Global Weirding - B.C. - and An Addition to the Family.

It's snowing on Vancouver's north shore mountains. Snow is accumulating on Grouse, Cypress and Mt. Seymour.

And British Columbians can welcome a new arrival to our coastal dolphin community. Short-beaked common dolphins have moved into the Salish Sea. Usually not seen north of California these dolphins seem to be migrating out of hotter southern waters or they're travelling in pursuit of their traditional bait fish.

Other resident dolphin species include the orca, Pacific white sided dolphin, Dall's porpoise, harbour porpoise, Northern Right Whale dolphin,  Risso's dolphin and striped dolphin.

Lockheed's Weird Narrative

For me, the miner's canary was a PostMedia Matthew Fisher column claiming that opting for the Boeing Super Hornet instead of Lockheed's F-35 would leave the Canadian north defenceless. I let it slide. It was Matthew Fisher after all and I had him pegged years ago. Then I began hearing the same story from a friend who said he'd read it in the Washington Post.

The story goes like this. Within a few years the Russians will be deploying their new stealth fighter, the T-50, and of course there will be swarms of them and Putin will station them on Russia's Arctic frontier.

The second part of the scenario involves Russia launching a stealth sneak attack (along the lines of the American's "Operation Chimichanga" strategy) using these T-50 jets to launch a cruise missile attack against Canada and the U.S.

The third part argues that the best defence against a Russian stealth warplane is a Canadian stealth warplane. Ergo we're screwed if we're stuck with Boeing's Super Hornet. Our only hope of salvation rests on being able to deploy Lockheed's F-35s.

To begin with, this is multi-level bullshit. About a week ago I did a bit of research into Russian progress with development of its long-range cruise missile technology. The consensus seems to hold that Russia's latest air launched cruise missiles can achieve 30-foot accuracy over a range of up to 6,300 miles.

Now here's the thing. Russia's long-range cruise missiles, the type they would need to reach the really important targets in Canada and the northern U.S. are those red things shown underneath the wings of a Russian bear bomber in the picture above. They're essentially small airplanes with wings and engines and fins.

No one is going to be slinging those things under the wings of any T-50 stealth fighter. First of all they're too big to fit inside. They're probably too big to mount under the wings either.  And then there's the problem that, if you did find a way to put a couple under the T-50 wings there goes your supposed stealth advantage.

That's not to say the Super Hornet could defend against a determined, Operation Chimichanga scale cruise missile attack either. We'll never have enough fighters to maintain an ironclad defence across our vast Arctic. The Russians could pick their spots, launch their cruise missiles and turn away, probably just as we would be launching our interceptors.

Is Lockheed that desperate to keep Canada in line on the F-35? Do they fear we'll lead a stampede of other international customers? Hard to know what's going on but it is getting bizarre.

When the Fossil Fuelers Are Done, Ordinary Albertans Are Screwed.

Such is life in a petro-state. Alberta has about 150,000 abandoned or dormant wells, many of them on farmland. The farmers didn't want them but they couldn't stop them going in either. What they didn't understand is how they'd get screwed by the fossil fuelers on the other end, when the well ran dry.

In many cases the well is owned by a shell company, a subsidiary of a big energy producer. When it's making money the cash flows through the subsidiary to the parent. When the good times end, the parent lets the subsidiary fall into bankruptcy and walks away leaving the farmer holding the bag.

Bad as the situation is for the Alberta farmer, Ecojustice lawyer, Barry Robinson, says a far bigger calamity could be in store from the Tar Sands.

As of 2015, the provincial government held $1.6 billion in reclamation bonds to clean up the oilsands — that's against $21 billion in estimated clean-up costs. Alberta's auditor general raised concerns last summer that the province wasn't holding enough on deposit.

It's a very real possibility that, in the not too distant future, the Tar Sands could become a stranded asset, abandoned by investors, bankers and the energy giants. Someone is going to have to pony up nearly $20-billion for clean up and reclamation. This giant tailing ponds won't clean up themselves. Who do you think will be writing the cheque?

Mental Health Break

Turning How We See the Economy On Its Head

It's not the way we do things. It contradicts our economic thought. Yet the way we've done things, our economic modelling has been instrumental in helping create the environmental calamity we're in today.

An article in The Guardian argues that it's the economy that needs to be integrated into the environment, not the other way round. It's an elaborate argument that deserves to be read in its entirety - which is also my way of saying it defies my ability to paraphrase it in nice, simple terms.

The point is that we have to recognize that the economy, the sum of our economic activity, has to be limited by the size of the environment, by what nature can provide, what it can bear, our environment's carrying capacity.

That sounds logical doesn't it? Sure only we've not done that. And we're running into walls in our headlong race of eco-excess. We have fouled the atmosphere, created threats such as global warming. We've drained our aquifers that we relentlessly exploited to support the levels of agricultural production needed that we could grow in numbers to 7+ billion. We've collapsed one fishery after another worldwide as our industrial fleets fish down the food chain. We've contaminated our freshwater and coastal waters with agricultural runoff leading to massive toxic algae blooms and oceanic dead zones. We are drawing down on natural resources at 1.7 times our planet's carrying capacity.

So, if our economic binging is beginning to backfire on us it only makes sense to accept that our economic activity must be governed by the environment. The economy must be a subset of the environment if we are to live in harmony with our one and only biosphere, Spaceship Earth.

Sounds great but how in hell do you do that? When, as a global civilization, we're living so far beyond our means, how do we mend our ways? Pretty obviously some will have to make do with less, perhaps a lot less. And chances are if it was put to a vote the have-nots would carry the day in deciding that the haves, us/we, should be doing the giving up part.

We in the West consume far more, on a per capita basis, than the rest of the world. Yet other countries have allowed their populations to explode without regard for how that impacts the environment. In other words we're all sinners. We may need to be taking a smaller piece of the pie but it's only fair that they have a lot fewer mouths at the table.

It's hard to imagine a more intractable problem. When has mankind ever been confronted with a dilemma of this magnitude? What is our track record of voluntary sacrifice on such an enormous scale?

And there, kids, you have the Easter Island paradox. You see the problem and the inevitable outcome. You know what you have to do. But hell's bells, you'll not have any of it. That tree over there? The last one? Yeah, let's get her down.

Oh Dear. Trump's Dirty Laundry - To Russia with Love.

This could be very awkward.  Hackers, allegedly from the Russian government, are said to have broken into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and filched the database on opposition candidate, Donald Trump.


The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.

The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some GOP political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.

“It’s the job of every foreign intelligence service to collect intelligence against their adversaries,” said Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike, the cyber firm called in to handle the DNC breach and a former head of the FBI’s cyber division. He noted that it is extremely difficult for a civilian organization to protect itself from a skilled and determined state such as Russia.

“We’re perceived as an adversary of Russia,” he said. “Their job when they wake up every day is to gather intelligence against the policies, practices and strategies of the U.S. government. There are a variety of ways. [Hacking] is one of the more valuable because it gives you a treasure trove of information.”

Canadians Are Parting Company With Their Federal Government

The Trudeau government's clumsy, ham-fisted approach to the assisted dying bill seems to be driving a wedge between the government and the public.

A recent poll showed that the public don't want Trudeau's narrowed bill. A strong majority want a Carter-compliant law including one that will give them, should their time come, the right to advanced directives on end of life issues.

Read the comments on any assisted death story. The responses are as powerful as they are uniform - the public is enraged that this government would put itself above the law. Justice minister Jody doesn't seem to have convinced anyone, perhaps except the prime minister himself.

What's also emerging is a renewed fondness for the Senate. Canadians seem to like the idea of the Senate doing what they imagined its job was - to provide sober second thought when the government goes too far or not far enough.

Hillary Links Our Saudi Allies with Global Terrorism. Wowser.

Yes, she said it. Hillary Clinton said our Arab allies, the Saudis, Qataris and Kuwaitis, are looking the other way while their princes, sheikhs and emirs write the cheques that fund Islamist terrorism. For the record, those princes, sheikhs and emirs, they are the state effectively.


"It is long past time for the Saudis, Qataris and Kuwaitis and others to stop their citizens from funding extremist organisations," she declared in the aftermath of the Orlando attack.

"And they should stop supporting radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path towards extremism."

...for Clinton to even link Saudi Arabia to extremism at all marks what has become a revolutionary realignment in US diplomacy in the Middle East.

For Obama to have questioned the Saudi funding of fundamentalist Wahhabi religious schools in far-off countries such as Indonesia is one thing, given he is near the end of his presidency.

Coming from Clinton, potentially about to begin hers, the criticism will sting.

With the US no longer as dependent on Saudi oil for its energy needs, and the malignant role of Saudi money in extremism now open slather, expect the pressure on one of the world's most repressive regimes to grow.

 

Boil it all down and what have you got? For starters, we're selling armoured war wagons to a major state sponsor of Sunni radicalism and Islamist terrorism. That our Saudi allies are also committing atrocious war crimes against the Houthi civilian population of Yemen, that's just icing on the cake.

Justin had better hope those freighters are loaded and out to sea before the U.S. government releases those 28-pages of the 9/11 Commission report. Oh dear.

Athletes Don't Hide It. Why Should Congressmen?

You know how corporate sponsors sometimes get their logos on athlete's jerseys or helmets? Wouldn't it be a good idea if America's "bought and paid for" Congress followed suit?

If you're working for Koch Industries or Exxon Mobile or Monsanto, why not have that sponsor's logo on your suit jacket? Truth in advertising. Get it out there.

What brings this up is a resolution the GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed last week condemning the very idea of an American carbon tax.


ExxonMobil officially supports a carbon tax, but the company did not comment on the House Resolution prior to the vote. Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute, which is a key lobbying group of the oil industry, including ExxonMobil, publicly supported the anti-carbon tax resolution, as did Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) suspects that the Resolution itself originated from the oil industry:

And it’s not just a matter of lobbying by Big Oil and the Koch operation on how Republicans ought to vote; given their control over the Republican Party, it is very likely that the vote itself was brought up at their behest.

Since 2009, ExxonMobil has contributed at least $1.7 million to members of Congress who voted in favor of the resolution, according to an analysis by ClimateTruth.org.


There are some indications that GOP leadership pressured House Republicans to vote for the Resolution. They certainly succeeded: of the 8 Republicans who are members of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, whose purpose is to craft optimal climate change policies, 7 voted for the Resolution. Only Rep. David Jolly (R-FL) withstood the pressure, voting “Present.”

Pop Goes the Methane

Remember those mystery craters discovered in the Russian north? They're still occurring and Arctic warming is the obvious suspect. As the Arctic warms it's taking the "perma" out of permafrost which is releasing massive amounts of once safely sequestered (frozen) methane.



Scientists have found that released methane is having all sorts of impacts in the polar region. Among them, it's contributing to the vanishing Arctic sea ice. As methane gas plumes bubble to the surface they can break up or prevent the formation of sea ice. On freshwater lakes boat owners have long used bubblers to prevent damaging ice from forming along the hulls of their yachts in winter. This is the same idea only it's a natural phenomenon and the bubbles are the powerful greenhouse gas, methane.

Then there are frozen methane blobs on the ocean floor called "clathrates." As the sea water warms they can melt releasing their methane to the surface. The bad news is that there is a lot of frozen methane on the seabed. The worse news is that scientists have found they played a significant role in major extinction events. The good news is that many scientists believe our clathrates are still too deep to thaw anytime soon. Many scientists as in "not all."

Trudeau Needs a Justice Minister Who Understands the Law of Canada

When justice minister Jody runs afoul of the legal mind of Joe Arvay. That's one thing. Regrettable, sure, but hey, it's Jody. When she refutes the wisdom of the top constitutional expert in Canada, Peter Hogg, Jody has one deep-seated, serious problem - herself.

The issue, of course, is the Carter decision of the Supreme Court of Canada and how much leeway justice minister Jody has to defy the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to whittle away the constitutional protections of severely afflicted Canadians.

Jody has sent a background paper to Canada's senators arguing that Trudeau's bill C-14 is "Charter proof." Jody is cleaving to the sophistry that the restrictions in C-14 are necessary if we're to avoid a stampede of people out to off themselves. Following the SCC decision, she maintains, would encourage suicide.

Josh Paterson, executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, a plaintiff in the Carter case, said it doesn’t matter “how many new purposes they put in the bill or how many bells and whistles and safeguards they impose,” the legislation is unconstitutional because it maintains an absolute prohibition on assisted dying for all those who are not close to death.

Canada’s leading constitutional authority, Peter Hogg, last week noted that the top court specifically directed the government to enact legislation “consistent with the constitutional parameters” set out in the Carter decision. Excluding all those who are not terminally ill from the right to assisted dying is not consistent with Carter and will thus be inevitably struck down, he told a Senate committee.

We already have a highest court of the land and it's not Jody much as she might think otherwise.

Here's an idea. Why not just pass C-14 on condition that Jody agree to resign, not her portfolio but her seat in Parliament never to seek office again, if when Canadian judges throw it out as unconstitutional?

Scripture Ain't Gospel - Live With It.

Biblical inerrancy is bullshit. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, is not the literal word of God. That's bullshit. It's the word of countless old geezers passed down from one to the other, embellished a bit here and there to suit whims and biases and fancies of the day with plenty of space left over for even more bullshit.

And people who believe the word from God is that gays should be put to death, well they have shit for brains. They probably also have prehensile tails. We developed an institution for them. It's called the zoo.

Lewis Black has a great sketch on the Old Testament and how it screws up Christians. Embedding is disabled but you can access it here.

How much mayhem have those damned books and the people who devour them inflicted in the name of their gods over the centuries? Those fundamentalists who come in equal parts of piety and murderous brutality. And they've been dining on a diet of straight bullshit.

It's time to rein this in. We need a law defining terrorist organizations to include any religion that justifies the killing of a person for any lawful practice relating to ethnicity, gender, political or sexual orientation. Preach any of that shit and - bang! - your precious tax privileges are gone, rescinded, over. You go on the terrorist organization list, you get regular visits from the anti-terrorism folks and your leadership, they go on the "no fly" list.

Global Weirding - U.K.

The Brits will have to put away their beach wear for a while. After the recent heat wave and predictions this will be the hottest summer in more than a century they're now being told to brace for Arctic temperatures this week.

Not sure how that works. Even the Arctic isn't experiencing Arctic temperatures lately.

After the "Arctic whisper" passes the Brits have been told to brace for heavy rains and flash flooding.

And that folks is what you call Global Weirding. Our new "normal."

Orlando and the Plague of Fundamentalism

I got a call from my brother yesterday morning. He's gay. Naturally the Orlando massacre came up in our conversation. The discussion got around to religious fundamentalism, people of that rabid religiosity that infests the world today - Muslim, Christian, Judaic, Hindu, hell even Buddhist. There you will find the murderous malignancy of intolerance.

I wondered how many good Christian folks went to church yesterday seeing God's hand at work in Orlando.

Fundamentalism is rooted in scriptural inerrancy. Every word, no matter how malicious, is the word of God. If God says homos are to be put to death, well it's right there in writing. Has to be true. How warped does a mind have to be to believe that shit?

Imagine a world free from fundamentalism of any stripe. Imagine.

Justin, Meet Edmund

When I think of Israel's headlong plunge into fascism and our government's indifference (or worse) to it, I can't help but think of Edmund Burke's classic warning:

All that is needed for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Only never let it be said that this prime minister is guilty of the sin of doing nothing. No, he and our government have joined the effort to censure those who campaign to boycott, divest and sanction Israel for its half-century long oppression of the Palestinians and the theft of the Palestinian homeland.

Jeez, remember how we got our knickers in a bunch over the supposed remarks by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that called for Israel to be wiped off the map? Oh my lord, there were going to be sanctions. Israel demanded the US attack Iran. What a mess. (BTW, read this account from the Washington Post that clarifies what was actually said and what was meant - it's not what you've been led to believe)

Anyway, we got up on our hind legs in righteous indignation. We were not going to sit by and tolerate these threats (or supposed threats). Iran was going to be taught a lesson.

Of course the supposed threat was laughable. Iran has no nuclear weapons although they were interested in perhaps building a few. That seems to have been part of the Sunni v. Shiite tensions. Israel, by contrast, has dozens of nukes and the ability to deliver them, pretty much at will. Hard to imagine the Ayatollahs wanted to see Iran turned to glass.

So the Iranian threat was empty rhetoric at worst. Ahmadinejad (no longer in power) was no Avigdor Lieberman, currently the second most powerful man in the Israeli government.  That rabid rightwinger did threaten another country, Egypt, with genocide. He proposed destroying Egypt's Aswan dam and sweeping the Egyptians into the sea. He's now the defence minister which also gives him responsibility for keeping Israel's boot on the Palestinian's neck. Bet you he hates that job.

Then there's Netanyahu's agriculture minister, Uri Ariel, who thinks it would be agriculturally wise to for Israel to now annex Area C of the Palestinian West Bank. Area C may not sound like much but it's 60 per cent of the West Bank.

The proposal triggered a storm of protest (none from Ottawa, of course) when word got out that Ariel was calling for the expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians. Nothing of the sort, he says.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for Ariel clarified that the minister was misquoted on the issue of Palestinians in Area C: Rather than saying that he wants to remove a few thousand Arabs from Area C, he said that only a few thousand Arabs live there, and their numbers are not high enough to prevent an Israeli annexation of the area.

“We have to aspire to the annexation of Area C. These are areas where there are no Arabs at all, except a few thousand who don’t constitute a significant numerical factor,” Ariel said.

Ariel also said the Israeli right is unconcerned over recent peace overtures by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since they will eventually come to nothing. Nonetheless, Ariel, who opposes Palestinian statehood, carped that by invoking a desire for a two-state solution, Netanyahu is fueling the notion held by many Israelis that the creation of a Palestinian state is inevitable.

Gee, that sounds like ethnic cleansing. Good men ..do nothing.

Of course those numerically irrelevant Palestinians have it easy compared to their brethren in the prison camp known as Gaza. They've got an epidemic of skin problems caused by drinking their own contaminated water. Here's an updated account on the state of suffering of these besieged Palestinians.

The 1.8 million Gazans are the victims of the Israeli strategy of Dahiyeh, the calculated destruction, in flagrant violation of the laws of war and human rights, of essential civilian infrastructure - water, sewer and electrical utilities, hospitals, schools and such. The Israelis perfected the technique in the Beirut suburb from which it gets its name and they practiced it on Gaza three times. (It's also the template our other ally, the Saudis, are using against the Houthi civilians in Yemen).

Good men ..do nothing.

The Trudeau government would rather censure the B/D/S movement than do anything about the evolution of this fascist state of Israel. Our government is onside with this. We just can't pretend any more. We can't look the other way forever. Netanyahu promised in the elections in March last year that there'll never be a Palestinian state while he's prime minister.  There's one thing, maybe the only thing, on which Netanyahu's words have to be taken at face value.

What we're witnessing is incremental ethnic cleansing. When Gaza becomes completely uninhabitable the population will either have to die or be relocated, perhaps to Jordan. As Israel continues to swallow up the West Bank there'll be no viable homeland there for Palestinians either.

With governments such as that we have now and the one we just sent packing, we, all of us, are complicit in this. 

I was mistaken about Edmund Burke. He was talking about evil triumphing when "good" men do nothing. We're running short of good men these days.

False Hope and the Great Illusion - Life in the Ghetto of Neoliberalism's Predator State

Chris Hedges figures we're fattened lambs being prepped for slaughter by the agents of corporatism, those we ourselves put in office.  He writes, of course, of America. Canadians, naturally, don't have a care in the world on this stuff. Don't we?

The aims of the corporate state are, given the looming collapse of the ecosystem, as deadly, maybe more so, as the acts of mass genocide carried out by the Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The reach and effectiveness of corporate propaganda dwarfs even the huge effort undertaken by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. The layers of deception are sophisticated and effective. News is state propaganda. Elaborate spectacles and forms of entertainment, all of which ignore reality or pretend the fiction of liberty and progress is real, distract the masses.

Education is indoctrination. Ersatz intellectuals, along with technocrats and specialists, who are obedient to neoliberal and imperial state doctrine, use their academic credentials and erudition to deceive the public.

The promises made by the corporate state and its political leaders—we will restore your jobs, we will protect your privacy and civil liberties, we will rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, we will save the environment, we will prevent you from being exploited by banks and predatory corporations, we will make you safe, we will provide a future for your children—are the opposite of reality.

The loss of privacy, the constant monitoring of the citizenry, the use of militarized police to carry out indiscriminate acts of lethal violence—a daily reality in marginal communities—and the relentless drive to plunge as much as two-thirds of the country into poverty to enrich a tiny corporate elite, along with the psychosis of permanent war, presage a dystopia that will be as severe as the totalitarian systems that sent tens of millions to their deaths during the reigns of fascism and communism.

Thank Freya that's only America. But, wait, is it really? Sure our cousins to the south are going through a rough patch. Having to choose between Drumpf and Hillary isn't pleasant. Talk about an election where everybody is holding their noses to vote. Who will it be - Bad or Worse?

Besides, it's America. They're flamboyant, always doing everything to extremes. It's easier to see the rot that way. You've got to dig around a little more to see it in Canada. It's still there but it's understated, seemingly gentler, less offensive.

Some of the stuff he chronicles is found here. Manufactured news spun and flavoured and dished up by our corporate media cartel. We've sure got that. Monitoring of the citizenry - I haven't heard Justin say he's dismantling the pipeline secret police his predecessor set up. Have you? CSIS is still in the domestic surveillance business, right? If you haven't heard anything to the contrary, it is.

Inequality - of wealth, income and opportunity - that's still going on. That's a self-perpetuating problem if left unattended. Neoliberalism? Yes, it's alive and well in the True North. 

Then there's the kicker, what Hedges calls "the looming collapse of the ecosystem." It's happening even if you didn't notice it on your commute to work this morning. This CO2 chart from NASA tells you everything you never wanted to know. Since 1950 we have been in a man-made environment unlike anything known for the last 400,000 years.  All my life and, I'll bet, all yours too has been in that unprecedented territory.

False hope and great illusion - is that all that's keeping us going? Is that what's propping up the state? Given the way our civilization is responding to this looming ecological collapse what else could there be? It's a house of cards.

Hedges argues that our only hope now is to take our fate into our own hands. New political movements, civil disobedience and more.

It is time to step outside of the establishment. This means organizing groups, including political parties, that are independent of the corporate political machines that control the Republicans and Democrats.

It means carrying out acts of sustained civil disobedience. It means disruption.

Many who work within ruling class structures understand the corruption and dishonesty of corporate power. We must appeal to their conscience. We must disseminate the truth.

We have little time left. Climate change, even if we halt all carbon emissions today, will still bring rising temperatures, havoc, instability and systems collapse to much of the planet.

Let us hope we never have to make the stark choice, as most of the [Warsaw] ghetto fighters did, about how we will die. If we fail to act, however, this choice will one day define our future, as it defined theirs.

Could This Be Our Biggest Blunder on Climate Change?

In the early years of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, we were introduced to what was presented as a long-distance, multi-generational phenomenon. We were told if we didn't change our ways things would be pretty rough for those who would follow us two or three generations down the road.

Take Arctic sea ice, for example. The IPCC warned us, not that long ago, that if we continued with our usual fossil energy pattern the Arctic could be "ice free" by 2100. To forestall that we were told we needed to sharply cut our carbon emissions and rapidly transition to a clean energy economy.

2100, they might as well have said 4100. A number of studies have shown that it's human nature to see numbers as distant as 2100 as almost irrelevant. People will sacrifice if necessary for their children's survival. They might even entertain some sacrifice if they perceive a realistic prospect of harming their grandchildren. But 2100, 84 years from now? Who cares? They can't connect themselves to that. It's too distant. Why should they sacrifice now for something that might, might benefit people they can't even envision that far down the road?

You know what does work, what does motivate people? You may see it soon enough. What works is when people see what's barreling down on them - here, now, or in the next ten to twenty years. That gets their attention.

Florida. When it comes to climate change many Floridians have been dead from the neck up until very recently. Three words - sea level rise - and the switch was flipped. The governor may still be brain dead but people with those lovely waterfront homes and condos woke up from their collective coma. They began to understand that the seas were going to rise and this was not a good thing when you own low-lying waterfront property. They began to understand the climate change Trifecta - sea level rise, high tides and storm surges. People began to learn what that holds in store even for their utilities - electricity, fresh water and that all important one, sewage.

Let's go back to the Arctic and that sea ice business. 2100 was the date until just a couple of years ago when the US Navy said its people figured the Arctic would be ice free for navigation by 2020, perhaps even as early as 2016. Guess what? It's going to be ice free for navigation this year and, if not, next year for certain. What ever happened to 2100? In 2010 they were telling us 2100. They were only out by 84 years. How in hell did that happen? What else did they get wrong? Plenty, it seems.

Back in 2010 we talked a lot about "tipping points." The idea was that we had to keep man made warming below 2 degrees Celsius if we wanted to avoid triggering these tipping points that would launch us into runaway global warming. These tipping points were triggers that would activate natural mechanisms that would release masses of greenhouse gases far in excess of anything man ever emitted.

That magical 2C target? Well that was a political number ginned up by - you guessed it - the same people who said the Arctic would be ice free by 2100.

At the Paris climate summit last December, even our politicians could no longer put up with that 2C nonsense. So they came up with a new nonsensical figure, 1.5C. That was the new, "never exceed" number to avoid catastrophic global warming.

The scientific community was quick to point out that, with the existing atmospheric loading of persistent greenhouse gases, we've already locked in 1.5C of warming. In a combination of sarcasm and anger they pointed out that it was a great target but it meant decarbonizing our economy and our societies now, immediately.  In other words, that horse has left the barn. Our enviromin, Ms. McKenna can say she's going to close that barn door but she's just blowing smoke up our backsides.

How could the IPCC get it so wrong? How could they warn of an ice free Arctic in 2100? How could they not see it coming by 2016? Here's an explanation. They were working on man made emissions. They didn't factor in tipping points and natural feedback loops. Humans may have pulled the pin but the grenade that's going off up at the pole, that's a natural feedback loop. That's nature's doing. It's part of runaway global warming. No point fretting about tipping points when the canoe has already turned turtle.

This is where the scientific debate on global warming comes in. Scientific debate? What debate? That's over, surely. 97% of climate scientists have reached a powerful consensus, right? Oh sure, they've agreed that 1) climate change is very, very real, and 2) that climate change (or the aspects of it that were in dispute) is man made. But that's not today's debate. The current debate is whether we can arrest global warming or have we already left it too late.

Climate science is tough, demanding work. It's not for the faint-hearted. There have already been casualties. Some just can't bear it and leave the field, taking a teaching post or doing industrial research. Some have succumbed to depression, something akin to climate PTSD. Some, like Guy McPherson, have thrown in the towel and now spend their time chronicling tipping points we've already passed. (A word of caution. The information at that link will be deeply unsettling. Proceed with care.) The rest, those who soldier on, figure out whether we can still arrest global warming and how we can prepare for what's coming. There aren't a lot of cheerleaders in that crowd.

Hydrologist Robert Ellison  put the struggle this way:

"This is a cultural clash for the hearts and minds of people and at stake is the future of the planet." Can you imagine sitting down to that grim notion at your desk every morning?

We allowed climate science to be politicized, transformed into another front of our culture wars. What madness.  Along the way the narrative got hijacked, ginned up, corrupted.

What if we had said, forget about 2100, you'll be taking a hammering by 2020 or 2025? In other words, this isn't some abstract notion that may affect people that aren't even born yet. This is a reality and you will have to deal with it.

2020 that's the predicted arrival date of what's being called "climate departure." Think of it as the abrupt transition from "old climate" - the climate you've known all your life - into a "new climate." One of the hallmarks of this new climate is that every year of the new climate will be hotter than the hottest year ever experienced in the old climate. There won't be any cool years, only very hot years.

Climate departure is supposed to set in first in areas such as the Caribbean, Central America and in equatorial regions elsewhere. Insufferable heat will be one problem but heat brings any number of knock-on effects - severe weather events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration; disease and pest problems; disruption of freshwater resources, on and on and on. If you haven't been following conditions across Central America you should know that they're already on the ropes, have been for years. Here, here, and here.

Climate departure will spread, sort of like the "creeping damp," until it's everywhere by 2047. It's not to say that cold places will be as hot as more tropical regions. They won't. They'll just be consistently hotter than they ever were prior to the "new climate" era.

As the Telesur article points out, America will soon be facing a major climate migration problem on its southern borders as today's trickle of migrants, about 10,000 a year, becomes a tide of people in search not of better paid jobs but survival. In case you're wondering, America is not planning to throw open her doors to a horde of climate migrants. I don't want to get into how they're planning to stop them.

In other words, our great blunder, this illusion about distant events in 2100, long after we're safely gone, may be erased from our minds by climate events overtaking our serenity and ease over the next five to ten years. Will that be enough to shake us out of our complacency toward climate change? Will we become willing to accept what must be done to upgrade our own economy, our society, even our governance? I don't know but we won't have long to wait for the answer.

Global Weirding

It was 71F in New York City on Thursday. Nothing particularly notable in that.

It was 74F in Nuuk on Thursday, something that's very notable.

Nuuk is the capital of Greenland and 74F (23.2C) is the highest June temperature ever recorded in that Arctic country. Highest, warmest, hottest - call it what you like.

Thursday’s toasty reading in Nuuk marks the second exceptionally warm temperature recorded in southwest Greenland since April, when the ice melt season began about a month prematurely.

Murray Dobbin Denounces the Apartheid State, Our Friend and Ally

It was bad enough when the Hooligan Party tabled their motion to denounce the Canadian Boycott/Divest/Sanction movement. It was cringeworthy when a bootlicking prime minister and his government threw in with them.

He's a couple of weeks late to the party but Murray Dobbin is taking a stand against the Conservatives, the Liberals, even New York governor Cuomo, and their vile "new anti-semitism." Dobbins argues that Netanyahu's "silent allies" are empowering the spread of fascism in Israel.

By now anyone even vaguely aware of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has heard the phrase ''the new anti-Semitism.'' It is a clever propaganda piece aimed at anyone who dares criticize Israel for its illegal occupation of the West Bank and its continued brutalization of Palestinians in Gaza.

...even such dire public warnings from members of the Israeli governing and military elite are having no discernible impact on the West's carte blanche support for the Netanyahu government. It raises the question: Is there any development in Israel that would cause Western nations to intervene in the longer-term interests of Israel and say enough is enough? Just yesterday, Uri Ariel, the Israeli minister of agriculture made a proposal to annex a huge chunk of the West Bank and expel 300,000 Palestinians. Does that cross a red line? Does the West even acknowledge a red line?

Israeli political commentator Michael Brizon, who writes under the pseudonym B. Michael, concluded the failure of Western governments to criticize what is happening in Israel is itself a new form of anti-Semitism. Writing in a Haaretz op-ed titled ''Yet Again the Jewish People Face Great Danger and the World Is Silent,'' Brizon lamented the fact that the greatest danger to Israel is now from within, not from its traditional enemies. ''With our very own hands, we anointed the Huns who rule over us.''

The irony for Michael is palpable: Israel's promise has been lost, he wrote, and ''all that remains is a big mouth, brandished fist, and endless hidden hatred, militarism, paganism, and self-righteousness. And the world is silent.''

That silence is what terrifies Michael: ''...if you persist in your silence, you indifferent world, that will be categorical proof that you really are anti-Semitic, exactly as we've always been told.''

Of course we're not silent. Not Canada, our Parliament, our Liberal government. They're not silent. They're giving Netanyahu's fascist movement a standing ovation, a big pat on the back.

Even Climate Change Has a Silver Lining

For years I've written that climate change would be the death knell of globalism. It's really simple. The global economy depends on a fabric of nations operating collectively. That requires a high degree of stability all the way along the chain. Climate change will seek out the weakest links on those supply chains and destabilize them.

Bloomberg, it seems, agrees.

Within a century of Henry Ford's first assembly line, the entire world economy has become a single, virtual conveyor belt. And that belt is getting hot.

When weather catastrophes hit, the big-ticket damages tend to come not from heat waves but from floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. Natural disasters caused billions of dollars in damagelast month alone, according to a recent report, from Canadian wildfires ($3.1 billion), to European flooding ($4.6 billion), to U.S. storm damage ($1 billion).

...Manufacturing these days involves facilities in multiple countries, each of which has a sequential role in taking raw materials a step closer to being finished products. Imported materials may remain unfinished, even after they're exported to the next station on the international assembly line. This “vertical specialization,” it turns out, may have a blind spot when it comes to climate change, according to new research from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Manufacturing is only as strong as the weakest, or in this case hottest, link in the supply chain.

..."We usually think that trade will allow us to adapt to climate change," said Solomon Hsiang, a public-policy professor at the University of California-Berkeley who has studied the effects of climate change on economic performance, "but this analysis highlights ways in which vulnerability to climatic events might actually increase our exposure to climatic risks."

Hsiang said that, similar trends in the U.S. amplified the economic impact of hurricanes on inland states by raising the cost of capital nationwide.

...With hotter temperatures looming, researchers have studied what that means for whole economies. An average annual temperature of about 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius) may be optimal working conditions. When the mercury rises past about 80F, workers start to become less productive in industries like mining, construction, or forestry, where there’s no escaping into an air conditioned offices.

While this Potsdam paper looked at the effects of heat, Levermann said he expects that other meteorological wallops getting the most attention—floods, drought, storms—will be shown to have a similar effect on what may be an increasingly fragile global manufacturing bucket brigade.

Which begs the question of why Canada or any other state is entering into long term trade deals when there are so many emerging climate threats that could destabilize our trading partners? What if we cannot meet our obligations to them? What if they fail us? This Trans Pacific Partnership mega-deal, for example. Has anyone done an environmental assessment of this deal including a climate change stress test for the signatory nations? Why not? Should any country be getting into 30 or 20 year deals without a clear idea of how the world will change by then?

We have to start looking at this seriously before we sign any new trade deals. The 80s are over. They're not coming back. Let's face facts.

Rethinking Seafood

Two years ago there was some sort of contamination problem with Asian seafood.  I think it was something viral. In any case the seafood appetites of wealthy Asians were not being met.

It didn't take long for Asian buyers to reach the Pacific northwest and they came with money, lots of it. The upshot of it was that locals found themselves staring at ridiculous prices for seafood from their own waters.

It was great for the commercial fishing industry. They made out like bandits. It was bad for everyone else.

I was in my doctor's waiting room. An old fellow sat beside me. He was carrying a bag. The receptionist came over and he handed her the bag asking if she could put it in their refrigerator. He was a fisherman and the bag was full of freshly caught prawns, a gift for the doctor. At that point prawns were fetching prices upwards of $40 a pound.

This fellow and I got into a conversation. He told me how he and his sons were making a killing off the Asian markets. I eventually asked him just who those prawns belonged to, him or the province and people of British Columbia? Were we sharing in his windfall because we were certainly feeling the pain of it?

We're going to have to deal with this question. The world is running out of fish. The commercial fleets are "fishing down the food chain" collapsing one fishery after another.

The stuff they sell today is often mislabelled or not labelled at all. I was in the frozen food aisle of a local store yesterday and I stopped to look at the "Captain Highliner" stuff - fish sticks, fish cakes, that sort of thing. The boxes said only that it was wild fish from the north Pacific.

A couple of months back I was over at the fishing port just down the road from my place. The boats were lined up, waiting to unload their obviously hefty catch.
I had to look. It wasn't cod or herring or anything like that. I asked the fellow on the dock, "is that hake?" and he nodded yeah. I asked since when did anyone bother catching hake, long considered a garbage fish. He said the fish processors take it, do something with it, add spices and flavourings, and then flog it as - you guessed it, "wild fish from the north Pacific."

If our kids are eating that stuff it means our good fish are going somewhere else, chasing the highest price. But that fish that is being sold to foreign buyers, that's our fish. Shouldn't British Columbians and other Canadians have first go at it at a moderate price. It belongs to the fisherman when he hauls it into his hold but before then it belongs to me.

Food security is a problem that's just beginning to gain traction. Over the next 20-years it's going to be a huge issue. This is a good time to ensure that our natural abundance is securely ours. That doesn't mean stopping exports. It means staking a claim and putting everyone on notice.

This business came to mind as I was reading a Globe story about the use of high tech modeling in the Atlantic fishery. The challenge, according to the report, was to "keep up with worldwide demand for seafood." There was no mention of the challenge of securing local access to an essential resource. That, in my view, should be the priority.

Eleven Days to Go and "Leave" Up by Ten Points

A month ago it looked like most Brits were for staying in the European Union. It was a slim but seemingly stable lead.

Now, with less than 2 weeks to go, a poll commissioned by The Independent finds the leave camp with a 10-point lead. Trying to find out what Brexit would mean to Europe and the UK isn't easy. Opinions are all over the place. Trying to find out how it might reverberate across the Atlantic is that much harder. Apparently it will effect the markets, stocks and bonds, but, like a lot of earthquakes, you'll have to see if that will be a ripple or a tsunami.

Is HMQ really for the leave camp. Apparently so, maybe.

No, That's Just a Racist Saying He's Not a Racist.

The Wall Street Journal headline was intriguing: Donald Trump Rebuts Allegations of Racism.

Read on, I thought. This was going to be a genuinely Herculean feat given how often the Great Orange Behemoth has made incredibly racist comments. So what was Trump offering up to rebut his racism? This:

“And by the way, just so you know, I am the least racist person, the least racist person that you’ve ever seen, the least” Mr. Trump said. “I mean, give me a break. But they’re saying, ‘Is Donald Trump a racist?’ I am the least racist person that you’ve ever looked at, believe me.”

That's just a racist saying he's not a racist. 

The Climate, It's Always Been Changing

Of course it has. Which is why NASA prepared this wonderful graph of just how atmospheric CO2  has changed over the past 400,000 years.

Res ipsa loquitur - the thing does indeed speak for itself. For those who say this is something other than man-made, well this chart puts that argument right where it belongs.

Shakedown

Nice place ya got here. Shame if anything happened to it.

Translate that into Lockheed-lingo and it comes out like this - you buy any other airplane and we'll pull $825-million in contract work, Canada.

A bit of background. Lockheed has implemented a marketing strategy for the overdue, overpriced and underperforming F-35 supposedly stealthy light bomber that would make Erwin Rommel swoon.

To make the F-35 Congress-proof, Lockheed spread development and construction contracts across all but a few States. If the programme dies, there go all those jobs, jobs, jobs - enough to give any Congressman second thoughts. The company was shrewd enough to save plenty of gravy for its foreign developer partners - the UK, Canada, etc.

For a while the company said those contracts would continue even if Canada didn't ink a firm deal for the F-35, i.e. so long as the option was open. Now it's playing hardball.

If Canada goes ahead and buys something else, such as the Boeing Super Hornet, Lockheed will pull those $825 million in contracts.

"It's not really a threat," [Steve Over, Lockheed director of international sales] said in an interview with CBC News. "I don't want it perceived as a threat, but we will have no choice, if Canada walks away from F-35, except to relocate work in Canada to other purchasing nations."​

By the end of the year, Over said he expects the value of Canadian parts and sustainment contracts to reach $1 billion, with an anticipated lifetime value of $10 billion or more.

This puts the prime minister in an awkward spot. He hasn't shown a lot of spine in rough water. Presumably Lockheed was watching closely as he buckled on the Saudi Death Wagon deal. Will Slick dare risk incurring Lockheed's wrath and the fury of Canada's corporate sector or will he run true to course and just fold?

Lockheed can pretend it's not a threat but it damn well is. Are we going to do as we're told - one more time?

Boxed In. Canadians Don't Support Trudeau's Narrowed Assisted Dying Bill.

A large majority of Canadians, three out of four, favour the inclusion of "advanced directives" or "advanced consent" provisions in the Trudeau government's assisted dying law.

“Advanced directives” or “advance consent” became a particularly controversial aspect of the assisted-death debate after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled last year the laws against the practice were unconstitutional. Such directives would allow someone with dementia or another degenerative diagnosis — while still in full capacity of his or her cognitive faculties — to sign a document requesting assisted death at a set point down the line. That could be defined in the order by a point in their illness or another predetermined metric.

A Forum Research survey of 2,271 Canadians on June 7 defined advance consent as “when someone leaves explicit legal instructions for their assisted death in the event they become incompetent and can’t make their wishes known themselves.”

It then asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of allowing assisted death for those who have signed advance consent, but may not be able to communicate their wishes?”

A full 74 per cent agreed, even slightly more than the 72 per cent who said they support assisted death.

“We have known for years Canadians favour assisted dying. It is clear from these findings that they don’t want to deny this right to those who can’t, in the end, speak for themselves” said Forum Research President Lorne Bozinoff.

It seems the prime minister and justice minister Jody are not only on the wrong side of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Senate of Canada and the terminally ill. They're also on the wrong side of mainstream public opinion. I guess that leaves them onside with only themselves and the cranks. Strange bedfellows.

Andrew Cuomo - If You Boycott Israel, New York Will Boycott You

A blunt and chilling warning from New York governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Those who exercise their conscience to boycott Israel will pay a price, if New York has any say in the matter.

I recently signed the first executive order by a U.S. governor to help protect Israel from these pernicious efforts to punish it economically. My order ensures that no state agency or authority will engage in or promote any investment activity that would further the harmful and discriminatory BDS campaign. New York will identify institutions and companies, with the list made available to the public and updated regularly, that engage in boycotts, divestment or sanctions activity targeting Israel, either directly or through a parent or subsidiary. All state funds will then be divested from such entities.

If you boycott Israel, New York will boycott you.

It sounds as though New York is not only going to throw out the 1st Amendment but it's beginning to work up an enemies list. Shouldn't be long before the Tories are calling on Justin to follow suit.

Europe's Worrisome Best Seller

In today's troubled Europe where some nations are proudly proclaiming the triumph of illiberal democracy denounced by others as fascism, the renewed public appetite for Hitler's Mein Kampf has many worried.

On Saturday, "Mein Kampf" could become even more widely accessible in Europe. The right-wing Italian newspaper Il Giornale has announced that it will distribute the book freely to readers of its Saturday edition — an announcement that drew heavy criticism from Jewish groups in the country.

Similar plans of a right-wing publishing company in Germany had already caused outrage earlier this week. "Mein Kampf" has been available in German bookstores since January — but only in an annotated version that is supposed to point out inconsistencies and lies in Hitler's arguments. There are more than 3,000 additionalcomments in that version.

According to German law, publishing the book without annotations would be considered seditious. But that is what right-wing publishing company Schelm is now planning to do. Prosecutors are investigating the plans and could file charges even before the book gets published.

"This book is too dangerous for the general public," library historian Florian Sepp told The Washington Post last year, reflecting a sentiment among several German experts on that research field.

Words Best Left Unspoken

Ever notice how a word or phrase can abruptly disappear from our language almost without anyone noticing much less wondering why?

I wonder whatever happened to "tipping points"? Where did that term go? Why did it fall off the radar?

Just a few years ago, back when we thought tipping points were decades off in the future, we read about them a lot. We were told we had to keep manmade global warming increases to this limit or that if we didn't want to awake the Sleeping Giant of nature and trigger runaway global warming.

What we were doing was bad enough. It wasn't going to be easy getting by in a climate that was 2 degrees Celsius hotter. That kind of man made warming would be awful but it was at least survivable, not like what awaited us from far greater warming resulting from natural feedback loops triggered should we cross these invisible, unknowable lines called "tipping points."

I suppose tipping points are a bit like a blind man parallel parking. That's why we had to be very, very conservative. This was no time to be pushing our luck, testing limits.

The fact is there are signs, very obvious signs, that we've already crossed some major tipping points. Nature is now running with the ball and has a clear path to the end zone.

The most obvious of these is the Arctic sea ice. Just a few years ago the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was warning that, if we didn't mend our GHG emission ways, the Arctic could be ice free by the end of this century, 2100.  End of the century. That gave us food for thought - tomorrow, maybe. Update: now we're looking at an ice free Arctic Ocean this year, probably, if not then next year for sure.  Why did the IPCC get it so incredibly wrong? Easy, they were working on man made warming. What we're seeing today is nature's doing. We've crossed a major tipping point. Best we stop using that word, eh?

How about a new term, "Arctic amplification"? What it means is that the loss of reflective Arctic sea ice warms the ocean and the atmosphere which warms and energizes the Polar Jet Stream which accelerates the melting of the entire Greenland ice sheet and creates these things called Rossby Waves that brings polar air deep into southern latitudes and warmer southern air high into the Arctic that increases the polar melt and on and on and on.

Think of it as a progression: tipping point, change, knock-on effect, knock-on effect, knock-on effect, more change, knock-on effect, knock-on effect... you get the picture. It's called a "feedback loop" or a positive feedback loop to be exact. Positive in that it accelerates the process of change.

You can't see the Polar Jet Stream that's playing such an important role in this but you can see its handiwork, from space no less.



Yes, the Arctic is greening which is a good thing in some ways. Nice to see plants growing and migrating but nobody can be sure how this rapid ecological change will play out.

One downside is that our northern, Boreal Forest is browning, dying out. The changes underway will cause changes to precipitation, energy and carbon cycles across the far north.

You Might Want to See This

Jimmy Fallon and Barack Obama slow jam the news. Warning: includes a shameless plug for the TPP

I'll Take World Trade for $200, Mr. Trebeck

I had it all wrong. In today's Toronto Star, Justin Trudeau explains the Saudi Death Wagon deal and middle class Chinese consumers to Paul Wells.

No comment from me. Read it yourself.

Because nobody stands on principle like a Banana Republic.  Check, got it.

Gordie's Gone

If there is a Canadian who owns the name "Gordie" it was Gordie Howe. Gone at 88.

The native of Floral, Sask., played an unparalleled 33 professional seasons, breaking into the pro ranks in 1945 as a teenager with the Omaha Knights of the United Hockey League and skating one final shift for the Detroit Vipers of the International Hockey League in 1997 — at the age of 69.

Adios, Mr. Hockey.

If It Sounds Too Good to Be True... Returning CO2 to the Stone Age

It's a fairly exciting breakthrough, if it's the real thing. In an Icelandic volcanic rock field, compressed CO2 was pumped underground. Just two years later the researchers found that CO2 had turned to rock.

The idea is that CO2 and basalt combine to form carbonates, the precursor to limestone.

It sounds great provided you have the source of your CO2 in the vicinity of a basalt basin. British Columbia has the Chilcotin Group shown in grey in the chart below. Similar fields exist in Washington and Oregon.

Is it the miracle cure? Probably not. The Icelandic project is scaling up, hoping to permanently sequester 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. The problem to be solved, however, entails hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

The red triangles that parallel the coast are British Columbia's Pemberton and Garibaldi Volcanic Belts that offer the promise of vast amounts of clean, geothermal power - if the political will is ever found to exploit them, something the fossil fuelers won't take lightly.

Trudeau's No-Win Dilemma

What to do, what to do? Trudeau's flawed (to the extent that being unconstitutional renders a proposed law flawed) assisted dying bill could become a millstone round the new prime minister's neck.

Let's say the Senate returns it with a host of amendments unacceptable to the false majority government.

Trudeau could put an end to the Parliamentary squabbling by referring the proposed legislation to the Supreme Court of Canada. Easy peasy. That's one of the things the SCC is there to do.

If the government genuinely believes its law comports with the Carter decision why shouldn't it go the reference route? Unless it doesn't think the bill would pass judicial muster.

Surely this government believes in the rule of law and would never want to enact unconstitutional laws, right? Right?

There's a second, potentially greater problem facing Trudeau. That would follow from enactment of the existing bill. Trudeau's law that extends the Constitutional protection to one class of sufferers while denying it to another.

It won't be long before the papers are harvesting accounts of patients left to endure excruciating ordeals at the instance of the federal government, real stomach churning, heart rending stuff. Trudeau the Younger will be an easy target, forced to wear responsibility for every one of those cases.

What will he say? Will he fall back on the "balance" excuse so feebly advanced by justice minister Jody? Will he say their desperate torment is in our best interests? Will anyone believe him?

We'll be hearing from the anguished relatives, seeing photographs of the Trudeau law's handiwork, reading accounts that will make our skin crawl.

As for public opinion, that Trudeau claims to read and follow, he knows how fleeting and fickle that can be. Once the "Trudeau Compromise" deaths roll in and people read what he has done, there's likely to be a tide change in public opinion.

My guess is that Trudeau knows all too well the disaster that would befall him from enacting his "compromise" assisted dying bill. He no more wants it becoming law than do the senators racing to amend it to make it constitutional.

Trudeau as Pontius Pilate. He wants to wash his hands of it, let someone else - preferably the Supreme Court of Canada - take the heat. He can tell the anti-assisted dying crowd that he did his best, fought the good fight, but got overruled.

Cowardly? Absolutely. The last thing Justin Trudeau wants is to have to live with the fallout from his own legislation.

What Part of Parliamentary Government Does Rona Not Get

Tory interim leader, Rona (as in "Donna") Ambrose is aghast that the Senate is refusing to rubber stamp the government's assisted dying bill. That the senators should have the audacity to introduce amendments before sending it back to the Commons for reconsideration is, to Ms. Ambrose, some sort of affront.

It's as though Rona doesn't understand that the Senate does not have power to legislate. It receives legislation from the Commons, reviews it and where it deems appropriate, amends it but then sends it back to the Commons where MPs can accept the legislation as received or further amend it and send it back to the Senate. Negotiations can ensue along the way.

The last time the Commons and Senate couldn't find a way to get along was in 1947. There's no reason to suspect a deadlock in this case. The Senate will send the bill back with amendments to make the law comply with the Carter decision. If the government won't bend, the Senate will probably sigh deeply, approve the bill as tendered, and leave it up to the judiciary to toss it.

Rona knows all this. She's just being pernicious, availing herself of another opportunity to engage in that greatest of Tory traditions - slagging the Supreme Court of Canada and the Senate.

Then again, when Ambrose essentially throws her support behind Trudeau, the Liberals should be on guard. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Such a Big World, So Little Peace

When it comes to global peace, Canada ranks 8th out of 163 nations, according to the 2016 Global Peace Index. You can follow the link to an interactive map to see this year's results. Overall, we're doing pretty good.

The index is produced by the Vision of Humanity initiative of the Institute for Economics and Peace based in New York and Sydney, Australia.

The 2016 Global Peace Index (GPI) shows the world became less peaceful in the last year, reinforcing the underlying trend of declining peace over the last decade. Results also show a growing global inequality in peace, with the most peaceful countries continuing to improve while the least peaceful are falling into greater violence and conflict.

The 2016 GPI report provides a comprehensive update on the state of peace. It shows that amidst the global deterioration the world continues to spend enormous resources on creating and containing violence but very little on peace.

  

America's "Lose-Lose" Election

American intellectual, Henry Giroux, doesn't know who will win the White House in November. He knows who is going to lose - America.


...we are living through an ongoing crisis of democracy in which both the agents and institutions necessary for such social order are being dismantled at an accelerating rate in the face of a massive assault by predatory capitalism, even while there is growing resistance to the impending authoritarianism. It gets worse.

We live in a moment of political change in which democratic public spheres are disappearing before our eyes, language is turned into a weapon and ideology is transformed into an act of hate, fear, racism and destruction -- all of which is informed by a dark history of political intolerance and ethnic cleansing. The war on democracy has produced both widespread misery and suffering and finds its ideological counterpart in a culture of cruelty that has become normalized.

The bankers, hedge fund managers, financial elite and CEOs who rule the United States' commanding institutions have become the modern version of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As Hannah Arendt describes them in The Origins of Totalitarianism, citing Conrad: "'these men were hollow to the core, reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel without courage ...' the only talent that could possibly burgeon in their hollow souls was the gift of fascination which makes a splendid leader of an extreme party."

In the age of Trump, anticipation no longer imagines a better world but seems mired in a dystopian dread, mimicking the restlessness, chaos and uncertainty that precedes a historical moment no longer able to deal with its horrors and on the verge of a terrible catastrophe. We now live in a time in which mainstream politics sheds its ideals and falls prey to choices that resemble a stacked deck of cards and mimic the values of an authoritarian society. All the while politics is being hollowed out as lawlessness and misdirected rage, while a loss of faith in electoral politics has given rise to a right-wing populism that is more than willing to dispense with democracy itself.

Demands to support Hillary Clinton as a lesser evil compared to Trump refuse to acknowledge that such mandates keep existing relations of power intact. Such actions represent more than a hollowing out of politics -- they represent a refusal of the affirmative nature of political struggle. They also represent the surrender of any hope of moving beyond the enveloping fog of authoritarianism and a broken political system. Put bluntly, such choices sabotage any real hope for developing a new politics and a radical democracy. These limited choices also undermine the need to develop a broader vision of struggle, a comprehensive politics and the need to engage multiple publics in the quest to rethink the political terrain outside of a neoliberal notion of the future. At issue here is the moral blight that permeates the United States: a politics of the lowest expectations, one saturated in lies, deceptions and acts of bad faith.

Wait Just a Second

What's that? All those new NATO partners in eastern Europe don't want to defend eastern Europe?

The United States is asking Canada to join with it and the Germans and Brits to constitute a rapid reaction force along the frontier with Russia.

Let's see, under Bush/Cheney NATO marched ever eastward, right up to Russia's doorstep, to welcome those eastern European nations under NATO's umbrella. And they were all too eager to join. Only they're not as eager to carry their weight as NATO partners, even in their own backyard.

“European allies have reasons why they can’t come forward. They’re thinly stretched, at home, in Africa, in Afghanistan. They just don’t have the money,” said a senior NATO diplomat involved in the discussions.

The reluctance of some European governments to help the military build-up, the biggest since the end of the Cold War, reflects internal doubts over whether the alliance should be more focused on combatting militant groups and uncontrolled flows of migrants, mainly from the Middle East and North Africa.

“There are divisions within NATO,” said Sophia Besch, a European defence expert at the London-based Centre for European Reform think tank. “Some allies feel the focus should be on the south.”

Unity is crucial for NATO as Moscow and Washington accuse one another of intimidation close to the NATO-Russia border. NATO and Russia feel threatened by each other’s large military drills and are at odds over the crisis in Ukraine.

Any sense in the United States that Europe is unwilling to pay for its own defence could be damaging. U.S. President Barack Obama has suggested European powers were “free riders” during the 2011 Libya air campaign, and U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused them of not paying their fair share.

As for NATO's eastern deadbeats, they're banking on the perception that we'll carry the burden for them rather than appearing weak to Vlad Putin. If they want to be our protectorates rather than our partners, shouldn't we be treating them that way?

The Senate of Canada - Back on the Job.

To some they're still unelected meddlers who should just sit down and rubber stamp the government's assisted dying law, just as they would have done during the Harper "shut up and do what I say, when I say it" era.

That's not their job. Freed from the yoke of an iron fisted prime minister, the Senate is doing its job. It is providing "sober second thought" to the massively flawed Liberal assisted dying bill.

Unlike the prime minister and his cabinet, the senators can understand the plain words of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Carter decision. They understand the rule of law. They realize that Charter protections aren't something the government can withdraw or rescind to suit political expedience. They know it's not their job to look the other way and pass unconstitutional bills.

And so the Senate is doing its job. Our senators are amending the flawed legislation to bring it into accordance with the law of the land. Justice minister Jody doesn't much like that. She thinks her bill appropriately compromises the Charter protections of the terminally ill. She thinks that Charter rights are something for the government to manipulate, to "balance" as it deems politically expedient.

The Senate has already passed one amendment to the bill. More are in the works. It's probably best to review them at the end when we can see what the law should look like. For now, however, they seem to be doing precisely what Canada's senators are supposed to be doing.

Update:

Here's how Chantal Hebert sees the Senate:

As counterintuitive as it may seem, a more independent Senate may force more democracy (and collegiality) on the House of Commons: What is certain is that Bill C-14 gave the maligned upper house a much-needed opportunity to shine in a capacity other than that of parliamentary villain. The high calibre of its deliberations confounded many of its critics.

For the first time in years, the upper house earned some truly positive coverage.

It is early days but, based on the assisted-death debate, it is possible to postulate that the more the Liberal government uses its majority to truncate debate in the Commons, the more scrutiny it can expect in the Senate. To earn the respect of a less partisan upper house, the government may have to show more respect to due process in the House of Commons.

Amen.

It's Not Just KPMG That's Looking Bad

With the revelations emerging about the accounting giant, KPMG, and the sketchy - no, worse than sketchy - Isle of Man tax dodge deal, the Canadian Revenue Agency may not be getting the attention it so richly deserves for its part in this.

As Alan Freeman wrote in iPolitics last month, the revenue agency is "rotten to the core." It's a perfect opportunity for Mr. Trudeau to clean house, or in this case, the stables. It would be a challenge befitting of Hercules cleaning the Augean Stables.