putting a leash on those hounds is probably not a terrible idea.

And, best of all, it might re-acquaint government with its fundamental progressive obligation to the public to regulate the sometimes conflicting interests of capital and the state, corporations and citizens. In an era of growing inequality where wealth and the political influence associated with it is migrating ever upward, isn't it about time for a little pushback?

The Power of Juxtaposition

At BBC's website, two adjacent headlines: "Inside the 'Doomsday Vault'" and "Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall to Marry."

Just sayin'

A Blast From the Past - Remember the "Middle Class"?

Wow, those were the days back when we had this Middle Class. It was great. It was broad-based spanning all the way from the trades through to the professions. We even had to divide it into upper and lower middle class. It was the extended ladder of social mobility by which everyone from the poor on up could strive for something better.

It was the stuff of dreams. It was also the cornerstone of liberal democracy and it flourished through an informed and empowered electorate the political classes dared not ignore.

Then along came this thing called globalization. We were force fed enough lies that we went along with it. Bit by bit our governments ceded sovereign powers to transnational corporations until they finally relinquished the essential democratic power to regulate the constant struggle between labour and capital. Capital won - by capitulation and betrayal.

Once the agreements had been inked there was nothing to prevent capital giving the middle class a good and enduring pistol-whipping. Entire sectors of the economy, especially those that had built the middle classes, were simply loaded on barges and sailed to distant lands. Liberal democracy fell into decline. Inequality flourished.

Well in the midst of this sadness and woe there's news!! No, the middle class isn't staging a comeback. It's not good news. It's bad news of a double whammy coming the way of what remains of the middle class. The new threat, according to a report from the Swiss Bank, UBS,  is called climate change.

The report said middle-class households are already changing their lifestyles in the cities most exposed to hotter temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather such as storms and floods.

"More fear, less fun is how we might sum it up," said the study https://www.ubs.com/microsites/climatechange/en/home.html.

In places with high risks of climate-related shocks, people spend more on the upkeep of their properties. And homes may decrease in value if certain places become less appealing to live, eating into wealth, the report said.

Efforts to adapt to changing climate conditions - which remain modest and sporadic among the middle class - can also bring new costs.

In cities that suffer extreme heat, the middle-class is increasingly laying out for air conditioning, the report noted.

But some types of adaptation can create "a negative feedback loop", it warned. For instance, higher demand for air conditioning requires more electricity, which can lead to grid failure and increased planet-warming emissions.

In addition, inadequate infrastructure and health care systems increase the need to rely on emergency government support when disasters strike. "In our assessment this is likely, even in the richest of countries," the report said.

The largest cities are home to nearly a quarter of the global population and generate around half of global GDP, the report said.

The thing is, like it or no, we're just going to have to get smaller, a lot smaller. There's just less stuff to go around than we were brought up to imagine. And some places, especially low-lying coastal cities like BC's Lower Mainland and the major cities of China and India are going to face some very costly challenges from sea level rise among other things.

What's interesting about the UBS report is what isn't mentioned - the very wealthy, those who today enjoy the fruits of the great unearned transfer of wealth out of the now gutted middle class. Apparently they'll be just fine. Figures.

You Don't Have to Be British Columbian to Hate Kinder Morgan

There are a lot of my fellow British Columbians who have a visceral hate for bitumen pipeline giant, Kinder Morgan. The company is right up there with Enbridge in their hearts and minds.

Trudeau has said he'll nix the Enbridge Northern Gateway bitumen pipeline to Kitimat but so far only the British Columbia government has said a tentative "no" to Kinder Morgan's southern pipeline expansion.

Just who is Kinder Morgan? Well, let's start with the founder, Richard Kinder. He launched Kinder Morgan in 1997. Before that Richard was the Chief Operating Officer of some outfit called Enron. Gee, that name sounds familiar. Oh yeah, THAT Enron, got it. Kenny Lay's Enron. When Richard stepped aside as COO his place was taken by another name from the past, Jeffrey Skilling, whose services earned him a 35-count indictment for fraud, insider trading and other crimes when Enron collapsed. But enough of the past.

Today a number of voices of protest are being heard over Kinder Morgan's proposed, 360-mile 'Palmetto Pipeline' that would stretch from South Carolina through into Florida. In the process they've dredged up plenty of information that should give even Harper appointees on the National Energy Board pause for concern.

In 2003 a Kinder Morgan affiliate, Kinder Morgan Bulk Terminals, Inc., caused the equivalent of several rail cars (about 160 metric tons) of potassium chloride to be dumped into the Pacific Ocean. According to the facts stipulated by the parties in the resulting criminal prosecution, one of the terminal operator’s supervisors paid a master of a vessel at the port $1,250 to dump the waste at sea. This avoided a cost of $80,000 to properly dispose of the material at a landfill. The affiliate pled guilty to a criminal violation of the Ocean Dumping Act and paid a $240,000 fine.

Prior to this incident, an FBI investigation conducted between 1997 and 2001 found that Kinder Morgan entities were systemically defrauding their own customers – including the Tennessee Valley Authority – by using two different methods in weighing coal provided to customers from one of its operations in Illinois. Operators at its Cora Terminal used certified scales to weigh incoming coal transported by rail cars, then weighed coal going to its customers using a barge draft method – which typically recorded weights two to three percent higher – then sold the excess coal as its own.

The same FBI investigation also found that the Kinder Morgan Entities simply took coal from customer stockpiles it stored at a terminal in Kentucky.
As a result of this FBI investigation in the two states, the company agreed to pay a $25 million settlement to the U.S. Government in 2007.

Also in 2007, another affiliate, Kinder Morgan Transmix Co., entered into a Consent Agreement in which the EPA alleged that the affiliate illegally mixed an industrial solvent, hazardous waste called a ‘‘cyclohexane mixture,’’ into unleaded gasoline and diesel. The EPA charged that Kinder Morgan then distributed about 8 million gallons of the contaminated fuel, which caused vehicles to break down by clogging their fuel filters. As part of the Consent Agreement, the Kinder Morgan affiliate agreed to pay a civil fine of $600,000 in response to the EPA allegations of violations of the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

And just five years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice discovered that yet another Kinder Morgan affiliate, Kinder Morgan Port Manatee Terminal LLC, had been less than honest on its Clean Air Act permit applications to the federal government with respect to a terminal at Port Manatee, Fla.

According to information released from the U.S. Attorney’s office in the middle district of Florida, the company repeatedly stated to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in permit applications that it would control its pollution, even though the company knew that its pollution control equipment was not even being used or properly maintained. Kinder Morgan was fined $1 million for the Clean Air Act criminal violations.

With a company such as Kinder Morgan, with its sullied track record of deceit and environmental abuses, why are we even thinking of allowing it to transport a million barrels of dilbit a day across British Columbia, into the Lower Mainland, and then via an armada of supertankers through Vancouver's challenging harbours and through our vulnerable coastal waters?

Dilbit is a genuinely toxic and persistent form of ersatz petroleum and no one has any idea much less the means to clean it up when - not if, when - one of those heavily laden supertankers creates a disaster.

When the federal government's National Energy Board looks the other way and gives an unquestioning nod to these dilbit pipelines, it doesn't speak for coastal British Columbians. It speaks for the rest of Canada and, when it does, it leaves coastal British Columbians feeling a little less Canadian.

Sometimes the Hard Left Just Spins and Spins Until Its Brain Explodes

It's a powerful voice of the Left but sometimes it goes so far left, right to the edge and then over the side. Canadian Dimension publishes some fine commentary until it overheats and its brain explodes.

Case in point - Andre Vltcheck's impassioned screed in which the author extends a wobbly comparison between Syria and Stalingrad reprising Assad's Allawites as the brave Soviet defenders who held off the Nazi invaders. He speaks glowingly of the courage of the 'Syrian people' but it's obvious that to Vltcheck the Syrian people doesn't include the country's majority Sunni population. By 'majority' I mean 74% of all Syrians who are Sunni.

Vltcheck's tortured account sees the civil war as the doing of the West, Turkey, the Saudis.  Consider this passage:

Eduardo Galeano told me: “People know when it’s time to fight. We have no right to tell them … but when they decide, it is our obligation to support them, even to lead them if they approach us.”

In this case, the Syrian people decided. No government, no political force could move an entire nation to such tremendous heroism and sacrifice. Russians did it during World War Two, and the Syrians are doing it now.

Vltcheck's references to "the Syrian people" and "an entire nation" are code for the small minority of Syrians who support Assad, not the massive majority he, for years, suppressed at gunpoint.

The Syrian uprising, in Vltcheck's narrative, was the work of outsiders - not the food shortages and anti-Sunni policies that caused the majority to rise up against their illegitimate government. In fact, Vltcheck surgically excises every fact that confounds his argument, such as Assad's forces raining barrel bombs on Sunni civilian neighbourhoods in towns such as Aleppo. Then again, by Vltcheck's logic, those are Sunni and therefore they don't exist.

Hedges' 'Great Forgetting'

One of the now shopworn themes on this blog has been the critical need, for the survival of our people and our democracy, to rebuild an informed electorate. I have long argued that the first, essential step in democratic restoration in Canada is to dismantle our corporate media cartel.

In this week's essay, Chris Hedges, gets into how America is being dumbed-down, democratically emasculated.

Ignorance and illiteracy come with a cost. The obsequious worship of technology, hedonism and power comes with a cost. The primacy of emotion and spectacle over wisdom and rational thought comes with a cost. And we are paying the bill.

The decades-long assault on the arts, the humanities, journalism and civic literacy is largely complete. All the disciplines that once helped us interpret who we were as a people and our place in the world—history, theater, the study of foreign languages, music, journalism, philosophy, literature, religion and the arts—have been corrupted or relegated to the margins. We have surrendered judgment for prejudice. We have created a binary universe of good and evil. And our colossal capacity for violence is unleashed around the globe, as well as on city streets in poor communities, with no more discernment than that of the blinded giantPolyphemus. The marriage of ignorance and force always generates unfathomable evil, an evil that is unseen by perpetrators who mistake their own stupidity and blindness for innocence.

Those few who acknowledge the death of our democracy, the needless suffering inflicted on the poor and the working class in the name of austerity, and the crimes of empire—in short those who name our present and past reality—are whitewashed out of the public sphere. If you pay homage to the fiction of the democratic state and the supposed “virtues” of the nation, including its right to wage endless imperial war, you get huge fees, tenure, a television perch, book, film or recording contracts, grants and prizes, investors for your theater project or praise as an pundit, artist or public intellectual. The pseudo-politicians, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-artists know what to say and what not to say. They offer the veneer of criticism—comedians such as Stephen Colbert do this—without naming the cause of our malaise. And they are used by the elites as attack dogs to discredit and destroy genuine dissent. This is not, as James Madison warned, the prologue to a farce or a tragedy; we are living both farce and tragedy.

The dumbing down of the country—fed by the crippling of the safe spaces where ideas, dissent and creativity could be expressed, where structures and assumptions could be questioned—accelerates.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump may be boorish, narcissistic, stupid, racist and elitist, but he does not have Hillary Clinton’s carefully honed and chilling amoral artifice. It was she, and an ethically bankrupt liberal establishment, that created the fertile ground for Trump by fleecing the citizens on behalf of corporations and imposing the neoliberal project. If she is elected, Trump may disappear, but another Trump-like figure, probably even more frightening, will be vomited up from our cultural and political sewer. 

Trump's Impossibly Flawed World View

Sorry, Don, but you've got this ass-backwards.

China didn't steal anything from America (other than a tonne of your military secrets). It didn't steal America's industry. It didn't steal America's jobs. It didn't steal America's wealth and prosperity.

America, like so many earlier economic powerhouses in pre-decline terminal mode, chose to allow its biggest corporations and wealthiest of wealthy elite to siphon away and offshore America's wealth and its industrial strength to China and other low-wage countries. It was all about extracting short-term maximum profits at the long-term consequence of the American state and its people.

Old school Republican party strategist, Kevin Phillips, documents all of this in his 2005 book, American Theocracy.

One part of his book explores the final fatal steps taken by previous economic superpowers - the Spanish, the Dutch and the British by turns. It chronicles how they all began from relatively insignificant agrarian states, advanced into manufacturing and technology (except for the Spanish who looted Central America), established dominance in trade until finally, for the sake of their financial elite, decided to switch their economic foundation, by offshoring their economic activity to save costs and amplify returns. In this, he notes, each nation adopted what today is known as a "FIRE" economy (finance, insurance and real estate) where wealth/money and not goods becomes the commodity of trade. By outsourcing manufacturing and production, the FIRE economies use their wealth to establish and grow their eventual successors' economies. There is no history - none - of that ever being reversed.

All America has done is to follow in the flawed and greed-driven footsteps of the superpowers that rose and fell before it. Nobody stole anything because nobody had to steal what was freely given.

Another critical point that Phillips draws out is that FIRE economies are inelastic, inflexible and far less resilient to recessions and trade wars than are manufacturing economies which bounce back quickly. FIRE economies recover slowly and incompletely leaving them weaker and ever less resilient to subsequent seismic disruptions.

America's problems are entirely homegrown. It was America that drove most of the globalization that now plagues its economy and its working classes, blue and white collar. It surrendered to an economic ideology, entirely faith-based, that was long on promises that were never met.

China can never fix problems that were sown by America's bought and paid for Congress and its economic elites. You paid for your ticket and boarded the ride. You don't get off until the ride's over.

For Iraqis This Could Make ISIS the Least of Their Problems

It's the Mosul dam, recaptured by Iraqi Army and Kurdish militia forces from ISIS some 16-months ago. However getting rid of ISIS didn't solve Iraq's problems. The dam is falling apart and, if that happens when the waters are high, it could kill 500,000 Iraqis and leave another million homeless.

When the dam fell to ISIS forces a counterattack was launched mainly out of fear that ISIS could blow up the dam sending floodwaters as far downstream as Baghdad.

The problem is that Saddam constructed the dam along the lines of the 'first little piggy' who built his house of straw. We all know how that turned out. Unfortunately the Baghdad government is cash-strapped and its politics have become gridlocked.

The US government estimates that a worst-case scenario collapse could release a 65-foot wave of water onto the city of Mosul.

Oh dear.

Migrant Wars, Europe

Many years ago The Economist ran a cover story with a 'barbarians at the gate' theme that speculated whether Europe should wall itself off from the peoples to the east and the south. For years ever since Europeans, especially the Germans, have struggled with 'guest workers' and, in Old Europe, the arrival of economic migrants from Eastern Europe as those countries joined the EU.

Germany and France have had particular problems with integrating Muslim newcomers into their societies. It has fueled the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany and has left a legacy of racial tension between the French and their North African population. Atop that lies terrorism - the Lockerbie/Pan-Am bombing, the Islamist attacks on London and Paris, the radicalization of European Muslim youth and their recruitment into the ranks of al Qaeda and ISIS. It all tended to give rise to an "enemy in our midst" xenophobia that appears to be taking hold in Europe.

Bombings are one thing. Shooting up crowds in cafes another. But a coordinated campaign of sexual attacks on women in Cologne on New Year's eve allegedly by Muslim men may be have sparked what could become a wildfire.

The plight of Germany's and, to some extent, all of Europe's Muslims was made more difficult when Ralf Jaeger, interior minister from North Rhine-Westphalia, announced the New Year's eve sexual predators were all Arabs and North Africans, i.e. Muslims.

"Based on testimony from witnesses, the report from the Cologne police and descriptions by the federal police, it looks as if people with a migration background were almost exclusively responsible for the criminal acts."

According to his report, of the 19 suspects identified by name, 10 were asylum-seekers and the other nine were believed to be in Germany illegally.

None were registered as living in Cologne, and four are now in custody for robberies committed during the New Year events.

Tensions have been high after 516 women claimed to have been the victims of sexual assaults and muggings on New Year's Eve.

It has been reported that the attacks were coordinated via social media.

The ordinarily moderate Deutsche Welle has run an opinion piece by a Pakistani journalist working in Germany who writes that Germans "feel increasingly threatened by a culture that is not compatible with their own."

As a Pakistani journalist working in Germany, I have been very skeptical about the German government's decision to allow thousands of refugees into the country without much scrutiny of their backgrounds.

...I was sure that the migrants' influx would ultimately disturb the harmony and balance of German society. I feel that Islamic culture and European norms are not compatible.

Most Germans have responded to the refugee crisis with exemplary humanism. My European friends got angry when I warned them against Chancellor Merkel's migrant-friendly policy. I found it very naïve that many Germans believed that all Middle Eastern and South Asian refugees would conform to their way of life and values. I told my friends that their understanding of the Muslim world was limited and flawed. They didn't pay much attention to my arguments.

...My worst fears came true when hundreds of young men allegedly from Middle Eastern and North African countries sexually assaulted German women in Cologne on New Year's Eve. Many say it was a pre-planned attack, as the Muslim men groped and touched the women's private parts shamelessly. And now the Germans are finally debating whether it was a good idea to be so open to embracing people from alien cultures.

...What happened in Cologne happens regularly in my homeland, Pakistan. The men are never ashamed, never feel guilty, never show remorse about the way they treat women in that part of the world.

The men who sexually harassed girls in Cologne were not demented; they knew what they were doing. And I am sure they did it with absolute contempt for the European culture, its norms and its people.

German society is changing, with right-wing Christian as well as Islamic groups getting stronger by the day. It is an alarming situation for the majority of secular people in Germany and Europe.

If the German government wants to protect the country's secular foundations, it must increase checks on the people it intends to integrate into its society. Integration is not only about learning the German language.

I know many Muslims who have been living in Germany for decades, speak fluent German, yet they harbor deep resentment against secularism and Western values.

The rise of Salafism in Germany has given more impetus to neo-Nazi movements in the country. Pegida is just one example.

What happened on New Year's Eve could change the way Germans live and treat foreigners forever. The government must make sure this doesn't happen.

Europe, to be fair, has a lousy record of integrating or assimilating its Arab and North African newcomers and there's plenty of blame to spread around and just about everyone, European and newcomer alike, deserves their share.

Will the Koln night of sexual assault leave a scar on Europe, a wedge between European and newcomers, that cannot heal? Bear in mind that the wave of migration that Europe experienced over the past year and a half is just the start. There are causes other than the Syrian civil war that will drive masses of people out of Africa and the Middle East seeking refuge in Europe. No one seems to imagine that Europe is even capable of absorbing the numbers that will soon be heading to its shores.

What is already underway is powerful fuel for the fires of rightwing nationalism of the sort that has brought such murderous misery to Europe and the rest of the world in the past. Could we be on the brink of another cataclysm of butchery?

UPDATE - Guess what's racing up the best sellers' list in Germany. You got it, Mein Kampf. It's selling like hotcakes.

Timothy Garton Ash writes in The Guardian how Poland's rightwing government is dismantling the pillars of democracy with attacks on the country's constitution, journalism and civil service.

A DIYguide to building an illiberal democracy.

Oh, great! Now this. Sweden's prime minister, Stefan Lofven, is criticizing Swedish police for covering up sexual assaults by "recent immigrants" at a 2014 music festival. And now reports are emerging of attacks on Swedish women in Malmo on New Year's Eve.

You Say Tomato and I Say Does It Really Matter?

Life on Earth has existed for about 570-million years. This is broken down into three main eras, each of which is subdivided into geological epochs.

The current era, the Cenozoic, has lasted about 65-million years. You (probably) and I (certainly) were born the the Holocene epoch. That has occupied the last 12,000 years which coincides nicely with the advent of human civilization. It was the Holocene's incredibly mild climate that was instrumental to our development of civilization-building agriculture.

As epochs go, however, the Holocene has been incredibly brief. Most epochs spanned many millions of years. The Holocene just twelve thousand although, but for us, humankind, it too might have gone on for millions of years. However we, mankind, have brought the Holocene to an abrupt and remarkably premature end.

We are the first species to create a geological epoch and, fittingly, it's named the Anthropocene - the epoch of Man.

Science, despite what some critics claim to the contrary, is reluctant to come to fast conclusions.  Conservatives should appreciate science because it is, in many ways, extremely conservative which, curiously, is what most infuriates Conservatives. Odd, isn't it?

It's this conservative reticence that has led to disagreement as to whether mankind has transformed the world, shifting it from the Holocene to this new Anthropocene. That question is therefore being put to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which describes itself as "The International Commission on Stratigraphy is the largest and oldest constituent scientific body in the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). Its primary objective is to precisely define global units (systems, series, and stages) of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart that, in turn, are the basis for the units (periods, epochs, and age) of the International Geologic Time Scale; thus setting global standards for the fundamental scale for expressing the history of the Earth."

When the greatest stratigraphologists convene later this year they will consider a new study by an international team of scientists that seems to support the Anthropocene theory.

The new study provides one of the strongest cases yet that from the amount of concrete mankind uses in building to the amount of plastic rubbish dumped in the oceans, Earth has entered a new geological epoch.

“We could be looking here at a stepchange from one world to another that justifies being called an epoch,” said Dr Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and an author on the study published in Science on Thursday.

“What this paper does is to say the changes are as big as those that happened at the end of the last ice age . This is a big deal.”

...The study says that accelerating technological change, and a growth in population and consumption have driven the move into the Anthropocene, which advocates of the concept suggest started around the middle of the 20th century.

“We are becoming a major geological force, and that’s something that really has happened since we had that technological advance after the second world war. Before that it was horse and cart transporting stuff around the planet, it was low key, nothing was happening particularly dramatically,” said Waters.

...Waters said that if the ICS was to formally vote in favour of making the Anthropocene an official epoch, its significance to the wider world would be in conveying the scale of what humanity is doing to the Earth.

Does triggering a mass extinction of life on Earth, the sixth in nearly 600-million years, qualify as tipping the world into a new geological epoch? That sounds as much a philosophical question as a scientific problem. Does it matter? The impacts of our actions matter and on a massively mortal scale.

Pot, Meet Kettle

If you're going to kill your own people, at least have the decency to use a drone.

As I opened The Guardian website this morning, there it was, a somewhat sensational story alleging that the Kremlin was suspected of the shooting death of an Islamist Chechen in Istanbul.

Okay, so?

"Abdulvakhid Edelgireyev survived for years hiding in the Chechen mountains, launching attacks on Russian security forces and evading capture. He survived the battlefields of Syria, and those of east Ukraine. But in November his life came to an abrupt end in a flurry of bullets: he was shot dead in broad daylight in Istanbul as he embarked on a shopping trip with his three-year-old niece.

"Edelgireyev and his niece walked out of their apartment block in Kayasehir, a far-flung suburb of nondescript new towers, shortly before 2pm on 1 November. The 32-year-old Chechen sat the girl in the passenger seat of his car, and was about to start the engine when a white car rammed into them from behind, closing him in. Pushing his niece on to the floor under the seat, Edelgireyev scrambled out and started running. One of the assassins gave chase, firing at him, and he crumpled to the ground. When paramedics arrived a few minutes later he was already dead, in a pool of blood. He had been shot five times.

"The dead man’s biography, as set out by family and associates, paints a picture of a key figure in the Caucasus Emirate, the umbrella group of Chechen and other fighters in Russia’s North Caucasus that has resorted to terrorist methods, including suicide attacks on Moscow’s metro and Domodedovo airport."

Murder, murder most foul. Perhaps if Putin had used a drone...

But this is different. Edelgireyev was gunned down on the streets of Istanbul, a city in the ISIS supporting, NATO ally Turkey. Several thousand Chechens now call Istanbul home and it has become a base for Chechen fighters and their families. Edelgireyev's three brothers died in shootouts with Russian forces.

The hypocrisy is palpable. We all got on the war wagon to invade Afghanistan and topple the Taliban government because they gave sanctuary to al Qaeda which had just killed three thousand Americans. Erdogan gives sanctuary to thousands of Chechen terrorists and their families, supports Islamists waging a terror war in Syria and Iraq, yet we recognize Turkey as an ally, a member in good standing of NATO.

Oh, wait, I know what the difference is. The Russians do their killing with guns, not drones. I suppose Edelgireyev's niece was unharmed.

Canada's Back? Define "Back."

I have to admit that, like many Canadian progressives  (real progressives, not the watered-down to meaninglessness type popular with so many Liberals) I thought I had misjudged Justin Trudeau during the heady first days of his administration.

He ordered an enquiry into missing First Nations women. He got the process underway to repeal mandatory minimum sentencing. Overall he seemed to be serious about dismantling the worst excesses of the Harper regime. He boastfully proclaimed that "Canada's back" and, for a while, he sounded like the real deal.

Sure it was obvious that he was picking at the low-hanging fruit, the really easy stuff that most of us, including a percentage of Tories, found repugnant. Yet that did create a mood of optimism and hope that it wasn't a mirage, that he would do Canada proud on the hard stuff just as he was on the initial housecleaning. He showed us that he was good at pushing on open doors, maybe he'd have the courage to kick in the locked ones too. Surely with the muscle of a strong majority he could handle the tough jobs.

Barely a month in power and it's looking like it was all a mirage. This Saudi arms deal, 15-billion dollars worth of rolling death on wheels, shows that people like me might have been giving this Trudeau credit where it really wasn't deserved.

What's wrong with Canada playing footsie with the House of Saud? I've been writing about it for the past year. If you don't understand the background, go here and here and here. And here and here and here and over here. Or here and here.

Justin isn't even trying to explain this away. He's cowering behind Dion who himself is closed-lipped. It didn't take long for Harper-era transparency and accountability to return.

Why are we providing these weapons? To what purposes will they be put? Why are we dealing with the country that literally spawned and backed radical Sunni Islamists, al Qaeda, al Nusra, ISIS and their affiliates, the guys responsible for the US embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, the first World Trade Center attack, the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the attacks on London and Paris.

We're quick enough to condemn Shiite Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism but Shia Islam doesn't have us under attack. All of these things are the work of Sunni radicals, the Hellspawn of the very guys to whom we're about to deliver such a massive fleet of wheeled death wagons. We're in a state of terrorism-fueled security lockdown that pervades our personal privacy and supposedly necessitates state surveillance of us and that's all driven by Sunni fundamentalists who practice the same extreme strain of Islam as the House of Saud.

A Rose By Any Other Name...

They're America's homegrown insurgents-in-waiting. They're guys like renegade rancher, Cliven Bundy, whose supporters staged a heavily-armed standoff in defiance of federal officials and law enforcement. In that squabble, Bundy had refused to pay grazing fees for using federal lands.

Today a bunch of like-minded malcontents are holed up in a government building in Oregon over the imprisonment of a couple of their own who were convicted of setting fire to government lands.

These cases have one thing in common. It's always "them" versus the state and there's always talk of martyrdom and bloodshed. Along the way these knuckleheads have added a couple of new words to the American lexicon - "Y'all Qaeda" and "YeeHaw dist."

Sounds about right.

About Those Weapons We're Selling to Saudi Arabia

The Trudeau government has no intention of axing the deal negotiated by the Harper regime to flog $15-billion worth of armoured fighting vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The government won't explain itself nor does it have any intention of letting the public see its assessment of the Saudis' human rights record (not that anyone really needs to see it to know the Saudis running the place are animals).

Here's something for young Justin to chew on over the weekend.

Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, warned Friday that a Saudi-led air coalition that is supported by the United States may have committed war crimes by using cluster munitions in heavily populated neighborhoods in Yemen.

The U.N. chief has “received troubling reports of the use of cluster munitions” in several Jan. 6 attacks in Sanaa, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters at the world body’s headquarters in New York. “The use of cluster munitions in populated areas may amount to a war crime due to their indiscriminate nature.”

The Saudis? Cluster bombs? Targeting Yemeni civilians? Oh, say it ain't so!

Only there's nothing new to this story. Vice TV exposed the cluster bombing of the Houthis last February.  You can pick it up at the 17:05 mark.

The video shows the cluster bomb casings. They're US made. The Saudis have been pounding the Houthi people with them for a good long while. There's no way our diplomatic and military people didn't know. The world knew only nobody in positions of power let on.

So, Junior, you're selling those wheeled death machines to fucking animals, the kind who don't think twice about raining cluster bombs on civilians - women and children. You don't need to show us your in-house human rights evaluation. There's nothing to conceal.

One other thing. Before you shatter our dreams about Canada being "back" why don't you have a word with your colleagues in Belgium and Germany. Maybe they can help you grow a new pair.

And, Junior, when you're finished that video check out the first segment which is an eye-opener on what we can expect from the fossil fuelers when - not if but when - one of those bitumen tankers goes down along the British Columbia coast. You may be against the Northern Gateway but you're backing Kinder Morgan's equally dangerous expansion of its bitumen pipeline capacity straight into the Lower Mainland.

There you go, JT, a two-fer.  This one's on the house. You're starting to show us what we really bought last October and it's not very pretty.

A World Bound to Faith, Not Fact.

We all do it. It's just human nature. We come to see what we experience in our life as normal. We regard the modes in which we're organized as almost as immutable as the laws of physics. We imbue our organizational models - social, political, economic, etc. - with a degree of orthodoxy, something demonstrated, tested and proven. The more accepted and time-honoured the belief is, the more it comes as a shock, even an affront, when we suddenly realize it's deeply flawed, untrue, nothing more than something we collectively take on faith.

We get a lot of our faith-based indoctrination not from some pulpit or the words of some holy book. Most of it we garner from our schools, from our parents and friends, from television and other media. We accept it and embed it into our actions and perceptions. In some cases we even spurn those who challenge our beliefs, taking it personally as though it was a rebuke, a personal indignity. Those who do not believe as we believe we treat as heretics.

I studied economics, around the same time as the bias-ply tire was displaced by the radial. I studied macro-economics and I studied micro-economics. Somehow I did extraordinarily well in both although I wouldn't have chosen either if I'd had my way. Not for nothing is it called the "dismal science." Still it's great stuff for moderately sharp slackers for nothing else so rewards regurgitation. In any event I came away pretty much accepting the tenets of neoclassical economics which was easy in a world where there was plenty of everything today and immeasurably more to be had tomorrow. It was a time when you could truly imagine a rising tide lifting all boats and supply and demand curves charting the future.

Over the following decades economics had no central role in my life as my interests drifted from military to journalism and travel to law. On matters economic I accepted the orthodoxy trusting that it was indeed a science tended by the most brilliant of its scientists who knelt at the side of our leaders, guiding their hands.

Then, beneath my feet, the world began to grow faster and faster. It became hot and unstable, rocking through the seismics of boom and bust. Things were going wrong. The boilers were near bursting. I thought it might be a good time to look into this science of economics again.

What an experience. It's like an old, mal-adjusted pinball game (a confession, I'm addicted) that too easily goes "TILT." I began reading a number of critiques of neoclassical economics that suggested the model had outlived its utility and was never devised to suit our now radically changed world. One article cleverly explored it in the context of a mental illness and it was uncomfortably convincing.

I learned from John Raulston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism that there's no truth to the scientific underpinnings claimed by all our leading economists. They're not scientists so much as High Priests of a faith-based ideology which we, in turn, are conditioned to accept as science. It is as grounded as any and all of the world's religions including all the religions you don't believe in plus that extra one I don't - yours. It's better than casting bones and reading entrails but sometimes not all that much better.

I'm currently engrossed with James K. Galbraith's The End of Normal, The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth.  Galbraith, son of John Kenneth Galbraith, is, like his father, an economist of the Keynesian school. In "The End of Normal" Galbraith explores four factors at play: the rising costs of real resources, the futility of military power, the labour-saving consequences of the digital revolution, and the breakdown of law and ethics in the financial sector.

Without critiquing his views, I find the history of economics in the post WWII era particularly enlightening. That was when we came to embrace the lethally fanciful notion of perpetual expansion of GDP. This came about in conjunction with the idea that governments manage economies (James Carville - "it's the economy, stupid"). It's long-range economic theory harnessed to short-term political imperatives, especially the quest for re-election. No wonder we're mired in such an awful mess.

Somehow I sense we really haven't moved all that far from these days:

The fact remains that all of our leaders - the lot - continue to embrace neoclassical economics, the precursor to neoliberal politics that, itself, is the springboard to illiberal democracy. They're all true believers yet they don't grasp how their prayers, eventually, must be answered.

Britain's Double Whammy Barreling Toward the UK

How do you cap off weeks of devastating flooding? How about a blast of Arctic air that'll bring you your coldest winter in 58-years? That's exactly what's heading for Britain and it'll hit the UK in just a couple of days. From the Daily Express:

Blistering Polar gales, several feet of snow and near-record low temperatures will grind the country to a standstill until MARCH, forecasters warn.

The first taste of what could be a historic whiteout will arrive THIS WEEKEND as freezing winds drive in from Siberia and the North Pole.

Britain is on alert for the week-long winter blast to unleash widespread heavy snow and -13C (8.6F) temperatures.

The bitter spell is forecast to last through next week bringing harsh frosts, snow and ice across the length and breadth of the UK.

It has sparked warnings to expect chaos on the roads while communities are urged to keep an eye on the elderly and vulnerable.

Flood-hit Scotland is braced for up to two feet of snow to plunge the region into more misery as the mercury nosedives to -10C.

Forecasters warn not to be fooled by a brief mild spell and that a lethal set of freak weather conditions merging to unleash winter CHAOS.

The graphic above indicates that western and central Canada and the American mid-west will also be getting hammered. It looks as though the west coast will be spared.

Is that Geraldo? No, It's Some Guy Named Mark.

As I was glancing through various news headlines, I was caught by one reading, "The electoral treachery of Justin Trudeau." Turns out it was from the Toronto Sun. No surprise there, I expect, although I don't frequent that chain of rags and misery but sparsely.

 I was surprised to learn that Canada has its very own Geraldo, our True North 'Moustache Pete' who goes by the name of Mark Bonokoski who apparently got re-purposed to a columnist gig, presumably a victim of the Sun chain's blessed fiscal misfortunes.

Anyway, I chose to learn more about Trudeau's electoral treachery. There's a loaded word, "treachery." According to Webster, it's "a violation of allegiance or of faith and conscience; an act of perfidy or treason."  

As I read through Mr. Bonaduce's complaint, it was the usual overplayed hand that has become the hallmark of the Sun variety of journalism.  Apparently young Trudeau was "ripping apart our democracy's very foundation" by not holding a plebiscite on his proposal for electoral reform.

The Liberals, wrote the bespectacled buffoon, would "change our electoral system essentially by coup, using their majority as a truncheon and locking out the public as if inconsequential to the outcome of their unilateral treachery."

And then it struck me. Wait, first Mr. Trudeau will have to get past those 'meddlers' of whom the Tories so persistently whined during Beelzebub's Decade of Darkness, the ever vigilant guardians of the constitution, the Supreme Court of Canada.

Unfortunately Mr. Buttafuoco doesn't publish his email address. I would like to put at ease his overheated imagination that conjures up images of treason, coup d'etat, and despotic truncheons. With the looming demise of the Sun chain, I'm sure he has plenty of real problems to occupy his tortured mind.

Charlie Hebdo - the Fight for Free Speech

To: The Rebel. This One's For You.

The Age of Reason, Now Closed for Business.

Overall it had a good run going back to the Age of Enlightenment and carrying on through the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and the geopolitical revolution of the 20th century. It wasn't a linear path. There were reverses aplenty but the Age of Reason kept plodding on into and through the progressive era post WWII.

Sad to see it go but that's what can happen given enough time and enough hubris. Reason, unattended, degenerates and gradually fails.

Blame human nature and why not? It takes us off the hook as individuals, doesn't it? When people say what we want to hear, we usually believe them. That puts a huge premium on lying, mythmaking. That sort of thing grows bigger and it gets heavier, ever more clumsy but it never really gets stronger. Eventually it gets too heavy or something comes along that gives it a shake and - boom - collapse.

What if I told you that the world in which you live is governed by an economic model that's a lot like a mental illness? Take our last election for example. All of the leaders, including Elizabeth May, spoke of the need to grow our economy. Same mantra you would hear in Britain or France or just about any country that indulged the notion of universal suffrage.

Growth. Ever greater GDP, gross domestic product. Ever more economic activity, greater production. That's exponential growth. It sounds modest enough. Three per cent this year and three per cent next year and the year after that. But it all adds up and we just don't get it. Ever see that experiment where you take a chess board and begin with one penny in the upper corner and double that as you go to the next square and so on? By the time you reach the opposite corner in the bottom, what began as one cent 64 squares earlier has grown into a sum greater than all the money on Earth. Wowser.

Of course we're not doubling our GDP from one year (square) to the next. We'll content ourselves with a modest 3%.  Only there's nothing modest about it. Let's say in Year 1, the economy, our GDP stands at 1X. Grow that by 3% per year for roughly one adult lifetime, 50 years, and you wind up with a GDP that stands at 4.38X. Run the formula for a century and you have grown GDP by 19.22 times greater than it was in Year 1. Over two centuries GDP expands to 369 times what it was in Year 1. Three hundred years?  That would be seven thousand and ninety eight times the size of the economy in Year 1. Not seven thousand per cent bigger, seven thousand times bigger. 7,098X. Four centuries is even better. That's 136,423X GDP.  Follow it through to five hundred years and its 2,621,877X GDP. That's all from steady growth of 3% per year.

That could never happen, could it? Of course not. Not unless the buying power of a dollar in Year 1 represents roughly the buying power of a couple of million dollars in Year 500, sort of the Weimar Republic on acid.

What can happen is what is happening. Overall economic activity - production and consumption - outgrows the environment. How can that happen? Well, to be honest, we cheat and we've become really, really good at it.

This year we hit a new mark. Mankind now consumes the Earth's supply of renewable resources at 1.7 times their replenishment rate. We're exceeding our planet's environmental carrying capacity by a factor of 1.7. It's called "overshoot." It's something that, unresolved, doesn't end well.

To keep up with our expectations we've learned to cheat. In fact we're mortally dependent on our success at cheating forever and ever on into the future. When our cheats no longer work, it's game over for an awful lot of us.

If you don't believe we're propping up our global civilization with parlour tricks consider that some of them are visible to the naked eye from space. From the gondola of the International Space Station the crew can look down and see the rampant deforestation; wildfires burning from one end of Indonesia to the other; the desertification of once viable farmland evidenced in dust clouds that rise over China and cross the Pacific to North America; dried up lakes and rivers that no longer reach the sea; tundra fires and the vanishing polar sea ice; toxic algae blooms that spread through our lakes and our ocean coastlines. All of those things evidence one species, ours, that no longer lives within the bounds of our environment.

There's Indonesia, Just Behind All that Smoke

NASA's Grace satellite system monitors the surface subsidence triggered by our rapacious reliance on groundwater, our ancient aquifers, for industrial agricultural production. In California's Central Valley the subsidence has reached a foot a year in some places which plays utter hell on foundations, roadways and bridges.

At our docks we see the evidence of overfishing as the far-ranging industrial fleet fishes "down the food chain", collapsing one fishery after the other. In the north, scientists and fishermen alike witness plumes of methane gas bubbling to the surface from melting seabed clathrates.

Our appetites are crowding out the other species with which we share our biosphere. The Living Planet Report 2014 surveyed terrestrial life of all forms and found that it had declined by half over the past 40-years. This year's Living Planet Report focused on marine life and found almost identical decline. Meanwhile species are enduring an extinction rate gauged to be 1,000 times normal.

What's happening? I am. You are. And about 7-billion more of us. That's what's happening. Those other things can't live if we don't leave them the clean habitat and resources they need to survive, if we continue to predate them to extinction. Did I mention we want an even bigger share of the planetary pie next year and every year after that?

We've broken the hydrological cycle, this loop whereby surface water that supports life on Earth is eventually released to the atmosphere as water vapour through evaporation or transpiration, cleansing it in the process, until it is returned as some form of precipitation - rain, show or hail - to go through the cycle again.

Throughout the Holocene the hydrological cycle was benign, steady and predictable. It traveled west to east, bringing passing rain storms with it that transited from one region to the next, delivering the right amount of precipitation to permit civilization-building agriculture. Released from subsistence farming we gradually developed villages and towns and cities and transportation and industry and even that remote control you pick up at night to catch the news.

Today's hydrological cycle - the one we created - is no longer benign or steady or predictable. We're now visited with extreme weather events and two in particular - droughts and floods. Neither of those are good for the agricultural foundation of civilization.

In my lifetime the Green Revolution swept the world allowing mankind's population to swell from the sub-3 billion at my birth to today's 7+ billion and heading, we're told, to 9+ billion around mid century and then on to even bigger numbers thereafter.

When it comes to ecological parlour tricks, there's Numero Uno. We discovered that, with enough agricultural chemicals (fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) and enough irrigation (both surface and groundwater) you could produce crops out of just about anything barely better than gravel. And so we did and so our numbers soared. Only we didn't realize in time that this industrial agriculture was exhausting our stocks of farmland, stripping them of essential carbon and destroying humus. This has been thoroughly researched in recent years and the word from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization warns that our stocks of farmland will be collapsed within about sixty years.

Do any of these things sound like they have any place in the Age of Reason? Any of them - exponential growth, anthropogenic climate change, overpopulation, over-consumption, species extinction and the loss of biodiversity, agricultural exhaustion. How 'bout when you take them all together, how do they square then with the Age of Reason?

It's All About Power, Cheap Power, And Without It...

There's only one reason that coal has played such a huge role in today's world - it's a cheap way to get the heat needed for thermal-electricity generation. Coal is cheap. So, too, has been water - the yin to coal's yang in electrical generation. Without cooling water, you don't have a generator. You merely have a torch. In other words, no water means no power.

Coal, of course, is not an isolated situation. Other forms of thermal energy including gas, oil and even nuclear also depend on plenty of water for cooling. And, while fossil energy remains cheap and abundant, the supply of water is today anything but secure. Did I mention climate change?

Hydro- and thermo-electric (nuclear, fossil-fuelled, biomass-fuelled) power plants are vulnerable to dwindling rivers and reservoirs as the planet warms, a study published in Nature on Monday said.

These technologies, which provide 98% of global electricity supply, depend on abundant water to cool generators and pump power at dams.

Lower river levels and warmer water temperatures could reduce generating capacity by as much as 86% in thermo-electric- and 74% in hydro plants, according to researchers at Wageningen University and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

It comes as water demand for power generation is set to double within the next 40 years, the report said. Drought-stricken hydro producers have reverted to dirtier energy sources in the past to shore up tottering grids.

Global warming is set to boost river levels in Canada, India and central Africa as global weather patterns shift. Yet most hydroplants are in regions forecast to see shortages, like South America, which generates almost two-thirds of its electricity from hydro.

Did you catch that last bit, the part about Canada? Yes, we're expected to be okay for precipitation "as global weather patterns shift." That's not to say that our precipitation will be steady, reliable - the sort needed for hydro-generation. Overall, though, we should be reasonably okay.

Did you catch what's missing in that last bit, the part about the United States? Our neighbours to the south, especially the southern States, aren't expecting any bountiful rainfall patterns. The multi-year drought that recently hit Texas led to periods when there wasn't enough water to cool thermo-electric utilities. The double whammy comes in that the time when electrical demand spikes is during heatwaves when people want to crank up the air conditioning.  When people most need to cool themselves is when their energy supply becomes unreliable.

Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged

That seems to be the theme of closing arguments defence counsel Peter Brauti is delivering in the trial of Toronto cop James Forcillo charged with the 2nd degree murder of Sammy Yatim aboard a TTC streetcar.

Give him his due, lawyer Brauti is not playing with a very strong hand. He can tell the jury all the predictable lines about 'heat of the moment' and 'imminent threat' but there's video, a lot of video evidence, showing the leisurely execution of Yatim by Jimmy Forcillo.

Even had Forcillo's position been plausible - that Sammy Yatim, having never left the aisle of the streeetcar, having never so much as set one foot in the stairwell of the streetcar, represented an imminent threat to the life of not just the shooter but the gaggle of cops at his side some 15 feet away from Yatim and, hence, it was a lawful exercise of force he can't change the fact that the video shows Yatim went down, collapsed to the floor of the streetcar, with the first shot.

Yatim was down with the first shot. He never got up again. He was no longer a threat to anyone after the first shot. Yet Forcillo fired a salvo of three rounds into Yatim, the first shot and two more after the kid was down. Then Forcillo paused for five seconds before he opened up again on the still prone body of his victim, emptying the remaining six rounds in his pistol, eight of his nine rounds striking Sammy Yatim.

Ordinarily eight hits for nine rounds is a pretty awesome result only, in this case, at least seven of those eight hits were on a stationary target and they were fired at what, Forcillo claims, was a short enough range that he was in imminent danger from a kid with a small knife.

Brauti is telling the jurors not to get lost in the detail but to look at the big picture. What he's really asking them is to ignore all the inescapable evidence that shows this cop murdered that young man. He doesn't want the jury to judge his client's guilt. He wants them not to judge Forcillo at all because, after all, they're not cops and they weren't there.

I Heard They Were Breaking Up Anyway

Maybe they'll become the Shifty Steve Trio.

As if getting his ass handed to him in the October runoff wasn't bad enough, ousted prime minister Harper has lost his trusty drummer, Phil Nolan (the guy in the hat).

Nolan will be out of circulation for two years after being convicted of two counts of sexual exploitation of a 13-year old girl.



The lyrics are precious, especially the "touching me, touching you" bit.

However, if your musical taste runs to the tones of a cat being transformed into violin strings, here's the late prime minister desecrating The Rolling Stones as only he could.

To See Ourselves as Others See Us - Middle Eastern Edition.

Trust Me, You Heathen Buggers!

First came WWI and we told them that if they sided with us instead of their ruling Ottomans then, once we had defeated the Germans and their Ottoman allies, we would ensure their freedom.

Germany and the Ottomans went down to defeat.

We (France and Britain) decided that they would rather parcel up most of the Ottoman territories between themselves and so Messrs. Sykes and Picot got out their pencils and their straight edges and began carving the place up. Straight lines. Ethnic (Arab, Persian, Kurd)  and religious (Sunni, Shiite) considerations were ignored.

We almost kept our word to the Kurds. Treaty of Sevres.

We quickly broke our word to the Kurds. Treaty of Lausanne just two years after Sevres.

Spent the next decade or two running around keeping those pesky and sullen Sunnis and Shia Persians and Arabs and Kurds in line, usually at gunpoint. One thing we knew for sure - you couldn't trust those damned Muslims.

Then came WWII. Some of those Arabs sort of sympathized with our enemy, the Germans, but they kept out of it recalling what awaited when we lavished them with promises and realizing it would probably be worse when we didn't.

Germans crushed. Second War over. What next? Oh yeah, let's take the Palestinian homeland, parcel it up, and give half of it to the new state of Israel to atone for what Europeans did to Jews during the war and ease our guilty consciences at how we failed to stop it in time. In the decades afterward we stood by as Israel gradually absorbed the rest of the Palestinian territories while it subjugated those Arab people.

Then came Iran, those uppity buggers.  We had blessed them with the British American Oil company that selflessly removed Iranian oil at almost no charge to the Persians. When the Iranian people democratically elected a leader who said "Hell no, that oil belongs to Iran" the CIA instigated a coup and installed a monarch, Shah Pahlavi, to sit on the peacock throne as our stooge. We (the CIA and the Mossad) even built him a secret police force, the Savak, that made the Gestapo look like cub scouts.

Over the following decades we, the West, backstopped every obedient thug willing to do our bidding from Iran to Iraq, Egypt to Libya. We made sure their lands were well vaccinated against unruly democracy and looked the other way as they subjugated their own people to what were often feudal conditions only to later denounce them for their lack of modernity and sophistication.

That largely sums up a century of Our dealings with Them. We still can't fathom why they hate us. We can't imagine why some resort to terrorism.

Ask yourself this. If you and your parents and your grandparents, perhaps even your great-grandparents, had gone through a century of that at the instance of foreigners who were utterly alien - ethnically, linguistically, culturally, economically, politically, theologically - how tolerant of them would you be?

UPDATE

In his latest essay for TruthDig, Chris Hedges explores the glue that holds America's empire together. It's pretty much the same formula that the European powers used in their colonial past - terror, intimidation and oodles of violence.

A Perfect Explanation for Climate Change Denialism

The dumb are too dumb to know just how dumb they really are. That's seriously dumb, sometimes dangerously dumb. It's "here, hold my beer - now watch this" dumb.

There's a scientific name for it, the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's named for Cornell's David Dunning and Justin Kruger 1999 research into the boneheaded.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. The bias was first experimentally observed by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in 1999. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence, they may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

Dunning and Kruger have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in the unskilled, and external misperception in the skilled: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Dunning and Kruger set out to test these hypotheses on Cornell undergraduates in psychology courses. In a series of studies, they examined subject self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were asked to estimate their own rank. The competent group estimated their rank accurately, while the incompetent group overestimated theirs. As Dunning and Kruger noted:

Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.

Meanwhile, subjects with true ability tended to underestimate their relative competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be easy, erroneously presumed to some extent, that the tasks also must be easy for others.

This could explain a common theme witnessed in climate change deniers. They have an astonishing lack of any sense of just how harebrained they are. They do exhibit illusory notions of superiority, readily placing their uneducated opinion on par with the scientific consensus. They're just too damned dumb to realize just how damned dumb they are.

A New NATO Charter

It's a problem that afflicts any club. Once it starts growing it inevitably lets in some members who are true dickheads. First everything starts going all to hell then rules of conduct have to be laid down and then you have to start turfing out members who just can't get with the programme.

Which brings me to NATO.  The Alliance has growing problems, some of them hardly new. Take Turkey's strongman (thug), Erdogan. He figures we're on the hook to back him up when he shoots down a Russian warplane that briefly, for all of 17-seconds, violated Turkish airspace. That's Russia for chrissakes. Russia - as in more nukes than any other nation on the planet - the US included.

That's Erdogan, the guy who bent over backwards to help ISIS recruits get into Syria. Erdogan, whose kids are suspected of brokering ISIS oil exports. Erdogan, who thinks nothing of violating other nations' sovereign airspace when he wants to bomb Kurds or just piss off the Greeks, another NATO ally. Erdogan, who seems to be on the verge of appointing himself president for life. Erdogan is a full fledged dickhead.

Then there are countries trying to work their way into NATO - places like Ukraine and Georgia - that could well use their membership to get nasty with guys like Vlad Putin. Oh yeah, there's Hungary and, possibly, even Poland.

Maybe it's time to amend the NATO Charter, especially Article 5, the mutual defence provision. That needs tweaking. Let's reserve Article 5 for "Old NATO," the founding western European states who all banded together so long ago to thwart Soviet territorial adventurism through the Fulda Gap and across the central German plain. That was back when the club worked as it was intended to work. We stood in defence of each other.

When it comes to Erdogan or the new NATO members, we should introduce Article 5(b) to provide that the mutual defence obligation will be suspended for members out picking fights or member states ruled by dickheads. You want to pick fights, you're on your own. You want to be a dickhead, nobody has your back. You get a hankering to shoot down Russian planes that are not attacking, you clear it with Brussels first. If you don't, well it was nice knowing ya.

Old NATO was never a source of worry. It put our minds at ease somewhat. New NATO shouldn't be a source of worry either - but it is.

How Shiite Islam Sees Saudi Arabia and Why We Need to Take Notice

Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is furious at Saudi Arabia's execution of that country's top Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr. Khamenei wasted no time posting this image to his web page.

Amnesty International denounced Sheikh Nimr's trial as "political and grossly unfair."

Some have warned that the Saudis are on the brink of a theological civil war pitting the larger and far stronger Sunni states against the Shiites.  The Sydney Morning Herald foreign editor, Maher Mughrabi, writes that the West may find itself dragged into the violence.

"For Shiites around the world, Nimr is the latest in a long line of martyrs at the hands of tyrannical rulers. They will recall the proverbial utterance of their inspiration, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law Ali bin Abi Talib, that "the day of the oppressed over the oppressor is more severe than the day of the oppressor over the oppressed".

"In Egypt, the Arab Spring brought democratic elections and the downfall of long-serving dictator Hosni Mubarak. The Saudis were amazed and appalled when their allies in Washington proved unwilling to back Mr Mubarak to the hilt. They were even more horrified when the Obama White House pursued dialogue and a deal with Iran over its nuclear program.

"The Saudi response has been to freelance a new, far more aggressive policy across the region, leading a coalition to invade and bombard Yemen and bankrolling the return of military rule in Egypt, which is now effectively a wholly-owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia."

"The president who won Egypt's democratic elections - Mohamed Morsi - also waits in jail under a sentence of death, along with many other leaders of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. The execution of Nimr surely brings the clock closer to midnight for all of those men, with potentially dire consequences for Egyptian society.

"The voices of all those in the Middle East who argue for a civic space that allows opposition voices and demands accountability from rulers have been weakened by this draconian act.

"More worryingly, the voices of those who argue that the sword of the state only understands one language - that fire can only be fought with fire - have been strengthened, making bloodshed and violence more likely not only for Saudi Arabia and its interests around the world but for all those who are allies and business partners of the House of Saud. And that could mean many Western countries."

"Whether we like it or not, the bell that tolled for Nimr Baqir al-Nimr tolls loudly for all of us. We cannot afford to let it pass unheeded."

One of These Is So Not Like the Others

One of these is different from the others but just not in a way you might guess - Chicago, Vienna, Istanbul, the North Pole.

Yes, it's the North Pole and what sets it apart from the others this week is that it's the warmest of the lot even though it is also the only one currently shrouded in 24-hour darkness. In the pitch dark temperatures in the high Arctic are expected to reach 5C.

Yes, this is the Arctic. The Arctic in January. In constant darkness at a balmy 41 degrees Fahrenheit. And, yes, like so many other weather records that are tumbling around our feet these days, it's unprecedented. Hmm, I wonder if something's up?

What do you think?

Maybe the Bastard Will Demand Royalties

It was only a matter of time. The Orange Slime has been featured in a jihadist recruitment video.

A clip of Donald Trump is featured in a purported new recruitment video released by Al-Shabaab, the terrorist group based in Somalia.

The GOP presidential candidate is shown discussing his plan to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Before Trump's appearance in the nearly 52-minute video, the al Qaeda-linked Islamic extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike, is shown lecturing: "Muslims of the West, take heed and learn from the lessons of history. There are ominous clouds gathering in your horizon. Yesterday, America was a land of slavery, segregation, lynching and Ku Klux Klan. And tomorrow, it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps."