"The Way We've Been Thinking Can't Be Right"

It was some 30-years ago that those shameless libertines - Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney - hopped into bed with the comely whore, neoliberalism, and we've been getting screwed over ever since.

Their successors are still in bed with neoliberalism. Yeah, that goes for Trudeau too - in spades. But that's not the worst of it. The real creepy part is that , today, they're in bed with a corpse and yet they're still just merrily shagging away.

A corpse, I say? Pay no heed to what I say but you might want to listen to those who are calling out our political necrophiles. People like John Ralston Saul who took neoliberalism's pulse a decade ago and found its once beating heart, globalism, stilled and dead.

Or, if Ralston Saul isn't to your liking, how about Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, economist extraordinaire, Nobel laureate and all?

Since the late 1980s and the so-called Washington Consensus, neoliberalism — essentially the idea that free trade, open markets, privatisation, deregulation, and reductions in government spending designed to increase the role of the private sector are the best ways to boost growth — has dominated the thinking of the world's biggest economies and international organisations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The policies of Ronald Reagan and Clinton in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK are often held up as the gold standard of neoliberalism at work, while in recent years in Britain George Osborne and David Cameron's economic policies continued the neoliberal tradition.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, there has been a groundswell of opinion in both economic and political circles to suggest that the neoliberal consensus may not be the right way forward for the world. In the past few years, with growth low and inequality rampant, that groundswell has gained traction.

Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 2001 for his work on information asymmetry, has been one of neoliberalism's biggest critics in recent years, and he says the "neoliberal euphoria" that has gripped the world since the 1980s is now gone.

"We've gone from a neoliberal euphoria that 'markets work well almost all the time' and all we need to do is keep governments on course, to 'markets don't work' and the debate is now about how we get governments to function in ways that can alleviate this," he said.

In other words, Stiglitz says: "Neoliberalism is dead in both developing and developed countries."

Stiglitz is not alone in his belief that neoliberalism has its problems, though his argument that the consensus is "dead" is somewhat more forthright than those of many others. In a blog post in May, three economists from the IMF — long one of the greatest champions of the neoliberal consensus — questioned the efficacy of some aspects of it, particularly when it comes to the creation of inequality.

..."The increase in inequality engendered by financial openness and austerity might itself undercut growth, the very thing that the neoliberal agenda is intent on boosting," Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri argued. "There is now strong evidence that inequality can significantly lower both the level and the durability of growth."

"There are a lot of people thinking the same thing at this point, that basically some aspects of the neoliberal agenda probably need a rethink," [Jonathan, Ottawa born son of Sylvia and Bernard] Ostry told the Financial Times on the day the blog was published, adding: "The crisis said: 'The way we've been thinking can't be right.'"

We are not thinking right, indeed. The evidence is all around us, inescapable. Yet not one of our political leaders, Trudeau included, has thought about slipping out of that bed and maybe taking a long, hot shower. Nope, it's their turn, and they've got some more shagging to do.

And there's the problem. Three decades of hard-thrusting neoliberalism has rendered statesmanship and leaders of vision, redundant and worthless.  The political process, thanks to globalism, has been so neutered as to tolerate only technocrats like Harper and Trudeau. The way they're thinking can't be right. It isn't.

Aviation Photo of the Day

What's going through his mind?

Dear Liz and Andy

As leaders of the federal and BC Green Parties respectively you've both slammed the BDS movement that has been repeatedly supported by the Green Party membership.

You both complain that BDS is a movement of extremists. Yes, nothing says "extremist" like the United Church of Canada and the Quakers. You can never tell what those terrorist motherfuckers will get up to next.

But wait, there's more. If you don't find the United Church and the Quakers to your taste, how about Lutherans?

In the U.S., the leading Lutheran outfit, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has passed two resolutions, by a margin of 82% at that, calling for the American government to cut off all funding to Israel and to recognize the state of Palestine. Here are the resolutions:

[8.] To urge this church’s members, congregations, synods, agencies and presiding bishop to call on their U.S. Representatives, Senators and the Administration to take action requiring that, to continue receiving U.S. financial and military aid, Israel must comply with internationally recognized human rights standards as specified in existing U.S. law, stop settlement building and the expansion of existing settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, end its occupation of Palestinian territory, and enable an independent Palestinian state; and

[9.] To encourage this church’s members, congregations, synods, and agencies to call on the U.S. President to recognize the State of Palestine and not prevent the application of the State of Palestine for full membership in the United Nations.

You see, Liz and Andy, this is not just about minding our own business any longer. Israel has descended into right wing extremism. You say you don't want to point fingers but not pointing fingers at the apartheid state, not pointing fingers after all these decades of oppression, looking the other way - well that's nothing short of complicity. You can be as morally vacuous as you like. Just don't expect the Green Party membership to diminish themselves as you would yourselves.

And just to put a fine point on your hypocrisy. If this was South Africa 25-years ago neither of you would hesitate to condemn that country's apartheid state. For reasons you carefully keep to yourselves, you choose to give Israel a pass.

The War of the Salish Sea

The waters off the east coast of Vancouver Island are getting busier with the recent arrival of large numbers of marine mammals, especially humpback whales, white sided dolphins and pods of transient orca or killer whales.

The bullies of the Salish Sea are the transient killer whales that, as the name suggest, eat dolphins and sometimes whales too. We're far more familiar with pods of resident orca that are fish-eaters.

Whale watching tours have become a big business of late with the ever larger populations of marine mammals. Earlier this week they witnessed an attack by transient orcas on humpback whales in the waters near Victoria.

Tour operators said the two adult humpbacks were keeping the orca away from their vulnerable calf when the cavalry showed up in the form of several other adult humpbacks who joined forces to drive the attackers off.

It's believed that the arrival of these new top predators is the result of their prey fish, herring and sardines, migrating north from ever warming waters off the US west coast.

Here's a video of transient orca at work in the waters off Vancouver Island:



It's still rare to witness an orca attack on great whales. Far more common are attacks on another newcomer, large pods of common and white sided dolphins.
The orca herd the dolphins into bays and then have at them. One spot they use is at the BC Ferries terminal at Departure Bay, Nanaimo.



Update:

Researchers observing the Humpback whale intervention have found the big whales will come to the rescue of just about any sort of marine mammal under attack by the orca. It's thought they have an instinctive reaction to drive off the killer whales. They've even been known to swim to the rescue of seals and sea lions.

Justice Minister Jody - a Two-Faced Hack

I was delighted when Trudeau selected Jody Wilson-Raybould to become Canada's justice minister. Like her grandmother and father before her, Wilson-Raybould was a prominent First Nations leader and advocate, a campaigner for the environment and social justice. She seemed an ideal pick for Canada's first First Nations justice minister.

Less than a year later that's changed. A lot.

When it came to Canada's assisted dying law, Wilson-Raybould has done everything in her power to subvert the clear decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Carter case. Along the way she revealed a dark and thuggish side when she denigrated a woman with an irremediable psychological condition that caused excruciating physical pain and suffering. Jody depicted the woman as having nothing more than a case of the downers. That's when I discovered her inner creep.

Now it's the Site C dam. This time it's Jody pushing through federal approval of the project despite the lack of consultation and opposition of our First Nations. This time Jody is revealing herself to be an utter, two-faced hack. Let's go back just a few years to 2012. Here's 'First Nations Jody' waxing eloquently on First Nations rights and the Site C project:




It's plain that Jody has done nothing to improve her own reputation. It's in the toilet.

h/t Alison at Creekside.

A Steady, Unstoppable Wave

It's the Unholy Trinity - climate change, over-consumption and overpopulation. Any of those three is capable of bringing human civilization crashing down. Together, they make it a certainty. We either succeed at solving them all or we must certainly fail at fixing any of them. Which brings me to an item from Foreign Policy on the crisis almost no one wants to address - overpopulation.

While countries across Europe and East Asia are grappling with declining birthrates and aging populations, societies across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia are experiencing youth booms of staggering proportions: More than half of Egypt’s labor force is younger than age 30. Half of Nigeria’s population of 167 million isbetween the ages of 15 and 34. In Afghanistan, Angola, Chad, East Timor, Niger, Somalia, and Uganda, more than two-thirds of the population is under the age of 25.

...Consider India. More than 300 million Indians are under the age of 15, making India home to more children than any country, at any time, in all of human history. To put the size of this generation’s numbers into perspective consider this: If these children formed a country, that country would be the fourth-largest in the world, still smaller than the United States but larger than Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan.

...And India is far from being the only country grappling with a booming youth population. Africa’s current population of 200 million young people between the ages of 15 and 24 is set to double by 2045. In the Middle East, a region of some 400 million people, nearly 65 percent of the population is younger than age 30 — the highest proportion of youth to adults in the region’s history.

...Unfortunately, the countries that have most of the world’s young people are also the ones that are the most ill-equipped to grapple with their needs, ambitions, expectations, and inevitable frustrations — let alone capitalize on their potential. According to the United Nations, developing countries are home to 89 percent of the world’s 10- to 24-year-olds; by 2020, they will be home to nine out of every 10 people globally. Like too many developing countries, countries like Chad and Niger rank high on lists of the world’s most fragile states. They also have populations in which half of their citizens are under the age of 16.

The author of the article, Kristen Lord, is the president and CEO of an international development and education NGO. She sees this reproductive bomb as an opportunity - for development and growth. She completely overlooks the impacts of both climate change (and other forms of environmental degradation) and our already massively excessive dependence on the Earth's resources, renewable and non. When we have already exceeded the planet's ecological carrying capacity by a factor of 1.7 and we're racing ever faster to deplete nature's reserves, another 2-billion + mouths to feed and clothe and employ can only worsen the situation in those nations already "most ill-equipped to grapple with their needs." The resources these next baby-boomers will need just to survive much less thrive are already over-subscribed. Where does she imagine more, much more, shall be found?

Our Rogue Government. Justin and Jody Are Above the Law.

As the Trudeau government sees it, the per curiam decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Carter case, the one that establishes the framework of the assisted dying right, is no longer applicable.

Now that there is a new law — which allows assisted dying only for incurably ill adults who are already close to a natural death — the government says those findings are no longer necessarily true.

"The defendant does not admit that these findings remain true today or that they are applicable in the present case," the government argues in a document filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

Among the facts that the government suggests are no longer true are the top court’s findings that:

— Denying assistance in dying for people with grievous and irremediable medical conditions may condemn them to a life of severe and intolerable suffering.

— Such a person faces a "cruel choice": take his or her own life prematurely or suffer until natural death.

— A permissive approach to assisted dying would not put Canada on a "slippery slope" in which disabled and other vulnerable Canadians are pressured to end their lives.

The government’s argument is in response to a court challenge launched by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and Julia Lamb, a wheelchair−bound 25−year−old who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative disease that she fears will eventually consign her to years of intolerable suffering. Lamb and the BCCLA contend the new law is unconstitutional and not compliant with the Carter decision because it would not allow an assisted death for people, like Lamb, who are suffering but not near death.

In a terse reply to the government’s document, Joseph Arvay, lawyer for the plaintiffs, says the government "is estopped from disputing the factual findings made in Carter ... and to do so is an abuse of process."

Grace Pastine, the BCCLA’s litigation director, said the government is essentially saying, "’We’ve crafted a brand new law and so now this is a brand new issue and you have to re−litigate and re−argue every issue related to physician−assisted dying all over again.’"

The legal fight that culminated in the Carter ruling took four years and cost millions, she noted, adding that the government is creating "a real barrier to justice" by maintaining that battle must be fought all over again.

"If ordinary Canadians and public interest groups and pro−bono lawyers have to recreate the wheel every time they challenge an unconstitutional law, they’re seriously disadvantaged against the bottomless pockets of the federal government," Pastine said in an interview.

Trudeau and justice minister Jody remind us, yet again, of the bad old days of the Harper regime. When it suits them they can be every bit as despicable, just as authoritarian, as the scoundrels they replaced. Just like Harper they see themselves as above the law.

NYT Magazine - One Issue, One Issue

It's a first for the New York Times magazine. An entire issue devoted to just one story - how the Bush/Cheney/Blair invasion of Iraq proved to be the undoing of the Arab world in the years that followed.

"More than a decade of war, terror and revolution has left a trail of ruin in the Arab world. This is the story of how a region came apart, seen through the eyes of six people whose lives were changed forever."

"This is a story unlike any we have previously published. It is much longer than the typical New York Times Magazine feature story; in print, it occupies an entire issue. The product of some 18 months of reporting, it tells the story of the catastrophe that has fractured the Arab world since the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, leading to the rise of ISIS and the global refugee crisis. The geography of this catastrophe is broad and its causes are many, but its consequences — war and uncertainty throughout the world — are familiar to us all.

"It is unprecedented for us to focus so much energy and attention on a single story, and to ask our readers to do the same. We would not do so were we not convinced that what follows is one of the most clear-eyed, powerful and human explanations of what has gone wrong in this region that you will ever read."

Dear Elizabeth May

The world is watching Israel's slide into right wing radicalism. The Conservatives and the Liberals look the other way. The Green Party membership won't. Your party, Elizabeth May, passed a moderate resolution calling for a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian question and supporting the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement to help achieve it.

Just so there's no doubt about where Canada stands, and with whom, Alison at Creekside, has reproduced this General Assembly vote on the recent resolution.

Seven nations opposed it - Israel, the United States, Canada and the bought and paid for Palau, Marshall Islands, Nauru and Micronesia. Seven votes, four of them stooge ballots. Look at the other side, the 155 nations voting in support - Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Portugal, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, Italy and Ireland - the whole bloody European Union - plus the nations of Africa, South and Central America, and Asia Pacific.

It's an apartheid regime and the world knows it. You say you oppose BDS but offer not one damned thing that might work in its stead. Where are you going to draw your line, ethnic cleansing? There are a lot of voices in Israel brazenly calling for that now and most of them support Netanyahu.  Israel has been doing it incrementally for half a century to the point that now the West Bank looks like this. That's what dialogue has achieved. Mind you, this is a full decade out of date. There's less, much less remaining of the Palestinian homeland now.

Canada, Liz, is in a bad way. We, Israel and the U.S. stand alone against the rest of the nations that can no longer look the other way. Censuring BDS has to be denounced for what it is - one more effort to stifle dissent and that's about as undemocratic as it gets. Wait, in Canada, it gets way more undemocratic than a mere censure motion. Speaking out can cost you your job.

Wake up Liz. Netanyahu's former second in command, then defence minister, Moshe Yallon, resigned in protest saying his country had been taken over by extremists. Former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, has warned that Netanyahu has planted the seeds of fascism. Netanyahu appointed Russian-born thug, Avigdor Lieberman, to serve as defence minister, effectively making him czar of all captive Palestinians. Here's just a glimpse at this thug:

Lieberman has called to redraw the border between Israel and the West Bank so that Israel would include large Jewish settlement blocs and the Palestinian state would include large Arab-Israeli population centers. He proposed that Israel's citizens should sign a loyalty oath or lose their right to vote.

In November 2006, Lieberman, who described Arab members of the Knesset that meet with Hamas as "terror collaborators", called for their execution: "World War II ended with theNuremberg Trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in [the Knesset]."[79]

The comment was attacked as racist by Eitan Cabel, a Labor party representative, and Ahmad Tibi, leader of the Arab party Ta'al and one-time advisor to Yasser Arafat, who demanded that "a criminal investigation be initiated against Lieberman for violating the law against incitement and racism".[79][80] Tibi strongly objected to Lieberman's ministerial appointment, describing him as "a racist and a fascist". Labour minister Ophir Pines-Paz, who resigned over Lieberman's appointment, echoed Tibi's remarks, saying that Lieberman was tainted "by racist declarations and declarations that harm the democratic character of Israel".[81]

In remarks in the Knesset in March 2008, shortly after the 6 March attack at Jerusalem's Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, Lieberman commented that "yesterday's attack can not be disconnected from the Arab MKs incitement, which we hear daily in the Knesset."[82] Directing his comments at Arab MKs whose comments Lieberman describes as anti-Israel incitement, he added that "a new administration will be established and then we will take care of you."[83]

Or you might dwell on the warning of the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, general Ya'ir Golan:

“If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016.”

General Golan knows the reality of fascism. A German Jew, his parents managed to flee Hitler's Germany in the nick of time. As a boy he saw fascism take hold and spread in his boyhood homeland.

"Things happening in Israel, especially since the last election, bear a frightening similarity to those events. True, the process is quite different. German fascism arose from the humiliation of surrender in World War I, the occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium from 1923-25, the terrible economic crisis of 1929, the misery of millions of unemployed. Israel is victorious in its frequent military actions, we live comfortable lives. The dangers threatening us are of a quite different nature. They stem from our victories, not from our defeats."


"The discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.)

"The rain of racist bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime."

Here's Fareed Zakaria's take on Lieberman:

As fiercely as he denounces the Palestinian militants of Hamas and Hizbullah, his No. 1 target is Israel's Arab minority, which he has called a worse threat than Hamas. He has proposed the effective expulsion of several hundred thousand Arab citizens by unilaterally redesignating some northern Israeli towns as parts of the Palestinian West Bank. Another group of several hundred thousand could expect to be stripped of citizenship for failing to meet requirements such as loyalty oaths or mandatory military service (from which Israel's Arabs are currently exempt). The New Republic's Martin Peretz, a passionate Zionist and critic of the peace movement, calls Lieberman a "neo-fascist ... a certified gangster ... the Israeli equivalent of [Austria's] Jörg Haider." No liberal democracy I know of since World War II has disenfranchised or expelled its own citizens.

As for the Boycott Divest Sanction movement that has your knickers in such a bunch, Lizzie, listen to Murray Dobbin who notes that the ghost of Stephen Harper lives on in Parliament, including now it seems, in the office of the leader of the Green Party.

That the Liberal government is so in alignment with Israel lobby groups raises a number of questions: Just who actually makes Canadian policy towards Israel? Did Trudeau think this through at all -- such as, is this in Canada's interests? But perhaps more to the point, is it even in Israel's interests? Does the Trudeau government have some brilliant ideas about how to get Israel to the bargaining table? Or does it believe the current situation doesn't need resolving? It makes me feel like Stephen Harper still rules the day on this critical foreign policy issue. Indeed the resolution smacks of Harper's declaration that criticism of Israel's government is the "new anti-Semitism."

The BDS campaign might not worry Netanyahu so much if it weren't for the fact that Israel now ranks near the bottom of pile when it comes to world opinion. A BBC poll in 2013 interviewed more than 26,000 people in 25 countries and found only 21 per cent of participants had a positive view of Israel, while 52 per cent viewed the country unfavourably. Only Iran, Pakistan and North Korea fared worse.

...If Justin Trudeau and his government believe they are doing Israel a favour by supporting the repugnant Conservative thought crime resolution, they could not be more mistaken. Every time a Western government turns a blind eye to Israeli apartheid it reinforces and extends that system by signalling to Netanyahu that he can do whatever he pleases.

As a Haaretz columnist recently wrote, BDS isn't the best weapon against Israeli right wing extremism, it's the only weapon. It's the only measure that works. So let's kill it off, eh?

It's Justin's National Energy Board Now and It's Still Bent - By Choice?

Today's National Energy Board has become synonymous with "dirty pool." New revelations show it's dirtier than anyone imagined.

Harper did an excellent job stuffing the NEB with industry shills. Trudeau promised to clean house and restore public confidence in the oil and gas regulator. He lied.

National Energy Board panelists have been meeting in secret with business leaders, including former premier Jean Charest who was working for Energy East’s TransCanada, in an obvious contravention of their mandate to conduct a public and unbiased process.

At first, the NEB vehemently denied that any discussion of Energy East took place. The public only knows the true story now (or at least some of it) because the regulator was forced to recant as De Souza’s investigative reporting and access to information requests forced them to release details.

TransCanada is being cagey. Despite repeated promises of transparency, the company still has not confirmed what it knew about the meeting. Common sense makes it hard to imagine a high level meeting with a former premier on company payroll could go unnoted. But confirmation would mean the company knowingly tampered with the NEB process.

The revelations are explosive. The NEB has the powers of a federal court. Imagine if a three-member independent tribunal was hearing arguments in a legal battle between Google and Facebook and two of the three judges decided to meet privately with a contractor hired by Google to discuss strategy about the case. What would Facebook say once the trial started? They’d bellow “rigged process,” just as every participant except big oil will declare in the case of Energy East.

Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May captured the mood succinctly: “I’m quite shocked and it does take a lot for me to lower my opinion of the NEB enough to be shocked."

The obvious first step is for the Trudeau government to remove the head of the NEB along with the panel members that comprised themselves and reconstitute a panel with some chance at public credibility.

Jacques Gauthier is the panel member who wrote to Jean Charest explicitly asking for backroom discussions on Energy East. He was joined at the meeting by fellow panelist Lyne Mercier as well as NEB chairman and chief executive Peter Watson.

If Trudeau doesn't finally move to clean the rot out of the National Energy Board it's entirely fair to ask what he and his party are getting out of it? How far up does this go?

UPDATE:

Alison from Creekside sent a link to a piece in iPolitics.ca. Trudeau's EnviroMin, Dame Catherine herself, is giving the government's blessing to the Harper/Trudeau NEB.

“We must have confidence in our system, we must have confidence in our institutions, and we must ensure we have decisions that are independent,” McKenna said, adding the Liberal government is committed to reviewing the environmental assessment process rigorously.

Yes, yes, Cathy, true enough, all of it. We must have confidence in our system. We must have confidence in our institutions. It's your bloody job to see that we do - and we don't. We've seen enough of your National Energy Board, enough to shake the confidence of any objective observer.  It's your "system" now and we don't have any confidence in you either. So pull your thumb out, clean up your goddamned National Energy Board and start rebuilding the confidence we are entitled to have in our institutions.

It's Justin's National Energy Board Now and It's Still Bent - By Choice?

Today's National Energy Board has become synonymous with "dirty pool." New revelations show it's dirtier than anyone imagined.

Harper did an excellent job stuffing the NEB with industry shills. Trudeau promised to clean house and restore public confidence in the oil and gas regulator. He lied.

National Energy Board panelists have been meeting in secret with business leaders, including former premier Jean Charest who was working for Energy East’s TransCanada, in an obvious contravention of their mandate to conduct a public and unbiased process.

At first, the NEB vehemently denied that any discussion of Energy East took place. The public only knows the true story now (or at least some of it) because the regulator was forced to recant as De Souza’s investigative reporting and access to information requests forced them to release details.

TransCanada is being cagey. Despite repeated promises of transparency, the company still has not confirmed what it knew about the meeting. Common sense makes it hard to imagine a high level meeting with a former premier on company payroll could go unnoted. But confirmation would mean the company knowingly tampered with the NEB process.

The revelations are explosive. The NEB has the powers of a federal court. Imagine if a three-member independent tribunal was hearing arguments in a legal battle between Google and Facebook and two of the three judges decided to meet privately with a contractor hired by Google to discuss strategy about the case. What would Facebook say once the trial started? They’d bellow “rigged process,” just as every participant except big oil will declare in the case of Energy East.

Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May captured the mood succinctly: “I’m quite shocked and it does take a lot for me to lower my opinion of the NEB enough to be shocked."

The obvious first step is for the Trudeau government to remove the head of the NEB along with the panel members that comprised themselves and reconstitute a panel with some chance at public credibility.

Jacques Gauthier is the panel member who wrote to Jean Charest explicitly asking for backroom discussions on Energy East. He was joined at the meeting by fellow panelist Lyne Mercier as well as NEB chairman and chief executive Peter Watson.

If Trudeau doesn't finally move to clean the rot out of the National Energy Board it's entirely fair to ask what he and his party are getting out of it? How far up does this go?

UPDATE:

Alison from Creekside sent a link to a piece in iPolitics.ca. Trudeau's EnviroMin, Dame Catherine herself, is giving the government's blessing to the Harper/Trudeau NEB.

“We must have confidence in our system, we must have confidence in our institutions, and we must ensure we have decisions that are independent,” McKenna said, adding the Liberal government is committed to reviewing the environmental assessment process rigorously.

Yes, yes, Cathy, true enough, all of it. We must have confidence in our system. We must have confidence in our institutions. It's your bloody job to see that we do - and we don't. We've seen enough of your National Energy Board, enough to shake the confidence of any objective observer.  It's your "system" now and we don't have any confidence in you either. So pull your thumb out, clean up your goddamned National Energy Board and start rebuilding the confidence we are entitled to have in our institutions.

Is the Queen of the Greens Pouting?

Elizabeth May was none too happy when the Green Party membership voted in favour of a motion supporting the Boycott Divest Sanction movement opposing Israel's illegal occupation of the Palestinian homeland. The resolution is here.

May opposed the motion, supposedly because she found it "polarizing." It would seem she either has no idea of what Israel has become under Netanyahu's rule or she simply could care less. It also seems she has taken a liking to the "go along to get along" approach to fundamental human rights.

Now, according to CBC, Ms. May says she's pondering her future as Queen of the Greens. Is she pouting, having a snit? Is this Mayspeak for it's my way or the highway? Is it that the hardest working MP on the Hill is just plain worn out?

I've had a feeling of late that the air has leaked out of the Green Party.

Polarizing? What, is the resolution going to fracture Canadian unity? Will it mean that Parliament won't be unanimous in kissing Netanyahu's ass?

Will the Green Party survive without Elizabeth May? If not, perhaps better that it be gone.

Another Year, Another Record.

We have certainly outdone ourselves this time. We've gobbled up Earth's resources even faster than last year and that year was a record. Then again, we've been setting annual records ever since we began exceeding our planet's carrying capacity back in the 70s. It's just that we're so much better at it now.

This year we managed to consume our planet's annual resource production by August 8th. That's a big step up from 2015 when it took us until August 13th or 2014 when Overshoot Day lagged at August 19th.

I'm getting weary of explaining Overshoot Day again and again. This year I'll just post this video:



So it's not so much a celebration as it is a day of observance, with funerary overtones. Why the Debbie Downer? For the simple reason that there's not one government in the West or in the emerging economies or, for that matter, anywhere else that's not committed to the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth in GDP - production and consumption. There's not a nation on Earth dedicated to the other solution to lightening our ecological footprint - sharply reducing population. Leaving population control to nature, however, is a profoundly murderous business.

Our Moment of Truth

Doctors do it a lot. They read the Riot Act to patients living seriously unhealthy lifestyles. "You either stop this, or you'll die." Sometimes it works. Sometimes the patient ignores it and brings on the predicted outcome.

The leaders of the world are about to have their own "You either stop this or else" moment in Geneva later this month when scientists gather to reveal the carbon diet they have to go on if we're to have any decent chance of saving human civilization.

How about this prescription? Shut down all coal-fired power plants and halt the use of combustion engines around the globe within 15-years. No more gas or diesel-powered cars or trucks or trains or ships by 2021. The internal combustion car you've got now may be your last because if world leaders commit to putting the survival of mankind ahead of the economy, manufacturers won't be building them much longer.

The magnitude of that challenge is almost impossible to comprehend. 15-years is the blink of an eye for something like a sweeping end to petroleum. That's not to say it can't be done. It will however be enormously dislocative for a society that George w. Bush lamented is "addicted to oil."

It would be an absolute bitch for the Petro-Pimps of Parliament Hill. Slick Justin, like his alter-ego Shifty Steve, is committed to the expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands and is banking on a similar expansion of bitumen sales abroad. The remedy scientists are prescribing would be a real kick to Justin's political family jewels.

Then there's the economy to consider, the global economy, the stock markets. What the climate scientists are demanding would mean bursting the Carbon Bubble. Global stock markets are carrying an estimated 27 Trillion US dollars in proven fossil fuel reserves. Banks, pension funds and other institutional lenders are massively invested in those hydrocarbon assets. Imagine wiping out that much wealth almost overnight.

Athabasca? You're stranded.

It's not like we haven't been warned. The Bank of England, the Exchequer and the London Stock Exchange have, for years, been telling anyone who would listen that the markets are dangerously exposed to this massive Carbon Bubble.

At the Paris climate summit last December, the Potsdam Institute's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber warned that mankind's only hope for survival depended on governments triggering an "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry.

This sets the scene for a truly ugly battle of Herculean proportions that pits the fossil fuelers against mankind itself. The energy giants will fight back, hard. What remains to be seen is which side our political caste will join. Will they choose their people or their patrons?

My guess is that the politicos will side with the fossil fuelers while pretending to serve the people. You'll know they're about to betray you if they come out with "schemes." If they start talking carbon pricing or cap and trade measures what they're doing is buying time for the energy giants and foreclosing the final opportunity we have for a massive shift from carbon fuels. It's all a matter of time and the clock is running out.

An Appetite for Authoritarianism. If It Looks Like Weimar and Sounds Like Weimar and Feels Like Weimar...

Grievances, real or imagined, and social change can give some people a thirst for authoritarianism. Vox.com reviews chilling research into the rise of American authoritarianism and concludes it's here to stay.

Perhaps strangest of all, it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory. In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.

Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries.

MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

...Miles away, in an office at Vanderbilt University, a professor named Marc Hetherington was having his own aha moment. He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina's Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump's rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.

That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

...Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

A candidate like Donald Trump.

The Big Question

How do people come to adopt, in such large numbers and so rapidly, extreme political views that seem to coincide with fear of minorities and with the desire for a strongman leader?

To answer that question, these theorists study what they call authoritarianism: not the dictators themselves, but rather the psychological profile of people who, under the right conditions, will desire certain kinds of extreme policies and will seek strongman leaders to implement them.

...According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or "activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian.
It is as if, the NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has written, a button is pushed that says, "In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant."

...When they face physical threats or threats to the status quo, authoritarians support policies that seem to offer protection against those fears. They favor forceful, decisive action against things they perceive as threats. And they flock to political leaders who they believe will bring this action.

...More than that, authoritarianism reveals the connections between several seemingly disparate stories about American politics. And it suggest that a combination of demographic, economic, and political forces, by awakening this authoritarian class of voters that has coalesced around Trump, have created what is essentially a new political party within the GOP — a phenomenon that broke into public view with the 2016 election but will persist long after it has ended.

Stenner's Theory of Activation.

In an influential 2005 book called The Authoritarian Dynamic, Stenner argued that many authoritarians might be latent — that they might not necessarily support authoritarian leaders or policies until their authoritarianism had been "activated."

This activation could come from feeling threatened by social changes such as evolving social norms or increasing diversity, or any other change that they believe will profoundly alter the social order they want to protect. In response, previously more moderate individuals would come to support leaders and policies we might now call Trump-esque.

Other researchers, like Hetherington, take a slightly different view. They believe that authoritarians aren't "activated" — they've always held their authoritarian preferences — but that they only come to express those preferences once they feel threatened by social change or some kind of threat from outsiders.

But both schools of thought agree on the basic causality of authoritarianism. People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.

...But Hetherington and Suhay found a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.

Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.

...this theory speaks to an oft-stated concern about Trump: that what's scariest is not the candidate, but rather the extent and fervor of his support.

And it raises a question: If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trump's ascent, then how else might it be shaping American politics? And what effect could it have even after the 2016 race has ended?

Testing Today's Voters.

The first thing that jumped out from the data on authoritarians is just how many there are. Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high." That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare.

The key thing to understand is that authoritarianism is often latent; people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how, over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful political constituency without anyone realizing it.

What America's Authoritarians Really Want.

The responses to our policy questions showed that authoritarians have their own set of policy preferences, distinct from GOP orthodoxy. And those preferences mean that, in real and important ways, authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.

What stands out from the results, Feldman wrote after reviewing our data, is that authoritarians "are most willing to want to use force, to crack down on immigration, and limit civil liberties."

The responses to our policy questions showed that authoritarians have their own set of policy preferences, distinct from GOP orthodoxy. And those preferences mean that, in real and important ways, authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.

What stands out from the results, Feldman wrote after reviewing our data, is that authoritarians "are most willing to want to use force, to crack down on immigration, and limit civil liberties."

This "action side" of authoritarianism, he believed, was the key thing that distinguished Trump supporters from supporters of other GOP candidates. "The willingness to use government power to eliminate the threats — that is most clear among Trump supporters."

Post-Election America

...authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.

If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the "action side" of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.

And that means Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics, with potentially profound implications for the country.

...The Tea Party delivered the House to the GOP in 2010, but ultimately left the party in an unresolved civil war. Tea Party candidates have challenged moderates and centrists, leaving the GOP caucus divided and chaotic.

Now a similar divide is playing out at the presidential level, with results that are even more destructive for the Republican Party. Authoritarians may be a slight majority within the GOP, and thus able to force their will within the party, but they are too few and their views too unpopular to win a national election on their own.

And so the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.

...the forces activating American authoritarians seem likely to only grow stronger. Norms around gender, sexuality, and race will continue evolving. Movements like Black Lives Matter will continue chipping away at the country's legacy of institutionalized discrimination, pursuing the kind of social change and reordering of society that authoritarians find so threatening.

...For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.

Aviation Photo of the Day

Quite possibly the best fighter of its time. The Canadair Sabre in the livery of the RCAF aerobatic team, the Golden Hawks.

This is actually a Mk. 5 Sabre. The ultimate was the Mk. 6, some of which were purchased by the US Air Force and taken to Korea for combat evaluation. The Americans found Canada's version of their frontline fighter with its Orenda engine and advanced controls superior in almost all aspects.

A Primer on Neoliberalism and Democracy. Check It Out.

Geoff Kennedy, Parchment In the Fire, has published a "must read" essay on neoliberalism and democracy in the context of Greece.

Perhaps the main reason that neoliberalism still clings to its hold on our governments and economy is that, like a toxic gas, it's odourless, colourless and tasteless - all but invisible until you begin looking for it.

Please, do read Kennedy's essay.

To Fareed Zakaria, He's a "Bullshit Artist."

To Fareed Zakaria, Donald Trump isn't much of a liar but he is a bullshit artist extraordinaire.


Harry Frankfurt, an eminent moral philosopher and former professor at Princeton, wrote a brilliant essay in 1986 called “On Bullshit.” (Frankfurt himselfwrote about Trump in this vein, as have Jeet Heer and Eldar Sarajlic.) In the essay, Frankfurt distinguishes crucially between lies and B.S.: “Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point. . . . In order to invent a lie at all, [the teller of a lie] must think he knows what is true.”

But someone engaging in B.S., Frankfurt says, “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all . . . except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.” Frankfurt writes that the B.S.-er’s “focus is panoramic rather than particular” and that he has “more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the ‘bullshit artist.’ ”

This has been Trump’s mode all his life. He boasts — and boasts and boasts — about his business, his buildings, his books, his wives. Much of it is a concoction of hyperbole and falsehoods. And when he’s found out, he’s like that guy we have all met at a bar who makes wild claims but when confronted with the truth, quickly responds, “I knew that!”

...Harry Frankfurt concludes that liars and truth-tellers are both acutely aware of facts and truths. They are just choosing to play on opposite sides of the same game to serve their own ends. The B.S. artist, however, has lost all connection with reality. He pays no attention to the truth. “By virtue of this,” Frankfurt writes, “bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

We see the consequences. As the crazy talk continues, standard rules of fact, truth and reality have disappeared in this campaign. Donald Trump has piled such vast quantities of his trademark product into the political arena that the stench is now overwhelming and unbearable.

Think of It As a Tipping Point

Here's something to think about during a quiet moment this weekend. Monday, August 8, is Earth Overshoot Day for 2016.

In case you're not familiar with the term, Earth Overshoot Day, it's not some sort of holiday. There'll be no celebration. It's an observance, nothing more. What it is is the date on which it's calculated mankind has consumed a full year's worth of Earth's renewable resources.

This year, we'll be in "overshoot" from August 9th until December 31st. During that nearly five month period we will be dipping into our planet's resource reserves. We'll be "eating our seed corn."

Overshoot manifests in two main ways - the drawdown of the planet's reserves and the increased accumulation of waste and pollution. This is the easiest form to observe. As we exhaust farmland through intensive agriculture or over-grazin  it can result in desertification, a big problem in China and a few other countries. Our over exploitation of forests results in deforestation. Desertification and deforestation are often visible to the naked eye from the International Space Station.

Another critical form of over-exploitation is the draining of our groundwater resources, our aquifers. This is recorded by NASA's Grace satellite system, a pair of satellites that, together, provide accurate data on surface subsidence. California's San Joaquin valley provides what is perhaps the most dramatic example. This first picture shows land subsidence from 1925 to 1977,

This next photograph shows the subsidence from 1988 to 2013. That's Overshoot.

Another way to visualize Overshoot is to imagine you're taking home a net salary of $700 a month but you're spending $1200, using your dwindling savings account to cover the $500 monthly shortfall.

The other variety of Overshoot is waste and pollution. Since the dawn of man, Mother Nature has been emptying our collective bedpan. Natural systems have a capacity to absorb and cleanse our leavings. However it's a finite capacity and when we exceed it, the pipes back up. That's what is happening today. Around the world we're contaminating our dwindling freshwater resources. This is a huge problem in China but it's also evident in the algae blooms in North American lakes and coastlines and in the oceanic dead zones. We're literally killing the water. Our excessive consumption of fossil fuels is also overburdening the atmosphere with CO2 and other greenhouse gases. No point here following the chain of knock-on effects. Not before the weekend.

Overall, what does Overshoot look like? Here's a handy graph:

Notice how the Overshoot curve climbs, then levels out and then plunges as the Carrying Capacity begins to collapse. Is our Carrying Capacity degrading and, if so, by how much? Here's a way to figure that out.

When I first became aware of the Global Footprint Network about 9 or 10 years ago, Overshoot Day fell in October.  By 2014 it had moved up to August 19th. In 2015 it fell on August 13th. This year it's August 8th. Here's another way to visualize it. To meet mankind's demands for Earth's resources we would need 1.7 planet Earths. Not long ago we were at a factor of 1.5. That's grown to 1.7. Now unless you can find another planet Earth that we can relentlessly pillage we've got a problem.

It all comes down to our very finite biosphere, Spaceship Earth, our one and only habitat. It is in that context that we have to consider the three existential threats man poses - climate change, overpopulation, over-consumption. Common threads run through them all. They're all tied together and, because of the powerful bonds among them, you have almost no chance of solving any of them without solving them all.

If we're looking for solutions the easiest way to find them is to imagine that we are indeed aboard a spaceship hurtling through space at 67,000 miles an hour. It's a giant container, like the hull of a submarine only bigger. You can only fit so many people in it and that number depends on how much stuff each person needs - or gets. You've also got a limited number of toilets and they can only handle so many bums.

So now you've taken inventory and roll call and you discover - damn! we're in Overshoot. Okay, so what are you going to do about it? Do you think adding more people will help? Maybe if they only consumed a bit more, year by year. Perhaps we should sweep all the excess waste under the cots - out of sight/out of mind.

The best answer is to work out our planet's actual carrying capacity and translate that into how many humans our resources can actually sustain.  That will depend in part on acting like responsible human beings instead of 21st century mega-consumers who accept a disposable world in which major appliances wear out in 7 years.

Everything - production, consumption, the population itself must be adjusted to become a subset of the environment. That, however, is a discussion for another day.

Aviation Photo of the Day

Britain's aerobatic team, The Red Arrows. This image, especially the swept tail fins, reminds me of a pod of orcas.

Here's the Hawk trainer in RCAF livery:

A Part of Canada Died Today.

Mel Hurtig is gone, age 84. If you don't know about him, learn about him. His passing leaves a void in our Canada. The Council of Canadians, Mel Hurtig - inseparable. He did so much heavy lifting for so long. Now we must fill the void.

UPDATE: Grant G. has provided this link to a terrific remembrance in the Powell River Persuader. Check it out.





http://powellriverpersuader.blogspot.ca/2016/08/mel-hurtig-1932-2016-robin-mathews-and.html

Trump's Mental Illness

The prospect of Donald Trump in the White House gives cause for concern. It's widely recognized that Trump is a narcissist. Most of us have a touch of it, some more than others. Yet extreme narcissism is a recognized mental illness - narcissistic personality disorder. It resembles an unduly self-centered sociopathy.

There's this handy synopsis from the Mayo Clinic:

Narcissistic personality disorder is one of several types of personality disorders. Personality disorders are conditions in which people have traits that cause them to feel and behave in socially distressing ways, limiting their ability to function in relationships and other areas of their life, such as work or school.


If you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may feel a sense of entitlement — and when you don't receive special treatment, you may become impatient or angry. You may insist on having "the best" of everything — for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care.

At the same time, you have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation. To feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make yourself appear superior. Or you may feel depressed and moody because you fall short of perfection.

Do these traits ring any bells when you think of Donald J. Trump?

DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these features:

Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance

Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it

Exaggerating your achievements and talents

Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate

Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people

Requiring constant admiration

Having a sense of entitlement

Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations

Taking advantage of others to get what you want

Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others

Being envious of others and believing others envy you

Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

So he's a proper arsehole, so what? Why can't a narcissistic chump be president? Why can't he be trusted with the nuclear codes? You might find helpful this paper from the US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. This brief passage might give you pause:

NPD and psychopathy are considered to be overlapping constructs, both expressing symptoms of grandiosity, compromised empathic functioning, and callousness. In fact, Kernberg2 suggested that narcissism might be the core of psychopathy. 51-53 Psychopathic individuals generally display an inability to form genuine relationships; limited (ie, grandiose) affective processing, especially with respect to anticipatory anxiety and remorse; an impulsive behavioral style involving a general failure to evaluate anticipated actions and inhibit the inappropriate ones; and a chronic antisocial lifestyle that entails great costs to society as well as for the affected individual. 54 While both affective and behavioral characteristics are important elements of psychopathy, the affective deficits have traditionally been considered to be the root cause of the psychopath's problems.

It's tough reading for the layperson but interesting nonetheless. I wonder how many assessments of Trump are being run by America's national security agencies? How do they read his stability, his mental health? Would these masters of the Dark Arts really tolerate someone unhinged in the Oval Office? Prominent Republicans from these services signed an open letter a few months ago in which they pronounced Trump a threat to American security and world peace. Today he's acting ever more irrational, unsteady.

Think back to Richard Nixon's final days in office when Kissinger and the security services questioned their president's mental fitness to the point where measures were taken to prevent him from accessing America's nuclear codes, the "football."

UPDATE:

Don't take it from me, a self-styled progressive. Listen to these prominent Republicans:

“Donald Trump is not of sound mind,” conservative Stephen Hayes wrote two weeks ago in the Weekly Standard.

“Have we stopped to appreciate how crazy Donald Trump has gotten recently?” liberal Ezra Klein wrote last week on Vox.

He “appears haunted by multiple personality disorders,” conservative David Brooks wrote last week in the New York Times.

“We can gloss over it, laugh about it, analyze it, but Donald Trump is not a well man,” Stuart Stevens, chief strategist to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, wrote last week on Twitter.

Stevens, the most prominent political figure to persistently broach the subject, conceded that he is “no doctor or psychiatrist.” But he said in an interview that the available evidence leads to two possible conclusions: either Trump has a substance abuse problem, which appears unlikely, or “there is something definitely off about him.”

“At best, this is a very damaged person,” Stevens said. “And there’s probably something more serious going on.”

And then there's this diagnosis from veteran Republican and modern day neoconservative, Robert Kagan:

Why denigrate the parents of a soldier who died serving his country in Iraq? And why keep it going for four days? Why assail the record of a decorated general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan? Why make fun of the stature of a popular former mayor of New York? Surely Trump must know that at any convention, including his own, people get up and criticize the opposition party’s nominee. They get their shots in, just as your party got its shots in. And then you move on to the next phase of the campaign. You don’t take a crack at every single person who criticized you. And you especially don’t pick fights that you can’t possibly win, such as against a grieving Gold Star mother or a general. It’s simply not in your interest to do so.

When you boil it all down you're left with what appears to be a serious personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, a creepy variety of sociopathy. The NPD "force" is obviously very powerful in Donald J. to the point that, as Kagan observes, he's compelled to resort to self-destructive behaviours. 

Donald Trump is no longer just a bombastic blowhard and a compulsive liar. He's off his nut.

The Summer That Never Was

In recent weeks they've been hitting 30 degree Celsius plus record temps inside the Arctic Circle - first in Nunavut, then in Alaska and most recently in northern Siberia where the heating triggered an anthrax breakout.

We know all about the heatwaves you've been experiencing across Canada this summer. Heatwaves and droughts. It's all very interesting reading here in the land of the summer that never was. We've spent the summer struggling to get - and stay - in the low 20s. We're hoping for a high of 19C today. Remind me - it's August, isn't it?

While it's been hitting 30C in the far north and the high 30s to the south, we've been under the influence of a Pacific low pressure zone sitting off the coast of B.C., Washington and Oregon that's been keeping the air cool and the lawns watered. It's also delivered a sharp decline in the usual forest fire numbers.

35C in northern Siberia in late July, WTF? Well, kids, that's the new climate, the changed climate that's our new reality.

The world is careening towards an environment never experienced before by humans, with the temperature of the air and oceans breaking records, sea levels reaching historic highs and carbon dioxide surpassing a key milestone, a major international report has found.

The “state of the climate” report, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) with input from hundreds of scientists from 62 countries, confirmed there was a “toppling of several symbolic mileposts” in heat, sea level rise and extreme weather in 2015.

Meanwhile The Guardian's enviroscribe, George Monbiot, writes that the climate crisis is already upon us.

Eight months ago in Paris, 177 nations promised to try to ensure the world’s average temperature did not rise by more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial level. Already it has climbed by 1.3C – faster and further than almost anyone predicted. In one respect, the scientists were wrong. They told us to expect a climate crisis in the second half of this century. But it’s already here.

Most of us once thought (many still do) that the global warming/climate change problem is one that we could confidently kick down the road - something our grandkids or great-grandkids would have to deal with. It should be alarming that our petro-pol, prime minister still acts that way. The Earth is melting and Slick is busy mapping out routes for pipelines - when he's got time between photo ops. That's Justin Trudeau giving Canadians a giant "Fuck You."

Trudeau, Netanyahu's Willing Dupe

I knew Trudeau was "all hat and no cattle" when he threw his party's support behind the Tory motion to censure the BDS (Boycott-Divest-Sanction) movement. It was a profoundly un-Liberal act of political conniving, completely bereft of the nuance that once guided courageous Liberal foreign policy.

The poster-boy for the anti-BDS campaign has been an Israeli company, SodaStream. The company manufactures a machine that produces carbonated drinks at home. BDS went after the company because it operated out of a factory built on confiscated Palestinian land. The anti-BDS campaign blamed the movement for persecuting the company.

Now the head of SodaStream is speaking out and he's pointing the finger of blame, not at BDS, but at Trudeau's dear friend, Netanyahu.

Daniel Birnbaum, who has been at the centre of a series of rows that saw SodaStream’s factory moved from the occupied territories to a new site in Israel’s Negev desert, insisted it was untrue that his company had been forced to relocate by pressure from the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Instead, said Birnbaum in a hard-hitting interview in the Times of Israel that drew the immediate ire of Netanyahu’s office, it was Israel not BDS that was responsible for the 500 Palestinian job losses. Birnbaum, who was a key speaker at an anti-BDS initiative in the US earlier this year, accused Netanyahu and his government of perpetuating the conflict with Palestinians for its own benefit, describing Netanyahu as “the prime minister of conflict”.

He said: “It pains me to say that I believe this administration is nurturing the conflict in all its evil manifestations. They nurture the hate and the boycott and they nurture separatism.”

Birnbaum says it was Netanyahu who saw to it that SodaStream was unable to employ Palestinians when it relocated.

Describing a 2014 meeting with Netanyahu’s staff, Birnbaum claimed it was Netanyahu’s intervention that led to his Palestinian staff losing their permits and their jobs. “The PM saw the opportunity here,” he said, “and he created his manipulative spin at the expense of my loyal employees. The prime minister’s office actually intervened to stop the employment of our Palestinians so that Bibi [as Netanyahu is known] can then point a finger at the BDS.”

Makes no matter. With Slick at the Liberal helm and Steffie navigating the murky waters of foreign policy we shouldn't be surprised that we're stuck in Harperland.

Sam Bee on Hillary, Gold Star Moms and "Hemorrhoidal Has-Beens"

Leave it to Sam Bee to wrap up the Democratic convention.