The View from Germany

The opening line in Der Spiegel says it all:  "Doubts are growing inside Angela Merkel's Chancellery that the incoming American president will mature and become a statesman. The chancellor is preparing for frosty trans-Atlantic relations while at the same time trying to pull Europe together."

Think about that. Angela Merkel doubts that a 70-year old man "will mature and become a statesman." Hmm. If he's not mature at 70 it sounds like a safe bet that he won't become mature later on.

The hour-long video didn't exactly put the German chancellor in a cheerful mood. The footage was from Donald Trump's recent appearance in Pennsylvania during his so-called Thank You Tour and Angela Merkel, as she told the national executive committee of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), watched the rally in its entirety. She recommended that her fellow party members do the same. "It is interesting to see the thought environment he inhabits," she said.

During his speech, Trump celebrated a landslide victory that was anything but; he blasted the press ("the world's most dishonest people") and in no way left the impression that he has matured into a statesman following his election win. But one passage really stood out in Merkel's memory and she quoted it verbatim: "There is no such thing as a global anthem, a global currency, a global flag. We salute one flag, and that is the American flag."

...

Internally, she makes no secret of what she thinks about Trump's campaign. No other presidential candidate in the history of the United States has ever violated the rules of decency to the degree that Trump has. That's how Merkel sees it. That helps explain why, in a brief statement given to the press following his Nov. 9 election, she held the kind of moral sermon that no previous German chancellor had ever delivered to a US president.

She said that "Germany and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for law." She then offered close cooperation with the next president on the "basis of these values." It was the language of a parole officer trying to get her charge back on the right track. Merkel didn't just say this publicly -- she also repeated it during an hour-long telephone conversation with Trump on Nov. 11. The future president remained friendly, but was apparently thoroughly unimpressed.

...

It's Trump's character that worries Merkel most, his craving to be loved and admired and his fury against all those who refuse to do so. Merkel has been in office for 11 years and she knows very well just how unstable the world order has become. "Many have the feeling that the world has been turned upside down," she said at the CDU's annual party conference at the beginning of December. It was a tone that one seldom hears from Angela Merkel.

...

The chancellor is fully aware of what is at stake. If Trump carries out even part of what he promised during his campaign, then the world order as Merkel knows it would be relegated to the dustbin of history. The messages that Merkel's emissaries have been given by Trump's people so far haven't been particularly encouraging. They have reported that the new president will make his decisions based solely on domestic policy considerations. His foreign policy will be dictated by how his decisions will be seen by voters at home.

Trump also has a penchant for dismissing the warnings of his advisers and allies. This creates the additional problem that efforts to coax or even pressure the new president may have the opposite of the intended effect. "To Trump, what matters is not if his decisions are coherent, but how they are perceived," says one diplomat who represented the German government in Washington.

Small wonder that, in many circles, it's no longer the American president but the German chancellor who is considered the new leader of the free world.

The Gift That Just Keeps On Giving

Not all greenhouse gases last for hundreds of years. Some compounds such as chlorofluorocarbons and methane can linger for much shorter durations, a year to a couple of decades. Yet, even when they dissipate their impacts can continue for centuries.

A new study by researchers from MIT and Simon Fraser University finds that these short-lived GHGs can cause sea level rise that continues long after they're gone from the atmosphere.

Recent studies by many groups ...have shown that even if human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide were to stop entirely, their associated atmospheric warming and sea-level rise would continue for more than 1,000 years. These effects — essentially irreversible on human timescales — are due in part to carbon dioxide’s residence time: The greenhouse gas can stay in the atmosphere for centuries after it’s been emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes.

...

In one particular climate modeling scenario, the team evaluated sea level’s response to various methane emissions scenarios, in which the world would continue to emit the gas at current rates, until emissions end entirely in three different years: 2050, 2100, and 2150.

In all three scenarios, methane gas quickly cleared from the atmosphere, and its associated atmospheric warming decreased at a similar rate. However, methane continued to contribute to sea-level rise for centuries afterward. What’s more, they found that the longer the world waits to reduce methane emissions, the longer seas will stay elevated.

“Amazingly, a gas with a 10-year lifetime can actually cause enduring sea-level changes,” Solomon says. “So you don’t just get to stop emitting and have everything go back to a preindustrial state. You are going to live with this for a very long time.”

Here's the thing. This is a worsening crisis to which our political caste responds with pretend solutions, i.e. carbon pricing. That horse, the creature that might have been tamed with carbon pricing, has left the barn.

Oh, by the way, I know it's cold pretty much straight across Canada, including here on Vancouver Island, but it's a different story in the far north. This is data from yesterday, 9 January, 2017. The Arctic, you may recall, is in the midst of winter dark. No sunlight, 24 hours a day. Yet it's still in the throes of an Arctic heatwave. Just like this time last year. Any guesses?

Really, Roger Ailes Goddaughter? Shame, Shame on You, Bill.

The New York Times is reporting that, shortly after the ouster of FOX News chairman, Roger Ailes, the network negotiated a sexual harassment claim settlement with Juliet Huddy. Ms. Huddy complained she was sexually harassed by FOX host Bill O'Reilly.



Here's the kicker - Juliet Huddy was/is Roger Ailes goddaughter.

You May Never Think of Donald Trump Quite the Same Way Again - Enjoy

Too bad no one realized back then that he was polishing up his presidential shtick.

When Is an Emergency Not an Emergency?

When I think of the word "emergency" I associate it with some situation out of the ordinary of unusual urgency. That was before Afghanistan.

An article published by the UN Humanitarian Affairs office, IRIN, describes as a "continual emergency."

The UN's emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, estimates 623,345 Afghans joined the ranks of that country's internally displaced population in 2016.

“The staggering numbers also confirm a worrying trend: Afghanistan is experiencing significant, year-on-year increases in the number of families driven from their homes,” said Danielle Moylan, a spokeswoman from OCHA. “The numbers of IDPs in 2016 are three-fold that recorded in 2014, and six times more than recorded in 2012.”

Based on current trends, the UN predicts that in 2017 at least 450,000 more people will join those already internally displaced. On top of that, Afghanistan struggles to support many of the 616,620 people pushed back from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan last year. Pakistan has warned that it will begin forcibly deporting Afghans who have not left voluntarily by March, and the UN expects about a million more, many of whom have no homes to return to.

“The constant stream of displaced families means that a state of continual emergency has become the norm in Afghanistan,” said Moylan.

The New Kid on the Block - the Islamic State

The US nation-building exercise in Afghanistan is now a shambles, 16 years after it led the invasion that overthrew the Taliban. The US withdrew almost all of its troops at the end of 2014, and the Afghan National Army was meant to take over security. But government forces have struggled, and lost control of many districts, particularly over the past year.

Most territory lost to the government is under Taliban control. But by early 2015, IS had moved into eastern Afghanistan and announced its intention to carve out an area of control called “Khorasan”, in reference to a historical region that once covered much of modern day Afghanistan as well as parts of Iran and Central Asia.

The group, which is known as Daesh in Afghanistan, has concentrated its activities in eastern Afghanistan, especially Nangarhar, on the frontier with Pakistan. In some areas, local militias have sprung up to fight IS, while others have joined the Taliban or government forces. But IS has also extended its deadly reach throughout the country.

How much, if any, of Afghanistan's plight is our doing may never be known. We came, we saw, we shot it all to hell and then we left, passing the place to a corrupt, ineffective government and a hapless army. Did we leave it so weak, impoverished and exhausted that it became a magnet for the Islamic State? Chances are we'll never truly know. What we do know is that it was bad enough when we got there, worse when we left and steadily worsening in the wake of our departure.

Mission Accomplished.

Who Knew? Oh Yeah, Just About Everyone.

When it comes to the Western world, the United States of America scores dead last for electoral integrity and free and fair elections and that's not even counting the 2016 elections. From the London School of Economics, U.S. Politics and Policy project:


So are American elections actually as exceptionally bad as claimed? Here for evidence we can turn to the Variety of Democracies (V-Dem) project based at the University of Gothenburg, an independent academic study involving a team of over 50 social scientists on six continents. The latest version of the dataset (V6.2) covers 350 indicators and 30 democracy indices in 173 countries annually from 1900 to 2012. This project has been widely acknowledged; for example, last year it received one of the most prestigious dataset awards in American political science. What does the V-Dem evidence show about how the quality of American elections compared with contests around the rest of the world?

V-Dem gauges the quality of elections using dozens of indicators such as those concerning voting rights, campaign media, the extent of any problems of opposition boycotts and electoral-related violence, and the independence of the electoral management body. For a summary measure, V-Dem asks its expert respondents: “Taking all aspects of the pre-election period, election day, and the post-election process into account, would you consider this national election to be free and fair?” Responses to this item, averaged for the period from 2000 to 2012, can be compared in 161 countries.

As shown in Figure 1, out of 28 Western democracies, according to the V-Dem data, the US ranks last. And this was well before the 2016 election, which isn’t yet in the V-Dem dataset. The United States is clearly exceptional.

As you will see Canada isn't doing all that well either, coming in at a mediocre 2.5 and trailing Japan, the UK, Norway, Chile, France, Spain, Australia, Portugal, Netherlands, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Poland and the Czech Republic.

The U.S. did however handily beat East Timor, Liberia, Libya, Kyrgyzstan and even narrowly edged out Myanmar, Romania, Kosovo and the Dominican Republic.

But here's the worst part. Yes this is going on across the United States and in many forms - minority voter disqualification, gerrymandering, robocalling, big money and media manipulation - and now even the FBI and the Russians are gaming the vote yet the American people largely stand complacent, indifferent. They don't care that the democracy they purport to so patriotically embrace is now so degraded that it has reached the level of Myanmar, Romania and Kosovo. That is a people who have allowed themselves and their country to be brought low.

Last Seat on Conservative Clown Car - Going, Going, Gone?

CBC News reports that Kevin O'Leary is telling his rich Tory pals in Florida that he's in. He will run for the Conservative leadership. Apparently O'Leary, probably bronzed and waxed, will make it official next week.

Michael Harris, meanwhile, figures O'Leary has no place to go but straight down.

Climate Change for Bloated Orange Dummies, by Barack Obama

Barack Obama has penned a parting missive for his successor, Donny Trump. It comes in the form of a paper now published in the journal Science entitled, "The irreversible momentum of clean energy."

The idea seems to be to demonstrate to the reader (assuming Trump can indeed read - and there's some doubt about that) that transitioning to clean energy from fossil fuels will facilitate rather than impede economic growth.


This “decoupling” of energy sector emissions and economic growth should put to rest the argument that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living. In fact, although this decoupling is most pronounced in the United States, evidence that economies can grow while emissions do not is emerging around the world.

...

At the same time, evidence is mounting that any economic strategy that ignores carbon pollution will impose tremendous costs to the global economy and will result in fewer jobs and less economic growth over the long term.

The full paper, in PDF format, can be found here. It's short enough that even Trump should be able to digest it.

Trudeau's Pipeline May Get to Tidewater. His Legitimacy Won't.

Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump have some things in common. They both garnered a lot of votes on the strength of outright lies. For Trudeau, nowhere is that more apparent than in coastal British Columbia.

On Nov. 29 of last year, as Justin Trudeau began to reveal his decision about an oil sands pipeline to Vancouver’s harbour, he announced he was a “grandson of British Columbia” with special ties to “our spectacular West Coast.” He then granted approval of the project while admitting many British Columbians would be “bitterly disappointed.”

Most bitter, probably, were those British Columbians who voted Liberal in the last election thinking they were halting just this sort of project pushed by Harper Conservatives in the face of environmental cautions.

The go-ahead for Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion was one of many Liberal government decisions made in the past year that likely left such voters feeling betrayed. They include approved permits for the Woodfibre LNG plant in Squamish, the Site C dam in northern B.C. and the Pacific Northwest liquefied natural gas plant near Prince Rupert, as well as helping to defeat an NDP bill meant to protect wild salmon.

Analysts have noted that Trudeau and his government may pay a high political price for backing the Trans Mountain project, given the populous ridings it affects and the extra tanker traffic and safety risks it involves.

Add fall-out from the list of other decisions above, and critics are wondering if Trudeau is either taking environmentally minded B.C. voters for granted – or just writing off some of the province in order to please other parts of the country.

...

Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Justice and First Nations leader, also represents a slice of Vancouver. Before being elected, she blasted the Site C dam project for trampling Indigenous rights, but when her government backed the project she was mum. On the Kinder Morgan expansion she wrote a letter to B.C.’s Dogwood Initiative in 2015 calling the project “misguided,” but has been silent since its approval.

...

[New Democrat MP Fin] Donnelly wonders whether Trudeau, the Liberals and central Canada in general have any understanding of the will, culture and values of British Columbia’s southwest coast.

In defending his approval of sending more oil to B.C. and tankers into its waters, Trudeau was firm his government “won’t be swayed by political arguments” from locals or otherwise. A few days later, to an Edmonton room full of oil executives, Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr suggested he’d send in the military to deal with those protesting the pipeline.

There's no other way to put it. British Columbians handed the Trudeau Liberals a basket full of seats on the strength of false promises and outright lies by the prime minister himself and several of his top cabinet ministers. They may well reap what they have sown. Here's to a Liberal-free British Columbia in 2019.

Turning the White House Into a Family Business

Perhaps the Great Orange Bloat was pissed off at the warning fired his way by Barack Obama but Donald Trump has decided to appoint his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as senior White House advisor.

It remains to be seen how Trump will square the appointment with anti-nepotism laws.

The Great Void

Think of it as the span between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the purported election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. Andrew Bacevich writes it was an era that caught America totally off guard, an era of opportunity squandered on the childish pursuit of triumphalism. An era that paved the way for the next president.

As you read his excerpted essay you may find his remarks resonate somewhat with our own experience and condition in Canada. His discussion of the urgent need for real vision is a critical deficiency present in our government also. It portends real trouble for our people, our society unless we change the way we're governed, our collective focus. Electoral reform will not, of itself, deliver us from our predicament.


Virtually no one in the American establishment gave serious thought to the here-today, gone-tomorrow possibility that the Soviet threat, the Soviet empire, and the Soviet Union itself might someday vanish. Washington had plans aplenty for what to do should a Third World War erupt, but none for what to do if the prospect of such a climactic conflict simply disappeared.

Still, without missing a beat, when the Berlin Wall fell and two years later the Soviet Union imploded, leading members of that establishment wasted no time in explaining the implications of developments they had totally failed to anticipate. With something close to unanimity, politicians and policy-oriented intellectuals interpreted the unification of Berlin and the ensuing collapse of communism as an all-American victory of cosmic proportions. “We” had won, “they” had lost—with that outcome vindicating everything the United States represented as the archetype of freedom.

... thre

In remarkably short order, three themes emerged to define the new American age. Informing each of them was a sense of exuberant anticipation toward an era of almost unimaginable expectations. The twentieth century was ending on a high note. For the planet as a whole but especially for the United States, great things lay ahead.

Focused on the world economy, the first of those themes emphasized the transformative potential of turbocharged globalization led by U.S.-based financial institutions and transnational corporations. An “open world” would facilitate the movement of goods, capital, ideas, and people and thereby create wealth on an unprecedented scale. In the process, the rules governing American-style corporate capitalism would come to prevail everywhere on the planet. Everyone would benefit, but especially Americans who would continue to enjoy more than their fair share of material abundance.

Focused on statecraft, the second theme spelled out the implications of an international order dominated as never before—not even in the heydays of the Roman and British Empires—by a single nation. With the passing of the Cold War, the United States now stood apart as both supreme power and irreplaceable global leader, its status guaranteed by its unstoppable military might.

...

The third theme was all about rethinking the concept of personal freedom as commonly understood and pursued by most Americans. During the protracted emergency of the Cold War, reaching an accommodation between freedom and the putative imperatives of national security had not come easily. Cold War-style patriotism seemingly prioritized the interests of the state at the expense of the individual. Yet even as thrillingly expressed by John F. Kennedy—“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—this was never an easy sell, especially if it meant wading through rice paddies and getting shot at.

Once the Cold War ended, however, the tension between individual freedom and national security momentarily dissipated. Reigning conceptions of what freedom could or should entail underwent a radical transformation. Emphasizing the removal of restraints and inhibitions, the shift made itself felt everywhere, from patterns of consumption and modes of cultural expression to sexuality and the definition of the family. Norms that had prevailed for decades if not generations—marriage as a union between a man and a woman, gender identity as fixed at birth—became passé. The concept of a transcendent common good, which during the Cold War had taken a backseat to national security, now took a backseat to maximizing individual choice and autonomy.

Finally, as a complement to these themes, in the realm of governance, the end of the Cold War cemented the status of the president as quasi-deity. In the Age of Great Expectations, the myth of the president as a deliverer from (or, in the eyes of critics, the ultimate perpetrator of) evil flourished. In the solar system of American politics, the man in the White House increasingly became the sun around which everything seemed to orbit. By comparison, nothing else much mattered.

...

Meanwhile, between promise and reality, a yawning gap began to appear. During the concluding decade of the twentieth century and the first decade-and-a-half of the twenty-first, Americans endured a seemingly endless series of crises. Individually, none of these merit comparison with, say, the Civil War or World War II. Yet never in U.S. history has a sequence of events occurring in such close proximity subjected American institutions and the American people to greater stress.

During the decade between 1998 and 2008, they came on with startling regularity: one president impeached and his successor chosen by the direct intervention of the Supreme Court; a massive terrorist attack on American soil that killed thousands, traumatized the nation, and left senior officials bereft of their senses; a mindless, needless, and unsuccessful war of choice launched on the basis of false claims and outright lies; a natural disaster (exacerbated by engineering folly) that all but destroyed a major American city, after which government agencies mounted a belated and half-hearted response; and finally, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, bringing ruin to millions of families.

For the sake of completeness, we should append to this roster of seismic occurrences one additional event: Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president. He arrived at the zenith of American political life as a seemingly messianic figure called upon not only to undo the damage wrought by his predecessor, George W. Bush, but somehow to absolve the nation of its original sins of slavery and racism.

Yet during the Obama presidency race relations, in fact, deteriorated. Whether prompted by cynical political calculations or a crass desire to boost ratings, race baiters came out of the woodwork—one of them, of course, infamously birthered in Trump Tower in mid-Manhattan—and poured their poisons into the body politic. Even so, as the end of Obama’s term approached, the cult of the presidency itself remained remarkably intact.

...

Globalization, militarized hegemony, and a more expansive definition of freedom, guided by enlightened presidents in tune with the times, should have provided Americans with all the blessings that were rightly theirs as a consequence of having prevailed in the Cold War. Instead, between 1989 and 2016, things kept happening that weren’t supposed to happen. A future marketed as all but foreordained proved elusive, if not illusory. As actually experienced, the Age of Great Expectations became an Age of Unwelcome Surprises.

True, globalization created wealth on a vast scale, just not for ordinary Americans. The already well-to-do did splendidly, in some cases unbelievably so. But middle-class incomes stagnated and good jobs became increasingly hard to find or keep...

Meanwhile, policies inspired by Washington’s soaring hegemonic ambitions produced remarkably few happy outcomes. With U.S. forces continuously engaged in combat operations, peace all but vanished as a policy objective (or even a word in Washington’s political lexicon). The acknowledged standing of the country’s military as the world’s best-trained, best-equipped, and best-led force coexisted uneasily with the fact that it proved unable to win. Instead, the national security establishment became conditioned to the idea of permanent war, high-ranking officials taking it for granted that ordinary citizens would simply accommodate themselves to this new reality. Yet it soon became apparent that, instead of giving ordinary Americans a sense of security, this new paradigm induced an acute sense of vulnerability, which left many susceptible to demagogic fear mongering.

During the Age of Great Expectations, distinctions between citizen and consumer blurred. Shopping became tantamount to a civic obligation, essential to keeping the economy afloat. Yet if all the hoopla surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday represented a celebration of American freedom, its satisfactions were transitory at best, rarely extending beyond the due date printed on a credit card statement. Meanwhile, as digital connections displaced personal ones, relationships, like jobs, became more contingent and temporary. Loneliness emerged as an abiding affliction. Meanwhile, for all the talk of empowering the marginalized—people of color, women, gays—elites reaped the lion’s share of the benefits while ordinary people were left to make do. The atmosphere was rife with hypocrisy and even a whiff of nihilism.

...

The Age of Great Expectations Falters.

Senator Bernie Sanders offered one of those signs. That a past-his-prime, self-professed socialist from Vermont with a negligible record of legislative achievement and tenuous links to the Democratic Party might mount a serious challenge to Clinton seemed, on the face of it, absurd. Yet by zeroing in on unfairness and inequality as inevitable byproducts of globalization, Sanders struck a chord.

Knocked briefly off balance, Clinton responded by modifying certain of her longstanding positions. By backing away from free trade, the ne plus ultra of globalization, she managed, though not without difficulty, to defeat the Sanders insurgency. Even so, he, in effect, served as the canary in the establishment coal mine, signaling that the Age of Great Expectations might be running out of oxygen.

A parallel and far stranger insurgency was simultaneously wreaking havoc in the Republican Party. That a narcissistic political neophyte stood the slightest chance of capturing the GOP seemed even more improbable than Sanders taking a nomination that appeared Clinton’s by right.

Coarse, vulgar, unprincipled, uninformed, erratic, and with little regard for truth, Trump was sui generis among presidential candidates. Yet he possessed a singular gift: a knack for riling up those who nurse gripes and are keen to pin the blame on someone or something. In post-Cold War America, among the millions that Hillary Clinton was famously dismissing as “deplorables,” gripes had been ripening like cheese in a hothouse.

Through whatever combination of intuition and malice aforethought, Trump demonstrated a genius for motivating those deplorables. He pushed their buttons. They responded by turning out in droves to attend his rallies. There they listened to a message that they found compelling.

In Trump’s pledge to “make America great again” his followers heard a promise to restore everything they believed had been taken from them in the Age of Great Expectations. Globalization was neither beneficial nor inevitable, the candidate insisted, and vowed, once elected, to curb its effects along with the excesses of corporate capitalism, thereby bringing back millions of lost jobs from overseas. He would, he swore, fund a massive infrastructure program, cut taxes, keep a lid on the national debt, and generally champion the cause of working stiffs. The many complications and contradictions inherent in these various prescriptions would, he assured his fans, give way to his business savvy. America Adrift.

Within hours of Trump’s election, among progressives, expressing fear and trepidation at the prospect of what he might actually do on assuming office became de rigueur. Yet those who had actually voted for Trump were also left wondering what to expect. Both camps assign him the status of a transformative historical figure. However, premonitions of incipient fascism and hopes that he will engineer a new American Golden Age are likely to prove similarly misplaced. To focus on the man himself rather than on the circumstances that produced him is to miss the significance of what has occurred.

Note, for example, that his mandate is almost entirely negative. It centers on rejection: of globalization, of counterproductive military meddling, and of the post-Cold War cultural project. Yet neither Trump nor any of his surrogates has offered a coherent alternative to the triad of themes providing the through line for the last quarter-century of American history. Apart a lingering conviction that forceful—in The Donald’s case, blustering—presidential leadership can somehow turn things around, “Trumpism” is a dog’s breakfast.

In all likelihood, his presidency will prove less transformative than transitional. As a result, concerns about what he may do, however worrisome, matter less than the larger question of where we go from here. The principles that enjoyed favor following the Cold War have been found wanting. What should replace them?

Efforts to identify those principles should begin with an honest accounting of the age we are now leaving behind, the history that happened after “the end of history.” That accounting should, in turn, allow room for regret, repentance, and making amends—the very critical appraisal that ought to have occurred at the end of the Cold War but was preempted when American elites succumbed to their bout of victory disease.

...

The Prescription - Vision

“Where there is no vision,” the Book of Proverbs tells us, “the people perish.” In the present day, there is no vision to which Americans collectively adhere. For proof, we need look no further than the election of Donald Trump.

The Age of Great Expectations has ended, leaving behind an ominous void. Yet Trump’s own inability to explain what should fill that great void provides neither excuse for inaction nor cause for despair. Instead, Trump himself makes manifest the need to reflect on the nation’s recent past and to think deeply about its future.

A decade before the Cold War ended, writing in democracy, a short-lived journal devoted to “political renewal and radical change,” the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch sketched out a set of principles that might lead us out of our current crisis. Lasch called for a politics based on “the nurture of the soil against the exploitation of resources, the family against the factory, the romantic vision of the individual against the technological vision, [and] localism over democratic centralism.” Nearly a half-century later, as a place to begin, his prescription remains apt.

Courage and Cowardice In The Age of Fear

If you want to keep the plebs in line, nothing works as well as a double-serving of fear.

Fear is the weapon of choice of every despot throughout history. The best part is how easy fear is to fabricate and then inculcate.

Chris Hedges visits the subject in his latest essay:


The more despotic a regime becomes, the more it creates a climate of fear that transforms into terror. At the same time, it invests tremendous energy and resources in censorship and propaganda to maintain the fiction of the just and free state.

Poor people of color know intimately how these twin mechanisms of fear and false hope function as effective forms of social control in the internal colonies of the United States. They have also grasped, as the rest of us soon will, the fiction of American democracy.

Those who steadfastly defy the state will, if history is any guide, be decapitated one by one. A forlorn hope that the state will ignore us if we comply will cripple many who have already been condemned. “Universal innocence,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it will all blow over.”

...

Resisting despotism is often a lonely act. It is carried out by those endowed with what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls “sublime madness.” Rebels will be persecuted, imprisoned or forced to become hunted outcasts, much as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are now. A public example will be made of anyone who defies the state. The punishment of those singled out for attack will be used to send a warning to all who are inclined to dissent. 

...

Demagogues, Solzhenitsyn reminds us, are stunted and shallow people. “Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty,” he writes.

“The overall life of society comes down to the fact that traitors were advanced and mediocrities triumphed, while everything that was best and most honest was trampled underfoot,” he observes. Ersatz intellectuals, surrogates “for those who had been destroyed, or dispersed,” took the place of real intellectuals.

“After all,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “we have gotten used to regarding as valor only valor in war (or the kind that’s needed for flying in outer space), the kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten another concept of valor—civil valor. And that’s all our society needs, just that, just that, just that!”

Straight Out of The Fossil Fueler Playbook - Let's Socialize the Environmental Damage

When Big Fossil has squeezed out the last bit of profit, they often just leave the taxpayer holding the bag for the clean up. The treasure is shifted out of Canada and then the operating company, usually a subsidiary, is put into bankruptcy. In this way Alberta is now sitting on 1,400 abandoned "orphan" gas and oil wells in need of clean up.

Naturally, the Oil Patch has an idea - get the Alberta and federal governments to pick up the tab.

Investment banker Ian Thomson, along with the Petroleum Services Association of Canada (PSAC), is pitching an idea to the federal government he thinks can help put people back to work — inject some capital in the junior oilpatch and make a dent in the number of inactive wells in the province.

Thompson and PSAC want the federal government to consider including in the next budget what they call a Sustainable Environmental Energy Investment (SEEI) fund for smaller oil and gas companies.

For every dollar invested in one of these companies, 47.5 cents could be spent on drilling and exploration, but the rest must be used to clean up old wells.

...Individual investors would be able to write off the full investment against their taxes, which means lost tax revenue for provincial and federal coffers.

These kinds of funds have been used for decades to promote development of Canada's natural resources. They are quite attractive to investors but less so to the government.

A Welcome (and Badly Needed) Eye Opener

Is the crisis of "fake news" just a symptom of neoliberalism's looming collapse?

An excellent essay by Evgeny Morosov in The Guardian looks behind the fake news phenomenon and its corrosive effects on democracy.



Will the fake news crisis be the cause of democracy’s collapse? Or is it just a consequence of a deeper, structural malaise that has been under way for much longer? While it’s hard to deny that there’s a crisis, whether it’s a crisis of fake news or of something else entirely is a question that every mature democracy should be asking.

Our elites are having none of it. Their fake news narrative is itself fake: it’s a shallow explanation of a complex, systemic problem, the very existence of which they still refuse to acknowledge. The ease with which mainstream institutions, from ruling parties to think tanks to the media, have converged upon “fake news” as their preferred lens on the unfolding crisis says a lot about the impermeability of their world view.

The big threat facing western societies today is not so much the emergence of illiberal democracy abroad as the persistence of immature democracy at home. This immaturity, exhibited almost daily by the elites, manifests itself in two types of denial: the denial of the economic origins of most of today’s problems; and the denial of the profound corruption of professional expertise.

The first type manifests itself whenever phenomena like Brexit or Donald Trump’s electoral success are ascribed primarily to cultural factors such as racism or voter ignorance. The second type denies that the immense frustration many people feel towards existing institutions stems not from their not knowing the whole truth about how they operate but, rather, from knowing it all too well.

...

The problem is not fake news but the speed and ease of its dissemination, and it exists primarily because today’s digital capitalism makes it extremely profitable – look at Google and Facebook – to produce and circulate false but click-worthy narratives.

...

When think tanks gladly accept funds from foreign governments; when energy firms fund dubious research on climate change; when even the Queen – what a populist, she – questions the entire economics profession; when the media regularly take marching orders from PR agencies and political spin doctors; when financial regulators and European commissioners leave their jobs to work on Wall Street – could anyone really blame the citizens for being sceptical of “experts”?

...

Caught between the two denials, the elites will never stop searching for innovative solutions to the problem of fake news – much as they never stopped searching for innovative solutions to climate change. The two issues do have a certain similarity: just as climate change is the natural byproduct of fossil capitalism, so is fake news the byproduct of digital capitalism.

It won’t take long for some genius policy entrepreneur, fed up with the authoritarian nature of current proposals, to unleash the genius of free markets on this problem. Why not, say, establish a post-truth emissions trading scheme, where news organisations could trade their government-issued fake news permits? Ridiculous, yes; ineffective, yes – but the scheme would surely receive major social innovation prizes.

The only solution to the problem of fake news that neither misdiagnoses the problem nor overpowers the elites is to completely rethink the fundamentals of digital capitalism. We need to make online advertising – and its destructive click-and-share drive – less central to how we live, work and communicate. At the same time, we need to delegate more decision-making power to citizens – rather than the easily corruptible experts and venal corporations.

It's Time to Call the "Two State" Option What It Is - a Convenient Ruse

Much as we might wish otherwise, this "two state" ruse can't go on forever. With every theft of land from the Palestinian territory, Israel is serving notice that it has no interest in handing the territories it has illegally occupied back to some Arab.

Our complicity is based on pretending that "two state" solution is still a thing. We pretend, fully knowing better, that it could actually happen. We pretend that the Palestinians could someday see that land returned to them.

Much hinges on keeping that pretence alive. If we accept reality we also have to accept that Israel is an apartheid state which, in reality, it absolutely is. Of course if we have to accept that Israel is an apartheid state, the fiction that it's a democracy flies straight out the window. Our main justification for so unreservedly supporting Israel is the fanciful notion that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. There you have it - a fictional construct of one layer atop another atop yet another. Were it not so well practiced for so many years, it would strain credulity to the breaking point.

Even the United States has shown that the decades-old ruse is no longer defensible. Secretary of state, John Kerry, made that plain when he spoke bluntly saying that Israel can either be a Jewish state or a democracy but not both. Put another way, Israel can be a democracy or else just another theocracy is a region chock full of backward, monotheistic states constantly at war with or preparing for war with each other.

To a "postnational state" like Canada, that should seem utterly alien.

Isn't That Biting the Hand that Feeds You? Trump Accepts Russia Hacked the Election.

Donald Trump's designated chief of staff, Reince Priebus, says the Giant Orange Bloat accepts that the Russians hacked the election, the vote that he supposedly won, and that Trump may take actions in response.

Reince Priebus, the former Republican National Committee chairman, said Trump understands that Moscow was behind the intrusions into the Democratic Party organisations.

"He accepts the fact that this particular case was entities in Russia so that's not the issue," Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday."

When Democracy Fails

There are few better object lessons on how democracy fails than Britain in the throes of the Brexit resolution.

No one, not even the prime minister, has a clue what Brexit is going to look like for Britain, its people, the European Union or anyone else. It begs the question of what the electorate imagined they were voting for in the referendum last June.

Of course it can always be said that the public, or a bare majority of those who actually turned out to vote, wanted Britain out of the European Union. Yet those same "leave" voters had no idea of what that might mean, the consequences as well as the possible benefits.

It recalls then Quebec premier, Jacques Parizeau, during the last separation referendum in 1995. It was rumoured that Parizeau told diplomats at a private meeting that, if a simple majority of Quebecers voted "yes" they would be like "lobsters in a pot." No escape. No second chances. Done, all boiled up.

Parizeau is also remembered for noting that, in any election, there is an informed segment of the population supporting one side, an informed segment supporting the other side, and a great horde of uninformed and misinformed who are the essential voters both sides target by whatever means - fear, confusion, wild promises - works best.

The Brexit referendum was decided by the "horde vote." Many Brits were fearful of EU migration and the control of the UK by Brussels. Nigel Farage and his cadre stoked these fears, sowed confusion and gave wild assurances that all would be sweetness and light once Britain was British again.

Seven months after the fateful vote, Britain and the British people still have no idea what Brexit means and what it entails.  Negotiations begin in April but the EU cousins aren't happy and they have their own ideas on what Brexit means that are more in line with expulsion that withdrawal. Scottish representatives, meanwhile, contend that Scotland may stage a Brexit of its own, leaving the United Kingdom and reconnecting with the European Union.

The Brits seem to think they can wrap up the negotiations quickly and emerge with something resembling the Canada-EU free trade pact, CETA.  One of Canada's main negotiators has said the UK can expect to be wrangling terms for at least a decade before it will have something akin to the Canadian deal. Britain's permanent representative to Brussels, Sir Ivan Rogers, has resigned over what he terms London's "muddled thinking." His successor, Sir Tim Barrows, inherits a "demoralized and depleted team" who see a train wreck in Britain's future.

Meanwhile the uncertainty and delay is weighing heavily on Britain's banking sector, so vital to London's economy. Several prominent banks are expected in the next few months to reveal plans to relocate to Europe.

The Corporation of London has published data showing that financial and professional services firms employ more than 2.2 million people across the UK, not just in the City.

The March of the Ichthyes

Okay, they're ichthyes, fish, and they don't march, they swim. And swimming they are in the same direction, away from the equator.

We've been seeing signs of this aquatic exodus in the waters off Vancouver Island but The Guardian reminds us it's a global phenomenon.

Scottish fishermen have uncovered an intriguing way to supplement their income: they have added squid to the menu of marine creatures they regularly pull from the sea. A species normally associated with the warmth of the Mediterranean, rather than the freezing north, may seem an odd addition to their usual catches of cod and haddock. Nevertheless, squid has become a nice little earner for fishing boats from Aberdeen and the Moray Firth in recent years.

Thirty years ago, squid was a rarity in the North Sea. Today, boats bring back thousands of tonnes a year – though cod and haddock still dominate catches. Nor is this warm-water addition to northern fish menus a unique feature. Red mullet, sardines and sea bass have also appeared with increasing frequency in North Sea fishermen’s nets in recent years. All of them are associated with warmer waters and their appearance is seen by many scientists as a sign that climate change is beginning to have a serious impact on our planet’s oceans.

For Scottish lovers of fresh squid, this is good news. However, in many other parts of the world, rising sea temperatures – triggered by climate change – are providing fishing industries and governments with major headaches. Fish are moving hundreds of miles from their old grounds, sometimes out of zones that had been set up to protect them. In other cases, fish are simply disappearing from nets.

What makes this migration especially vexing is that, for the Third World, fish represent the main source of animal protein and now that food source is leaving for cooler climes.

As the prey fish - think herring and sardines - migrate, their food chain follows. Bigger fish want/need to eat smaller fish, can't be helped. To people of the Third World, for whom it's fish or nothing, they're part of that food chain and, as their fisheries suffer, it adds to all the other environmental strains that compel the disadvantaged to relocate/migrate.

Update:

Reader Chris has provided a link to an excellent essay by Colin Woodward published in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald detailing what's now underway along the stretch from America's northeastern seaboard to the Maritimes. It's an impressive article for anyone interested in this early-onset impact of climate change.

Remember Who Did the Heavy Lifting Last Time

 As liberal democracy gives way to authoritarianism from the United States to Hungary, Poland, Turkey and even into Britain and France, it is helpful to remember the turbulent 50s and 60s, an era that saw uprisings against Communist regimes imposed by the Soviet Union.

In Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere a powerful resistance movement emerged, one that would eventually undermine the Iron Curtain and lead to the liberation of Eastern Europe.

As Jan Surotchak reminds us, it was the intellectual elite who defied - and finally defeated - tyranny.


Today is the 40th anniversary of the Charter 77 Declaration, the foundational document for pro-democracy dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia. On January 6, 1977, 242 leading writers, artists, musicians, poets, workers, and politicians published what was then a revolutionary demand: for their government to live up to the human rights commitments in the country’s own 1960 constitution, the 1975 Helsinki Final Accords and the various United Nations covenants on political, civic, economic and cultural rights signed by the communist government.

...On their way to present the Charter 77 Declaration to the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly and the media, Vaclav Havel, Ludvík Vaculík and Pavel Landovský were stopped by the state security forces. Along with other signatories, they were detained and interrogated, and their houses were searched on the same day, with all printed materials confiscated.

...physical copies of the Declaration had been spirited out of Prague by émigré friends of the main organizers and it was printed on January 7 in the leading German, French, British, Italian and American newspapers. Charter 77 quickly became synonymous with the Czech dissidents themselves, and the group became the focal point of pro-democratic resistance throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Havel and his compatriots achieved semi-celebrity status abroad, and their voices were amplified at home as Western media penetrated the Iron Curtain.

This, of course, brought the full fury of the police state down on Charter 77 activists, and many suffered greatly for their support. Just one week after the Charter’s release, the Prosecutor General, the Chairman of the Supreme Court, the Minister of Justice of the Czech Socialist Republic and the Prosecutor General of the Czech Socialist Republic kicked off twelve years of relentless persecution, accusing the declaration of "evoking hatred and hostility towards, or at least distrust of, the socialist social and state system of the republic.”

...Sadly, Europe today again needs its elites to stand against regimes that criminalize free thought and free expression and flagrantly disregard international commitments that have helped keep the continent (mostly) at peace since 1945. With Moscow back in the business of punishing dissent at home and spreading false narratives abroad, we’d do well to remember the lessons of January 1977.

Emperor Trump Fiddles While the World Burns

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, shows how Donald Trump's refusal to accept the reality of climate change is a death sentence in distant corners of the world.

This Could End With a Bullet

Former CIA director James Woolsey bailed out on Donald Trump yesterday.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a veteran of four presidential administrations and one of the nation's leading intelligence experts, resigned on Thursday from president-elect Donald Trump's transition team because of growing tensions over Trump's vision for intelligence agencies.

Woolsey's resignation as a Trump senior adviser comes amid frustrations over the incoming administration's national security plans and Trump's public comments undermining the intelligence community.

People close to Woolsey said that he had been excluded in recent weeks from discussions on intelligence matters with Trump and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the incoming White House national security adviser.

Trump choosing to get his intelligence from Gen. Michael "Alternate Reality" Flynn is not going to go down well with America's massive intelligence/national security apparatus.

Prominent Republican officials in top echelon spots at America's intelligence agencies released open letters before Trump won his party's nomination and again before he sort of won the election, warning that the Great Orange Bloat was a threat to America's security and a danger to world peace. Now, in just two weeks, he'll have his hands on America's nuclear launch codes even as he outright rejects the views and evidence put forward by the intelligence community.

Sorry but I still think this could end with a bullet.

In Chicago, They Kill With Guns. In Vancouver, It's Fentanyl.

Chicago logged a record 762 murders in 2016, most of them by hand guns.

Vancouver, while much smaller than the Windy City, saw hundreds of deaths from fentanyl overdose including six in one day, nine in one weekend.

Last month the B.C. coroner’s office issued an urgent warning after at least 11 people in the province died on one day, six in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Fentanyl, often mixed by traffickers with heroin or cocaine, is up to 100 times more toxic than morphine. B.C. victims include addicts with jobs, families and children as well as those in Vancouver’s infamous “shooting gallery.”

Province wide, B.C. logged 555 overdose deaths in the first three quarters of 2016, 374 of them fentanyl overdoses.

Headed for the White House - the Most Caustic Prick on the Planet.

Joe Biden spoke for a good many people around the world when he urged Donald Trump to "grow up."

"Grow up, time to be an adult, you're president."

Biden said it would be legitimate to question intelligence and ask for more detail or disagree but “dangerous” to publicly criticise the agencies and claim to know more than them.

“For a president not to have confidence in, not to be prepared to listen to, the myriad intelligence agencies, from defence intelligence to the CIA, is absolutely mindless,” he said in an interview with PBS.

“The idea that you may know more than the intelligence community knows – it’s like saying I know more about physics than my professor. I didn’t read the book, I just know I know more.”

Meanwhile, the Great Orange Bloat, had more pressing things on his mind than Russia tossing the election his way. Donald is more concerned with how his replacement, Aaarnold Schwarzenegger, is doing as host of Celebrity Apprentice.

Demonstrating the childishness he brings to everything he does, Trump tweeted (naturally) -

"Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got "swamped" (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT.

"So much for being a movie star - and that was season 1 compared to season 14. Now compare him to my season 1."

And Rightly So -

Water service to the 5.5 million residents of Damascus, Syria has been disrupted causing the UN to warn, quite correctly, that targeting water sources constitutes a war crime. UN observers aren't sure yet whether to blame the Syrian government bombarding the area or rebel sabotage. Whoever is to blame, it's a war crime.

However when other nations do it, especially our ally, Israel, it doesn't seem to be treated as a war crime. Google Dahiyah or Dahiyah Doctrine and you'll see what I mean.

It's a tactic of deliberately targeting civilian populations first developed in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyah and subsequently introduced in Israeli campaigns against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The assault opens with two or three days of air strikes targeting essential infrastructure - electricity, water and sewage utilities. Once those essential resources are destroyed, the attacks proceed to schools and hospitals, police and government offices before, finally,  reverting to residential neighbourhoods.

As for Canada, well Ottawa just looks the other way.

Pot, Kettle, Putin, Trump - Hmmm

America's national intelligence wizards will be spending the day describing to Congress how the Russians hacked America's November election to usher Trump into the White House.

According to Lindsey Graham, Rep. S. Carolina, this has his fellow senators up in arms, 99 out of 100 believe the US election was manipulated by Moscow. How dare some foreign outfit rig America's election?

Well, as I've written here earlier, this is America's pot calling Russia's kettle black.

Guardian columnist, Ian Jones, today expands on Washington's electoral hypocrisy:

...while Americans feel justifiably angry at alleged interference with their political process, they have also been handed a mirror, and the reflection should disturb them.

For the US is a world leader in the field of intervening in the internal affairs of other countries. The alleged interference is far more extensive than hacking into emails belonging to unfavoured political parties. According to research by political scientist Dov Levin, the US and the USSR/Russia together intervened no less than 117 times in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, or “one out of every nine competitive, national-level executive elections”.

Indeed, one cannot understand US-Russian relations today without acknowledging America’s role in the internal affairs of its defeated cold war foe. As Stephen Cohen puts it, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the approach of US advisers “was nothing less than missionary – a virtual crusade to transform post-communist Russia into some facsimile of the American democratic and capitalist system”.

As soon as Bill Clinton assumed the White House in 1993, his experts discussed “formulating a policy of American tutelage”, including unabashed partisan support for President Boris Yeltsin. “Political missionaries and evangelists, usually called ‘advisers’, spread across Russia in the early and mid-1990s,” notes Cohen: many were funded by the US government. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, talked of Russia “increasingly passing into de facto western receivership”

...Take Italy in 1948: as the cold war unfolded, the US feared that a socialist-communist coalition would triumph in Italian elections. It barred Italians who “did not believe in the ideology of the United States” from even entering the country; funded opposing parties via the CIA; orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign, including millions of letters from Americans of Italian origin; and made it quite clear, via the State Department, that there was “no further question of assistance from the United States” if the wrong people won. Its efforts were a success. This was the first of many Italian elections featuring US interference.

...There are more recent examples too. Take the military overthrow of Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya in 2009. The then secretary of state – a certain Hillary Clinton – refused to describe the toppling of Zelaya as a “military coup”, which would have required the suspension of US aid, including to the armed forces. Rather than call for Zelaya’s reinstatement, Clinton called for new elections. US assistance – including military aid – continued as dissidents were treated brutally; as death squads re-emerged; as violence against LGBT people surged; and as widely boycotted unfair elections took place.

Allegations of Russian interference in the US elections are undoubtedly alarming, but there’s a double standard at play. Meddling in foreign democracies only becomes a problem when the US is on the receiving end. The US has interfered with impunity in the internal affairs of so many other countries. The day that all such interference is seen for what it is – a democratic outrage, unworthy of any great nation – will be a great day indeed.

Don't We Get a Say In This?

Did you get the memo? I didn't. That's why it came as a surprise to hear the Dauphin proclaim Canada the world's first "postnational" country. He did it in a British newspaper, The Guardian.

This is Trudeau's brainfart. He didn't run on the idea. He didn't consult us about it. He didn't seek any "social licence" or the nod from our First Nations. He just did it and he let the Brits in on it first. That's a bit of a slap in the face.

What is a "postnational" state? Well it's probably a country purged of nationalism, not just the bad kind but also the good. Remember that good nationalism that brought us together for our country's centennial, back in the days of Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, that did so much to unite us and inspire us as a people? Well, for our nation's 150th birthday, Slick thinks it's time to ditch all that.

Multiculturalism is all well and good as is immigration when deftly managed for the betterment of the country and our communities. But surely that can't be a definition of postnational.

What is a state? It's generally recognized as comprising four qualities - sovereignty, population, territory and government. If an entity has political sovereignty  and a defined territory, an identified population living within that territory under their own government then it has achieved nationhood. It's not a colony, it's a country. We distinguish citizens from residents. We know, and supposedly defend, our defined territory. We have established a government to lead the country. A, B, C and D - the nation of Canada.

So what incidents of this nationalism are we supposed to have jettisoned or moved beyond to achieve this postnationalism and, better yet, why? The way our prime minister put it in his gushy interview with The Guardian a little while back, we've moved past national, i.e. "Canadian" values. We don't really have core values now.

Where the fuck did Junior get that idea? Did he ask you? He sure didn't ask me? His dad seemed to think we had Canadian values, fine and essential values, some of which he enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These were the same values we celebrated during the Centennial that brought us together and made us feel proud to be Canadians. How proud do you feel when you're told that you're postnational, liberated from all those core values you only imagined were real?

If we're post national, we're taxpayers, not citizens. We are consumers and this thing we call government is the ultimate Big Box store. We have no core values any more which begs the question of why we should bother defending our diminished way of life? The invisible hand of the marketplace can guide Justin as it did Harper.

My take? This is bullshit, another enfeebled proclamation from a mildly addled mind. This could be a dangerous assumption.

Here's the thing. We're entering an extremely dangerous century where we will face the synergy of novel impacts never before experienced be they political, economic, social and environmental. Overconsumption, overpopulation, and environmental impacts - they're all coming barreling down the same tunnel straight for us.

There won't be any country that isn't hammered by these impacts even if only indirectly. Yet, of all the world's nations there are a handful, five or perhaps six by some estimations, that are different than all the others and that are positioned to better deflect or absorb these several blows. One of that handful is Canada.

It's not been our doing. We're just lucky, like most of the other high northern latitude countries in this group. Whether it's northern Russia, the Scandinavians, or Canada we've got something in common - a lot of empty space reaching to the far north. That could just be our lifeboat.

The rest of the planet? In the 12 thousand year history of civilization, mankind expanded through, populated and developed the "rest of the planet," especially the tropical and subtropical belts. It was a lot easier to live and farm and settle and wage war where it was warm than where it got really, really cold. Better growing seasons, better transportation and communications, that sort of thing. That was a major factor in how the US came to have ten times the population of Canada and why the majority of Canadians live in that narrow belt along our southern territory. It's why you don't find Ottawa on the shores of James Bay (unfortunately).

To meet these coming challenges and take full advantage of Canada's fortunate circumstances, we're going to need as much social cohesion as we can muster. That's going to take a population, no matter their ethnicity, who can coalesce around, uphold and defend clearly understood core values.

Trudeau has decided to take Canada in precisely the wrong direction and we didn't even get a say in it.

An Expert on Nuclear Nonproliferation Takes the Measure of Donald Trump

Avner Cohen is a professor of nuclear nonprolifteration studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. Nuclear weapons and policy are his thing. When it comes to the idea of Donald Trump getting America's nuclear codes, professor Cohen is, in two words - scared shitless.


For more than seven decades – from the administration of President Harry S. Truman to that of outgoing President Barack Obama – a kind of political and diplomatic taboo formed in the United States: Nuclear weapons are not a subject for public discussion, and certainly not without preparation. Nuclear weapons should be treated as a special case, one that is beyond the accepted political discourse. This taboo, the product of a custom that is not enshrined in any law, is considered a means of measuring presidential responsibility.

Last month, though, in the blink of an eye, President-elect Donald Trump spit on this sacred taboo in a Twitter post. “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes,” he tweeted on December 22. There are some who say Trump is so ignorant, he is completely unaware of the power of that nuclear taboo.

Trump’s tweet was blatant defiance of a U.S. policy that goes back to the time of President Ronald Reagan, a policy five subsequent presidents have stood behind. It holds that the United States seeks to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role atomic weaponry plays in global diplomacy.

The following day, after Trump’s advisers sought to put a different spin on their boss’ foolish statement and claim that it was nothing more than a comment on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, Trump amazed the world yet again. In an interview that was meant to minimize the damage, and in response to the claim that such a tweet could spur a renewed global nuclear arms race – or at least legitimize it – the president-elect nonchalantly told a reporter: “Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” In less than 24 hours, Trump had twice violated the basic no-no of the nuclear age.

All of Trump’s tweets, including the embarrassing series of comments about a former beauty queen, demonstrate that he is impulsive, unbalanced and not in control of himself, a person responding immediately to every provocation, whether large or small, that exceeds his threshold. His responses are knee-jerk reactions and not subject to a common-sense review, whether by Trump himself or his institutional gatekeepers.

 ...But not only did the clearly unqualified candidate win the election; he will also take possession of the briefcase with the nuclear codes. Now he is tweeting nonsense about things he knows nothing about, on subjects his predecessors as president always treated with reverence. There’s no knowing whether Trump is tweeting his crazy thoughts to the world as a narcissistic act or one of megalomania and arrogance. But since these thoughts now have the aura of a future presidential policy, they are truly frightening.

On January 20, when Trump becomes the one with the nuclear codes, the world will be entering an era of uncertainty and fear, the likes of which it hasn’t known since the end of World War II. 

Agenda for 2017 - Defend Democracy

Washington Post columnist, E.J. Dionne, writes that progressives will have their hands full in 2017 but no challenge is greater than defending democracy, in the US and abroad.


There should be no mistaking the dangers democracy confronts. The rise of far-right parties in Europe, the authoritarian behavior of governments in Turkey, Hungary and Poland, and the ebbing of center-left and center-right parties that were part of the postwar democratic consensus would be troubling even without the rise of Donald Trump. His emergence should sharpen our concern. “A right-wing demagogue in charge of the world’s most influential repository of democratic values,” wrote Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, “is a devastating fact.”

Trump’s disrespect for the conventions of democracy, his willingness to flout rules long accepted by presidents of both parties and his praise for assorted strongmen, particularly Russia’s Vladimir Putin, all point to instincts and attitudes very different from those of his predecessors, Republican and Democratic.

...Also alarming is the closeness of many of Trump’s top aides, including national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, to extreme movements in Europe that have brought back themes buried since the 1930s and early 1940s.

Trump’s aides emphatically denied that Flynn had met with Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, as Strache had claimed. But there is no denying that many on Europe’s far right, including the Austrian party founded by ex-Nazis in the 1950s, are open in declaring their sense of empowerment from Trump’s victory. Bannon, for his part, has spoken favorably of the “women of the family Le Pen,” meaning Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate of the nationalist and anti-immigrant National Front in France, and her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

...supporters of democracy have their own challenges to confront. As John Judis wrote in his insightful book, “The Populist Explosion,” the rise of populist parties, including authoritarian ones, signals that “the prevailing political ideology isn’t working and needs repair, and the standard worldview is breaking down.”

The liberal democracies have, indeed, been guilty of a certain complacency in confronting the economic challenges of globalization. Mass immigration — some of it bred by the Middle East’s brutal wars — has created discontents in nearly all the leading democracies. And small-d democrats have gotten out of the habit of offering robust philosophical defenses of a form of government they took for granted.

Canada - a "Haven for Corrupt Capital."

Income, Me? No, I Don't Have Any Income.

Last year when Trudeau announced Canada would be opening new visa offices in China I suggested it would be better if he opened new offices for the Canadian Revenue Service in China to work with Chinese revenue authorities on tax cheats living in Canada.

The idea came from a Vancouver Sun report that my old Vancouver neighbourhood was the poorest, based on declared income, in the entire city. Today that area features houses ranging from $1.5 to $2.5 million and more. How could anyone with negligible income buy those homes or two or three, many of them just sitting vacant?

It's beyond obvious that those "homeowners" are keeping their income offshore, far from the prying eyes of Canada's tax authorities.

Mitchell Anderson writes in The Tyee that Canada is getting a reputation as a "haven for corrupt capital."

How many shell companies exist in Canada? How many legal trusts? Who are the beneficial owners protected by such unnecessary veils of secrecy? No one knows, because in most cases there is no legal requirement to disclose actual ownership even to regulators. In fact, more information is required to get a library card than to set up a company in most jurisdictions in Canada.

What we do know is that Canada ranks near the bottom among our OECD partners in terms of corporate disclosure requirements to fight money laundering and tax evasion. A recent report from Transparency International detailed the dismal situation and why our country has become a haven for dubious offshore property speculation.

“The Canadian government must take immediate steps to require all companies and trusts in the country to identify their beneficial owners to ensure Canada does not become a haven for corrupt capital,” warns Transparency International Canada executive director Alesia Nahirny.

Canada is one of the few developed countries that does not require the identities of company directors to be verified, or any information on shareholders. In most provinces it is legal to use “nominee” directors or shareholders without disclosing that they are acting on someone else’s behalf.

A nominee is essentially a sock puppet — the proverbial student or homemaker often listed as the title owner of some of Canada’s most expensive homes. Why would someone list a multi-million dollar property in someone else’s name? Some plausible reasons include to avoid taxes or to launder money. This practice remains completely and inexplicably legal in most parts of our painfully polite country.

Maybe our social butterfly prime minister could at least deal with this. Speaking of which, whatever happened to the Revenue Agency/KPMG/Isle of Man scandal, the one that showed government revenuers to be in bed with KPMG to swindle Canada out of tax revenue through a dodgy shelter deal on the Isle of Man? Or the Panama Papers scandal? I haven't heard of our courts being overwhelmed with criminal charges. I haven't heard of even a single charge, nothing at all.

Nope, No Money Here, Sorry.