Sometimes a Picture Says So Much.

What does this photograph convey? A couple of attractive women in a newish car. Nice clothes and makeup. Pretty happy about something.

Here's the thing. They're Iranian. In Iran. No hijabs, nothing of the sort.

Clashes between women and Iran’s morality police particularly increase in the summer when temperatures rise. But even though the police regularly stop these drivers, fining them or even temporarily seizing their vehicle, such acts of resistance have continued, infuriating hardliners over a long-standing policy they have had a great deal of difficulty enforcing.

Iran’s moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, has argued that people’s private space should be respected and opposes a crackdown on women who don’t wear the hijab. He said explicitly that the police’s job is not to administer Islam. Speaking in 2015, Rouhani said: “The police can’t do something and say I’m doing this because God said so. That’s not a police [officer]’s business.”

But Iran is supposedly an evil empire, our mortal enemy. We've taken sides and Iran's rival, Saudi Arabia, is our ally. Because, after all, Shiite Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. Just look - the embassy bombings; the attack on USS Cole; the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the Taliban, al Qaeda, al Nusra, ISIS, Boko Haram; you can't ignore that sort of reality. What? Those had nothing to do with Shiite Iran? They're the handiwork of the radical Sunni faith, Wahhabism, of Saudi Arabia that the Saudis and other Gulf States have funded, promoted and spread. So we're on the side of the guys who have set that part of the world on fire with murderous Sunni fundamentalism and spread terrorism into our own capitals but we're opposed to the other guys, the Iranians. Something doesn't seem quite right here. Can you figure it out?

And please do let me know the next time you see two Saudi women, turned out as nicely as these women, driving a car on the streets of Riyadh. 

The Real Success Story of the G20 - Donald Trump

Okay, so Donald Trump single-handedly turned the G20 into the G19 plus that other outfit. However, as Donald Trump sees it, he was the real success story of the summit and he has this cheesy slideshow to prove it.

Steve and Jared's Excellent Afghan Adventure

Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump strategist and son-in-law respectively, think they know how to win in Afghanistan - mercenaries, lots of them, in fact nothing but mercenaries.

The two apparently got their martial brain fart via Eric Prince of Blackwater/Xi fame, brother of Trump's education secretary Boomin' Betsy Devos.

Mr. Prince laid out his views in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May. He called on the White House to appoint a viceroy to oversee the country and to use “private military units” to fill the gaps left by departed American soldiers. While he was at Blackwater, the company became involved in one of the most notorious episodes of the Iraq war, when its employees opened fire in a Baghdad square, killing 17 civilians.

The strategy has been called “the Laos option,” after America’s shadowy involvement in Laos during the war in neighboring Vietnam. C.I.A. contractors trained Laotian soldiers to fight Communist insurgents and their North Vietnamese allies until 1975, leaving the country under Communist control and with a deadly legacy of unexploded bombs. In Afghanistan until now, contractors have been used mainly for security and logistics.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Bannon sought out Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the Pentagon to try to get a hearing for their ideas, an American official said. Mr. Mattis listened politely but declined to include the outside strategies in a review of Afghanistan policy that he is leading along with the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster.

Some think Bannon and Kushner could still use their direct access to the man/baby president to do an end run on the generals.

How Hot, Too Hot? How Soon, Too Hot?

There's an article in New York Magazine for those who still haven't slaked their thirst for all things apocalyptic. David Wallace-Wells introduces the reader to, "The Uninhabitable Earth."


If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

...Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.

But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was...

The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt.

...the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster.

Overheating.

The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it’s swung around in the air (since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air, this single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner.

Actually, we’re about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.”  ...And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.

It is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys, too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is 121 degrees outside my door. It is not a record high.

The End of Food

Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.

...Drought might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s food, will be reliable sources of any.

The Air We Breathe

...The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.

...Then there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others, “serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should avoid all outdoor exertion.” The Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 peaked at what would have been an Air Quality Index of over 800. That year, smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country.

The Violence Baked Into Heat.

...Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century.

This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The drowning of all American Navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, but being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. Of course, it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming — a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began accelerating when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil.

It's the Economy Stupid or Is It the Stupid Economy?

The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and everything. But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of historians studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have begun to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the 18th century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of global capitalism but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power — a onetime injection of new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by global subsistence living. Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from 500 years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves. After we’ve burned all the fossil fuels, these scholars suggest, perhaps we will return to a “steady state” global economy. Of course, that onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change.

... Every degree Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1.2 percent of GDP (an enormous number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as “strong”). This is the sterling work in the field, and their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century (resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor).

Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier: There is a 12 percent chance that climate change will reduce global output by more than 50 percent by 2100, they say, and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 20 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Recession lowered global GDP by about 6 percent, in a onetime shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by the end of the century that is eight times worse.

...Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.

Wilful Blindness

Surely this blindness will not last — the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past.

...Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries — a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime.

...

Several of the scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as the solution to Fermi’s famous paradox, which asks, If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it? The answer, they suggested, is that the natural life span of a civilization may be only several thousand years, and the life span of an industrial civilization perhaps only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another. Peter Ward, a charismatic paleontologist among those responsible for discovering that the planet’s mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, calls this the “Great Filter”: “Civilizations rise, but there’s an environmental filter that causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,” he told me. “If you look at planet Earth, the filtering we’ve had in the past has been in these mass extinctions.” The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.

... Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.

I Suppose We've Got It Coming

New research confirms that Earth's sixth mass extinction is underway and it's further along than we imagine.  One of the first five was caused by a major asteroid impact. The others resulted from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Now mankind has managed to replicate those earlier four extinctions.

To compound our fossil energy addiction we have also increased our population more than seven fold in under two centuries and increased our consumption of resources even more than the increase in our numbers. We, mankind, so over-consume our planet's resources that we've not even leaving enough to sustain all the other species that share Earth with us.


The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, eschews the normally sober tone of scientific papers and calls the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation” that represents a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation”.

Prof Gerardo Ceballos, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who led the work, said: “The situation has become so bad it would not be ethical not to use strong language.”

Previous studies have shown species are going extinct at a significantly faster ratethan for millions of years before, but even so extinctions remain relatively rare giving the impression of a gradual loss of biodiversity. The new work instead takes a broader view, assessing many common species which are losing populations all over the world as their ranges shrink, but remain present elsewhere.

The scientists found that a third of the thousands of species losing populations are not currently considered endangered and that up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades. Detailed data is available for land mammals, and almost half of these have lost 80% of their range in the last century. The scientists found billions of populations of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians have been lost all over the planet, leading them to say a sixth mass extinction has already progressed further than was thought.

Let that sink in. We have triggered the sixth mass extinction in the multi-billion year history of our planet. We've done it in barely two hundred years and we've done it with fossil fuel energy. And, despite all this, despite all the science and the mountains of  evidence, despite the worsening danger to the continuation of life on Earth, we have a prime minister and provincial premiers dedicated to the extraction, export and consumption of ever more fossil energy including the world's highest-carbon, filthiest ersatz petroleum, bitumen.

The paper goes farther than many we've seen that focus on climate change. This study incorporates the two other existential threats - human overpopulation and our rapacious overconsumption of the planet's resources, renewable and non-renewable.

Wildlife is dying out due to habitat destruction, overhunting, toxic pollution, invasion by alien species and climate change. But the ultimate cause of all of these factors is “human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich”, say the scientists, who include Prof Paul Ehrlich, at Stanford University in the US, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb is a seminal, if controversial, work.

“The serious warning in our paper needs to be heeded because civilisation depends utterly on the plants, animals, and microorganisms of Earth that supply it with essential ecosystem services ranging from crop pollination and protection to supplying food from the sea and maintaining a livable climate,” Ehrlich told the Guardian. Other ecosystem services include clean air and water.

“The time to act is very short,” he said. “It will, sadly, take a long time to humanely begin the population shrinkage required if civilisation is to long survive, but much could be done on the consumption front and with ‘band aids’ – wildlife reserves, diversity protection laws – in the meantime.” Ceballos said an international institution was needed to fund global wildlife conservation.

To my Liberal friends and New Democrats too, how do you square that circle? How do you support Canada as a petro-state? How do you write off the future of your grandkids and theirs? How do you support governments that would leave us trapped in the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth in GDP when we're already far past the ecological carrying capacity of our planet? It's like trying to battle lung cancer by going from two packs a day to three.

Please, just give me one sane, plausible justification for that. Just one. And if you can't come up with that one sane, plausible justification that you find personally convincing, ask yourself just what you're thinking?

p.s. If you want more information on our extermination of other life on planet, marine and terrestrial, check out the Living Planet Report 2012, 2014 and 2016.

Okay, We're Pretty Good

I wish this came out a few days earlier, but...

The Hamburg-based statistics portal, Statista, has released a graphic of the nations seen as having the most positive influence globally. And, without further ado:

Coming Apart at the Seams

It's almost too grotesque to watch. The wheels are falling off the GOP wagon. Even with a unified government -  control of the House, the Senate and the presidency - the Republicans are unable to repeal Obama's Affordable Care Act and replace it with a gutted version of their own.

For all their legislative majorities, the Republicans are much too divided to deliver even their flagship objective, erasing Obamacare. One group wants the federal government out of healthcare entirely. Another, the Ryan-McConnell crowd, want healthcare gutted enough to free up money for yet another hefty tax cut for the richest of the rich. Then there's the third group who see their own re-election in peril if Obamacare is scrapped.

It's gotten so bad Trump is actually threatening members of his own party, vowing to intercede against them when next they have to stand for office if they defy his will.  Trump knows they're making him look bad, weak and he's preserved that job for himself.

Imagine what it must be like for the Republican rank and file. You almost certainly support one of the three factions and probably reject the other two. That doesn't do much for party cohesiveness and harmony. Whatever path the Republicans take, even if they do nothing, there are going to be plenty of pissed off Republican voters.

Credit Where Credit Is Due - Kudos to Patti Hadju

It's a cornerstone of progressive democracy, the balancing of the interests of labour versus capital. During the Harper years labour, especially organized labour, was treated like a disease. Abraham Lincoln addressed this endless struggle declaring that, of the two, labour was far the superior. Stephen Harper was no Abe Lincoln.

Which brings us to labour minister Patti Hadju.

The federal Liberal government delivered on one of its key 2015 election campaign promises last month when Bill C-4 came into effect, effectively repealing previous Conservative government legislation that was widely seen by organized labour as “union busting.”

“It’s critical that we have a strong labour movement for the prosperity of our country, and for the fair treatment of workers, which is the foundation of prosperity,” Labour Minister Patti Hajdu said in an interview with The Tyee in Vancouver Wednesday.

Hajdu says Bill C-4 is just one aspect of her office’s efforts to protect workers. It’s also working on changes to the federal labour code to protect people with precarious jobs from abuse, and plans to ensure government skills development programs and funding meet the needs of workers more likely to change jobs and careers than their parents were.

...

The current federal government is trying for a better relationship with the country’s labour unions, creating legislation that Hajdu said is informed by input from workers and employers.

“This government was elected on a promise to grow the middle class,” she said. And after speaking with union leaders on the campaign trail, “it became clear that [Bill C-4] had to be one of the first pieces of legislation that we introduced, because it was foundational to a strong and healthy organized labour movement.”

The Liberals put the legislation forward almost immediately after winning the 2015 election. But it took almost two years to get the legislation passed because of Conservative members of the Senate, Hajdu said.

Before the critics jump in, of course it's not perfect. Of course there is still a long way to go to rehabilitate Canada's middle class. But it is a damned good first step ahead after enduring a decade of Tory backsliding. 

Kudos to minister Hadju.

Have We Become Human Foie Gras?

It's considered a delicacy, goose or duck liver pate, a.k.a. foie gras. It's made by force feeding grain to the birds in quantities that cause the liver to expand by 600% or more. Think of it as torture followed by slaughter. They do it because there's money in it, plenty of it.

But what about human foie gras? Are we being sickened for someone else's profit?  Chris Hedges, a vegan, seems to think so.

In July 1976, the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by Sen. George McGovern, held hearings titled “Diet Related to Killer Diseases.” The committee heard from physicians, scientists and nutritionists on the relationship between the American diet and diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Six months later, the committee released “The Dietary Goals for the United States,” which quickly came to be known as the McGovern Report. “Decrease consumption of meat,” the report urged Americans. “Decrease consumption of butter fat [dairy fat], eggs, and other high cholesterol sources.”

“The simple fact is that our diets have changed radically within the last 50 years …,” McGovern said when the report was released. “These dietary changes represent as great a threat to public health as smoking. Too much fat, too much sugar or salt, can be and are linked directly to heart disease, cancer, obesity, and stroke, among other killer diseases. In all, six of the ten leading causes of death in the United States have been linked to our diet. Those of us within our government have an obligation to acknowledge this.”

The response to the report was swift and brutal. The meat, egg and dairy industries lobbied successfully to have the document withdrawn. They orchestrated new hearings, supplying a list of 24 experts approved by the National Livestock and Meat Board, so that, in the words of Wray Finney, then the president of the American National Cattlemen’s Association, the public would get “a balanced, correct view of this whole matter.” A new report was released in December 1977. This second edition insisted that “meat, poultry and fish are an excellent source of essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals.” The Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was abolished. Its functions were taken over by the Agriculture Committee. “The Agriculture Committee looks after the producers of food, not the consumers, and particularly, not the most needy,” wrote The New York Times. And when Sen. McGovern, who had already angered the Democratic and Republican leaderships with his 1972 insurgent campaign for the presidency, was up for re-election in South Dakota in 1980, he was defeated by James Abdnor, a cattle rancher and well-funded spokesman for the meat industry.

Hedges writes that there's money - tens of billions of dollars - to be extracted from our ill health.

“You have a $5 billion stent industry,” Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a renowned cardiologist, says in the book. (A stent is a permanent wire mesh inserted into an artery to prop it open.) “A $35 billion statin [cholesterol-lowering] drug industry. They don’t want that to go away. Look, if I’m in the middle of a heart attack, there’s no question that I want a man or a woman with great expertise in stents by my side. They will save my life and a lot of my heart muscle. But the 90 percent of stents being done electively? There is zero evidence that you can prolong life or protect against a future heart attack with stents.”

“Of every US federal income tax dollar in 2015, 28.7 cents went to healthcare,” Wong writes. “That’s the biggest single chunk of the dollar, larger now even than the military (25.4 cents). Compare that to 3.6 cents for education, and 1.6 cents on the environment. Talk about priorities. And yet for all that healthcare spending, the US has the lowest life expectancy among 12 high-income nations, and some of the worst health outcomes.”

Hedges points out how major health agencies have been co-opted by the food industry.

The American Heart Association, Wong writes, “has received money from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Live Stock and Meat Board, Subway, Walgreens, Texas Beef Council, Cargill, South Dakota Beef Industry Council, Kentucky Beef Council, Nebraska Beef Council, Tyson Foods, AVA Pork, Unilever, Trauth Dairy, Domino’s Pizza, Perdue, Idaho Beef Council, and fistfuls of pharmaceutical companies—the usual suspects like AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Merck, which spent $400,000 to fund an AHA program teaching 40,000 doctors to ‘treat cholesterol according to guidelines.’ ”

One of the main sponsors of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) is the National Dairy Industry. AND, which is the nation’s largest trade group for registered dietitians, publishes so-called Nutrition Fact Sheets for the public. The food industry writes these Nutrition Fact Sheets for its own products and gives $20,000 for each of these sheets to AND.

It's all very disturbing stuff, troubling information. However it's not cynical to point out that we're inundated with troubling information today and, with the rarest of exception, almost all of it goes straight down the Memory Hole within weeks if not days.

Harry On Social Justice and Canada

Harry Leslie Smith first came to my attention from a Remembrance Day op-ed he penned for The Guardian in 2013, "This year, I will wear a poppy for the last time."

Harry, a veteran himself, believed that the poppy had become an infomercial for the 'war without end' crowd.

Harry, now 94, splits his time between his UK homeland and his place in Belleville, Ontario. The outspoken progressive has given an interview to The Tyee in which he compares Canada's current prime minister to the guy he replaced.

In a March 2015 interview with The Tyee about Harper, Smith characterized the former prime minister as having “one consideration, and that is to let the rich get richer and the poor fend for themselves.”

At the time he was concerned about child poverty in larger cities, tax loopholes for the wealthy and government service cutbacks under the Tories.

Harper was arrogant and refused to admit when he was wrong, Smith said, but the problems that persisted under his government continue because Trudeau “doesn’t have any thoughts of his own” on how to improve the country.

“If he was saying he’d found a way to provide cheap housing to all the people who have been waiting for years… then that would be something he could be proud of,” he said. “We have too many people in this country sleeping under bridges and railways and have no hope of finding places to live.”

...

Smith finds the oppressive humidity in Southern Ontario in July a challenge to his comfort, but he endures.

“Even with the heat, Canada in summer is the prettiest place this side of paradise,” Smith said while explaining his yearly migration. “It is just glorious.”

Less glorious is the recent behaviour of Canada’s prime minister, who Smith calls a “razzle dazzle man.”

“He’s not giving any indication at all that he is going to be very interested in changing the lifestyle of people here in Canada,” he said. “He’s actually more interested in appeasing people above him who are telling him what to do.”

Those “above” the prime minister mostly include members of the one per cent who want leaders doing their bidding without question, Smith said.

The broken promises on electoral reform and commitments to Indigenous people and attempts to appease U.S. President Donald Trump are some of the complaints Smith has about the Liberal government.

...

And a report last week from the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada showed income inequality and precarious work are a growing concern in Canada’s cities.

The report says the onus is on federal and provincial governments to tackle the problem, but Smith isn’t seeing an effort to solve such inequality from Trudeau.

He dismissed initiatives like the Canada Child Benefit, saying they don’t actually reduce inequality as the Liberals often claim.

Parents need affordable childcare and good wages, not payments that effectively subsidize the businesses paying their low wages, he said.

It’s all left Smith wondering where the prime minister’s heart is.

“He’s not his own man,” he said. “I have a feeling, a gut feeling, there’s someone behind him pulling strings and he’s obeying orders.”

Harry sees a ray of light in the recent ouster of the B.C. Liberal government.

"I’m so happy that it’s happened there,” Smith said. “I’m sincerely hoping it’s just the start of a rumble that will careen across the country province by province until we can get rid of all these people.”

Geez, if you New Dems are still looking for a leader, you could do worse - a lot worse - than old Harry.

Think of It as "Duck and Cover" for the 21st Century

Perhaps you're already familiar with this but I wasn't.

In the UK there's a programme called "Run, Hide, Tell" to prepare Brits for terrorist incidents while they're on holiday.



But what if you're not on holiday? What if you're at work? They've got you covered there too.



The Americans have their own version - "Run, Hide, Fight" based on the notion that Americans, unlike their British cousins, have the good sense to always pack that Glock - for moments just like these.



In fact the Americans have produced a bunch of these run, hide, fight videos. They have some obvious appeal.

Justin, Climate Change is Here and It's Hurting. Now, Can You Stop Making It Worse?

Is This Really In the "National Interest"?

On Friday, British Columbia logged no fewer than 140 new forest fires. That might be a record. Then again, climate change is bringing the world plenty of records. Worst ever this, worst ever that.

We had plenty of forest fires last year but the big focus was, of course, on the devastation of Fort McMurray.

We've known this was coming. Some reports warned of it 20 years ago. We caught up with our reading last year.

Over the past 30 years, human-caused climate change has nearly doubled the amount of forest area lost to wildfires in the western United States, a new study has found.

The result puts hard numbers to a growing hazard that experts say both Canada and the U.S. must prepare for as western forests across North America grow warmer and drier and increasingly spawn wildfires that cannot be contained.

“Climate change is playing a substantial role in the variability of fire activity… and we expect that to continue into the future. The question is how are people going to respond to that,” said John Abatzoglou, a climatologist at the University of Idaho and lead author of the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

At this point, Mr. Trudeau, the game has changed. You can't undo the warmer, drier conditions that have set in across the western US and Canada.  Nobody's asking you to do that. What you can do though and what you are doing is to make the future worse than it otherwise need be. That, after all, is the inevitable result of your considerable efforts to ramp up the extraction and export of the world's highest carbon, filthiest and most toxic ersatz oil, bitumen.

It doesn't make any difference where that bitumen and the really nasty petcoke bonus it carries are burned. It's all one atmosphere. Burning that garbage in Asia gets back here in due course.

And, I know how annoying this is but you might also consider what these heightened greenhouse gas emissions are doing in other corners of the world, the poorest and most vulnerable countries, where climate change is already killing people through droughts and floods and famine and the wars these catastrophes sometimes trigger. You can't undo much of that but you can definitely make it worse.

And then there's our grandkids and perhaps their kids in turn. You can't undo much of the environmental hardship they'll have to cope with but you can definitely make it worse, perhaps nightmarish. 

I know, the world is going to need hydrocarbon energy while we transition to clean energy alternatives. Sure. And, right now, the world is awash in oil and gas. So why don't we use the cleanest of these fuels, the products that create the lowest emissions? Better yet, why not take advantage of the surface carbon cycle and produce bio-oil and bio-gas?

Why bitumen? Surely bitumen is to climate change what asbestos is to mesothelioma. Some things should be left safely in the ground.

Because Taking the Piss Out of Donald J. Trump Just Never Gets Old

Donald J. Trump, man/baby president of the United States, has set the Twittersphere howling with laughter over his claim that he and Putin have discussed forming "an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.."

Let the hilarity ensue:

Biggs & I discussed forming an impenetrable Train Security unit so that train robberies, & many other negative things, will be guarded... https://t.co/lbQccPDwqQ— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) July 9, 2017


Spoke to the fox. He agreed to work with us to improve henhouse security. https://t.co/Mp6Od8C5Nz— Paul Singer (@singernews) July 9, 2017


Translation: I have decided that the Hamburglar should be in charge of hamburger security. https://t.co/M1ycWLeJ1l— Colin T Mitchell (@ColinTMitchell) July 9, 2017


El Chapo and I discussed building an impenetrable prison so that drug kingpins and many others would never escape. https://t.co/Vw8XzsAZpS

Translation: Democrats will never win another election https://t.co/D2yLUdCELl— Get him tfoh (@PhillyGameday) July 9, 2017


A joint anti cyber security system with our enemy? Are you mad? https://t.co/blls8pOUA0— Peter Henry Fonda (@iamfonda) July 9, 2017


You want to guard hacking? Not guard against it, guard hacking? You could have phrased that differently, but you didn't. https://t.co/v8uUuD8oD7— Stephen Dyer (@Steve_Dyer4) July 9, 2017

Putin: We didn't meddle, ask Trump.
Reporter: But WH hasn't released any info.
Putin laughs: We'll talk to the WH and tell them to fix that. pic.twitter.com/CQkJd1FgDi— Ubadah Sabbagh (@Neubadah) July 8, 2017

MayBot Cautioned Not to Jump Too Quickly Into Donald Trump's Lap.

British prime minister Theresa May went to the G20 summit in Hamburg looking for a date. With the combined impacts of the Brexit fiasco, her disastrous performance in Britain's last general election and the Grenfell Tower scandal, the MayBot is desperate for something, anything positive to show the folks at home that she is indeed "getting on with the job."

She got that in Hamburg in the form of a promise from Donald Trump to expedite a US/UK free trade deal very, very soon. Britain's business community, however, is warning May not to jump too fast into Donald Trump's lap.

The president of one of the most influential business groups in the country has warned Theresa May not to rush into a trade deal with the US.

Paul Drechsler, president of the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI), criticised the Prime Minister for seeking to make headlines instead of setting out the facts and evidence to the British public, when she met President Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Hamburg.

Mr Trump told reporters he expected a "very, very big deal" to be completed "very, very quickly".

Speaking on Sky News, Mr Drechsler, who campaigned with the CBI to remain in the EU, warned against the UK entering a "bear hug" with the US.

He said: "One has to recognise, not every trade deal is necessary a good and fair deal for both parties. The US has one of the best negotiating teams in the world in terms of trade deals.

"We don't want to walk into a bear hug and I would be wary of trying to be too fast on a trade deal. The important thing is to know what we want to achieve, what the objectives are and what the trade-offs are.

"A trade deal is a dog-eat-dog activity, it is not a diplomatic activity. And what worries me is that we are not honest to people about all these big issues so we are going for headlines rather than the facts and evidence."

May would also do well to recall the remarks of Trump's now commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, from last December. From CNBC.

Wilbur Ross, President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Commerce secretary, has urged other countries to exploit the "God-given opportunity" to steal business from the U.K., according to a report in The Times.

Ross urged Cypriot financiers to strike during this "period of confusion" in Britain to draw businesses away from the City. He made the remarks before the U.S. election and his selection by the Trump.

"I recommend that Cyprus should adopt and immediately announce even more liberal financial service policies than it already has so that it can try to take advantage of the inevitable relocations that will occur during the period of confusion," Ross said, according to The Times.

He further added that Britain's departure from the European Union was a "God-given opportunity" for the City's financial rivals, especially Frankfurt and Dublin in particular.

If confirmed as Commerce secretary, Ross would be among those responsible for negotiating a free trade deal with the U.K. But his comments have sparked speculation that the U.S. may seek to exploit the uncertainty created by Brexit in order to lure business away from London.

I think I understand why the British commerce sector has reservations about the MayBot and her schemes.

The Rand Corporation and America's Simpleton in Chief

There may be nothing Donald Trump likes better than to bash America's NATO partners as freeloaders who are feeding off the US economy, dragging America down.

A study conducted by the Rand Corporation, America's venerable military think tank, finds that Trump is talking crap.

The researchers started by building an entirely new database of thousands of U.S. treaties and security agreements, an effort that took six months. They also obtained 50 years of data on overseas troop assignments.

They then merged those data sets with U.S. and global trade numbers. They tracked changes in the number and nature of U.S. security commitments between 1955 and 2004, and then matched them to any subsequent bumps or dips in the trade numbers.

They found clear evidence that those overseas commitments do indeed strengthen trade between America and other countries, likely worth tens of billions of dollars every year. In fact, they estimated that doubling the number of treaties could expand U.S. trade, especially imports, by 34 percent. Doubling troop numbers would increase trade by up to 15 percent.

What about the group that claims that slashing America's overseas military presence by upwards of 80% could save Washington $126 billion a year?

The RAND researchers found that even a smaller 50 percent cut would cost the U.S. economy as much as $490 billion in lost wages and profits.

The study provides a solid foundation for debating the value of America's overseas commitments, the researchers wrote, but it's not likely to be the final word. For one thing, it did not capture the possible long-term economic benefits of freeing up money from overseas commitments and investing it elsewhere. But it also only looked at direct effects on trade, not on foreign investments or other international capital flows—meaning that its estimates may be, if anything, conservative.

Those limitations, however, are not likely to change the study's bottom-line conclusion, the researchers wrote. A wholesale cutback of overseas commitments would almost certainly cost the United States more than it saves, perhaps by as much as 3-to-1.

“Policymakers who reduce these commitments would face not only the immediate problems of how and where to make the reductions,” the researchers concluded, “but also the future problems of a poorer United States.”

But this is post-truth America where beliefs, fueled by suspicion, fear and anger, cannot be displaced by facts and logic.  As Joe Stiglitz notes, America under Trump is a rogue state and it is not at all reluctant to engage in self-harm.

Joe Stiglitz on Trump's Rogue State America

No one would have expected a progressive such as Joe Stiglitz to be a cheerleader for Donald Trump and he's not. The Nobel laureate economist does, however, make a compelling argument that Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate pact shoots America in the foot.


For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad for the US and implicitly unfair to it.

While fairness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, Trump’s claim is difficult to justify. On the contrary, the Paris accord is very good for America, and it is the US that continues to impose an unfair burden on others.

Historically, the US has added disproportionately to the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and among large countries it remains the biggest per capita emitter of carbon dioxide by far – more than twice China’s rate and nearly 2.5 times more than Europe in 2013 (the latest year for which the World Bank has reported complete data). With its high income, the US is in a far better position to adapt to the challenges of climate change than poor countries like India and China, let alone a low-income country in Africa.

In fact, the major flaw in Trump’s reasoning is that combating climate change would strengthen the US, not weaken it. Trump is looking toward the past – a past that, ironically, was not that great. His promise to restore coal-mining jobs (which now number 51,000, less than 0.04% of the country’s nonfarm employment) overlooks the harsh conditions and health risks endemic in that industry, not to mention the technological advances that would continue to reduce employment in the industry even if coal production were revived.

...

Just a few weeks before Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord, the global High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices, which I co-chaired with Nicholas Stern, highlighted the potential of a green transition. The Commission’s report, released at the end of May, argues that reducing CO2emissions could result in an even stronger economy.

The logic is straightforward. A key problem holding back the global economy today is deficient aggregate demand. At the same time, many countries’ governments face revenue shortfalls. But we can address both issues simultaneously and reduce emissions by imposing a charge (a tax) for CO2emissions.

It is always better to tax bad things than good things. By taxing CO2, firms and households would have an incentive to retrofit for the world of the future. The tax would also provide firms with incentives to innovate in ways that reduce energy usage and emissions – giving them a dynamic competitive advantage.

The Commission analyzed the level of carbon price that would be required to achieve the goals set forth in the Paris climate agreement – a far higher price than in most of Europe today, but still manageable. The commissioners pointed out that the appropriate price may differ across countries. In particular, they noted, a better regulatory system – one that restrains coal-fired power generation, for example – reduces the burden that must be placed on the tax system.

Interestingly, one of the world’s best-performing economies, Sweden, has already adopted a carbon tax at a rate substantially higher than that discussed in our report. And the Swedes have simultaneously sustained their strong growth without US-level emissions.

America under Trump has gone from being a world leader to an object of derision. In the aftermath of Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris accord, a large sign was hung over Rome’s city hall: “The Planet First.” Likewise, France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, poked fun at Trump’s campaign slogan, declaring “Make Our Planet Great Again.”

...

Fortunately, large parts of the US, including the most economically dynamic regions, have shown that Trump is, if not irrelevant, at least less relevant than he would like to believe. Large numbers of states and corporations have announced that they will proceed with their commitments – and perhaps go even further, offsetting the failures of other parts of the US.


In the meantime, the world must protect itself against rogue states. Climate change poses an existential threat to the planet that is no less dire than that posed by North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. In both cases, the world cannot escape the inevitable question: what is to be done about countries that refuse to do their part in preserving our planet?

Are Republicans "Victims"?

It sounds like a stretch, Republicans as victims of their health care reform aspirations. That, however, is the Brookings Institute's Isabel Sawhill's take.


But are Senate Republicans evil people? Do they lack a moral compass? I don’t think so. I think they are simply victims of a once-successful but now discredited economic ideology. That ideology says tax cuts for the rich will create jobs for the middle class. It says cutting benefits, including health benefits, for the poor will cause them to work harder and behave more responsibly. Granted there is a grain of truth in these propositions but they have now become a cartoon of their once-legitimate, Chicago-school ancestors.

Republicans have become trapped in their own rhetoric, crafted during years of being in opposition. As Ross Douthat noted in a recent New York Times column, drawing on new analysis in a report by Lee Drutman, that rhetoric is now well to the right of the beliefs held by the broader Republican electorate. Republican leaders have failed to recognize the fact that the economic views of those who voted Republican in 2016 “lean only slightly to the right.” Republicans could have used the Trump election to effect a political realignment—one that would have combined a more moderate set of economic policies than the Republican elite currently supports with a more moderate set of cultural positions than those espoused by leading Democrats.

Sawhill goes on to list a number of possible solutions that would seem to most Canadians and Europeans still way too rightwing but might suit Americans just fine.

What I take from her essay is that our political caste, not just America's, has fallen into a trap created by a flawed and now failed ideology.  Instead of seeking alternatives their response is more of the same only sometimes doubled down.

It's easy to mock the Americans but there hasn't been an original visionary idea of another path out of Ottawa in many years, decades.

The Operative Word is "Already"

310 million people living in low-lying coastal areas are already vulnerable to sea level rise compounded by severe weather events.

Sea level rise has increased markedly in recent decades and it's only expected to continue accelerating. The past is gone - for good.

Bad as it can be when seas are calm, sea level rise takes on a much worse dimension when there are high tides or, worse, high tides coupled with severe weather events triggering storm surges. As New Yorkers learned during Hurricane Sandy that's when subways wind up underwater.

Up to 310 million people living in low elevation coastal zones are already directly or indirectly vulnerable to extreme sea levels.

Improving predictions for how much ocean levels may change in the future and how that will affect coastal communities has been a challenge for researchers for years.

But a new study that incorporates extreme weather events predicts extreme sea levels will occur more frequently than previously predicted, and it may be a game changer for researchers and coastal planners.

We've had severe storm events forever and long before climate change became a factor.  The role climate change plays is to increase these severe weather events in three areas - frequency, intensity and duration.

That's already happening in coastal towns and cities around the world. In my town a beautiful but low lying area can get inundated once, sometimes twice a year. In places such as Miami some roads can be underwater once or more a week. All the ingredients are there and growing - sea level rise, water temperatures, atmospheric temperatures and atmospheric water vapour levels. That's "already."

This Should Make Your Day

The leader of the free world, Angela Merkel, reacts to a bit of mansplaining from Vlad Putin.  Madam Chancellor seemed underwhelmed when Putin corrected her understanding of missile trajectories.

More hilarity from the G20 x

Book Review - "Arts of Living On a Damaged Planet."

Somebody was bound to get around to this sooner or later. It's a legitimate question - what will it take to get by on the planet we have so extensively and probably permanently changed?

Think of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" only it's for everybody interested in a guide to Earth, not as we've known it but as we've made it.

There is no shortage of books foretelling the catastrophe to which climate change shall deliver us. But what about a perfectly decent field guide to the flora and fauna of rising seas and ruined forests?

Into this vacuum comes Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, a volume packed thick with descriptive essays of life in the Anthropocene — the emergent word to describe our own era, in which human hands have reshaped the planet’s environment and climate. Penned by a motley mix of mycologists, lemur biologists, sci-fi writers, anthropologists, and zoologists among others, these 18 pieces jaunt across the world, trying to make sense of plants and animals interacting with each other in a polluted landscape.

In Fairness, Vlad Was Pushing on an Open Door and an Empty Mind.

Russian president Vladimir Putin says Trump was "satisfied" with the Russian's assurances that Moscow did not meddle in America's 2016 elections.  Well, that's that then.

Speaking at the end of a G20 summit in Germany where the two leaders met face-to-face for the first time, Putin said he believed he had been able to establish a personal relationship with Trump, and that the initial groundwork had been laid for an improvement in US-Russian ties.

Their meeting was subject to intense scrutiny, following allegations that Moscow had tried to help Trump win the White House, and a Washington investigation into the Russia ties of Trump associates.

So, Vlad tells Don, "trust me, I did nothing to swing that election your way," and Donnie buys it.

There are Photo Ops and There are Photo Ops. This One Raises the Bar.

And the winner and new champion is, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.

To demonstrate his commitment to France's nuclear deterrent force, Manny did a Jack Ryan/Red October  and had himself winched to the nuclear sub Terrible by helicopter.

Sort of like this scene:

Well, Justin, Manny just put it down. You gonna pick it up?

America Versus the Civilized World

The G20 is now the G19 Plus One. The One, of course, is Trumpland. The 19 constitute the civilized world, the rest of the planet that understands that climate change is a truly existential and urgent threat to our global civilization.

The final communique of the G20 Hamburg summit is said to spell that out. Trump, whose country remains second only to China in total greenhouse gas emissions, has abandoned the Paris climate accord commitment to slash emissions.

Some of us want our grandchildren to have as liveable a world as still possible. The hard reality is that Donald Trump, his government and the majority of America's Congress don't stand with us. It's time we recognized that awful truth and acted accordingly.

As for Canada, prime minister "do as I say, not as I do" Trudeau is firmly aboard with cutting greenhouse gas emissions so long as it's the provinces and municipalities doing the heavy lifting his government won't. His solemn resolve is, however, so very soothing.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Justin bombed the Deutschers with this howler:

My predecessor Stephen Harper did not care much for the fight against climate change. For 10 years under that government, what we saw was tremendous leadership from our provinces, from our cities, from our big companies -- despite the federal government at the time.

See, it's all Sideshow Steve's fault. He left the heavy lifting to the provinces and municipalities. No, Justin cares very much for the fight against climate change - right up to the point of doing anything about it. Birds of a feather.
---

One other thing. The next time someone asks if you believe that climate change is real, say "Hell no." Climate change is not a belief-based construct. Science is evidentiary in nature. Religion, ideology, economics - those are all belief based. That's why they're so widespread and diverse and constantly shifting. I believe this, you believe that, he believes something else altogether. Tomorrow or next year or in a decade or two we may believe something quite different.

The denialist side has very skilfully turned climate change into a difference of beliefs. That's because their position is not evidentiary. It is belief based, plain and simple. And the best way to advance their position against ours is to make ours belief-based also. That's how they degrade and undermine the scientific case - make it all about belief.

You don't believe the sun will rise in the morning. You know it will. You don't believe the wing on your jetliner will generate lift to get you off the ground and on the way to your destination. You know it will. Science does not give you belief. It gives you something way more valuable. It gives you knowledge.

Oh, Maxine. Did You Really Have to Use the "I" Word?

Maxine Waters, Democratic representative from California, has gone after Donnie "Little Hands" Trump for his endless attacks on America's news media.

This is gonna burn.

Only a weak and impotent leader would spend more time attacking his predecessor and the free press than those in the world truly threatening US.

— Maxine Waters (@MaxineWaters) July 6, 2017

Impotent? That should be enough to stampede Trump into yet another implausible defence of his manhood and, by manhood, I mean his junk. Marco Rubio showed how oddly thin skinned Trump is to any suggestion he's not up to snuff. 

It's Worked (So Far) for Tony. Maybe It'll Work for Terry.

Say what you like about Britain's beleaguered prime minister, Theresa May. No, seriously, say what you like. There must be something. Brexit was a good idea? No. Calling a snap election was a masterstroke of brilliance? Probably not? Grenfell Tower? No, definitely not Grenfell Tower. You see, I come up empty. I can't find a single thing about PM Terry that's remarkable much less remotely admirable. Oh, wait, I know. Maybe she still has a pulse but I'm not betting the farm on it. In Britain they've got a new name for their cadaverous prime minister, "Maybot."

For all that, Terry is digging in, Blair style. She insists she has "no regrets" about calling the snap election that cost her government its majority and propelled her arch-rival, Jeremy Corbyn, to prominence. It's a bit like Michael Jackson saying he had no regrets setting his hair on fire in that Pepsi commercial.

May said: “There’s two ways the government can react to that. We can be very timid and sit back or we can be bold and that’s what we are going to be.”

The Conservative leader also said: “I think it was the right decision to actually call that election. I’d hoped for a different result.”

The "right thing to do" mantra May now constantly chants seems utterly Blairesque. Going forward... right thing to do... going forward... right thing to do. Rinse and repeat.

Meanwhile the Maybot is making the most of Angela Merkel's tea party in Hamburg. She's taken her begging bowl to the G20 in search of trade deals, just about anything to take attention away from her Brexit fiasco.

She even got a sit down with The Donald who assured her that a new trade deal between the UK and the US would be completed "very, very quickly." I wonder if she's read his book.

May also made the rounds, hitting on Xi Jinping, Shinzo Abe, Recep Erdogan, Narendra Modi.

But it may be Maybot's adversary, the EU, that comes away from Hamburg with a trade deal. Word is that CETA, the Canada-EU free trade deal will come into effect on September 21.

Sinners and Saints

Two provinces, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and the Yukon territory have already met Canada's climate change target emission cuts of of 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. It's mainly the result of weaning themselves off coal powered electrical generation.

Ontario, meanwhile, is on track to meet the targeted emissions cuts.

Plenty of saints but there are a couple of sinners. It probably won't come as much of a surprise that petro-province, Alberta, is Canada's emissions bad boy. There emissions are increasing which is one reason why Alberta won't refine bitumen on site.

Expect the federal government to heap praise on itself for these results but the credit belongs to the provinces and definitely not Ottawa.

Hackers Going After America's Nuclear Plants

This is bound to bolster the windmill/solar panel crowd.

The US Department of Home Security and the FBI have confirmed a series of attacks by hackers targeting companies operating America's nuclear power plants.

The attacks were first detected in May. No details of how many attacks may have succeeded or what sort of systems or data were affected.

Oh Great. How US Officials Try to Brief Trump to Meet With Putin

US officials have prepared briefing binders to help prepare their president for his one on one meeting with Vlad Putin.  However, recognizing that Trump isn't a reader, especially when it comes to briefing books, they've fallen back on grade school level communications, essentially tweets. From the LA Times.

Here's one to inform Trump about Putin:

"Putin was and is a KGB officer, and KGB officers are specialists at one thing: seduction, how to persuade others to do what you want."

 Advisors including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James N. Mattisare trying to carefully script Trump’s interaction to head off any attempt by Putin to manipulate the encounter to his advantage, the U.S. officials said.

Putin is known to prepare assiduously for such high-stakes encounters with foreign counterparts, developing a command of policy objectives and honing a strategy to extract concessions, one U.S. official said.

John Herbst, a foreign policy expert at the Atlantic Council and a U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under President George W. Bush said, “The odds are the atmosphere will be good because our president seems to love Putin, even though it is bad policy.”

Herbst, who as a career foreign service officer helped prepare presidents and secretaries of State before such high-stakes interactions, suggested that Putin will try to establish a personal connection with Trump, who is widely seen among his global counterparts as particularly susceptible to flattery. And Putin will want to convince Trump that Russia is not a danger and NATO is “not as important” as Trump’s advisors say, Herbst said.

The White House said Tuesday that Trump and Putin will have a "normal bilateral meeting" Friday afternoon during the G-20 summit. That implies a longer, more formal meeting than the conversation he will have with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, as well as other "pull aside" meetings with the leaders of Mexico, Japan and several other countries that day.

Putin is expected to look for ways to further undermine NATO and exploit divisions within, such as the tension between Trump and Merkel evident at the NATO summit and after Trump’s disavowal of the Paris accord on climate change. She told reporters in Germany that the G-20 meetings would be “thorny.”

The Fleecing of America (and Us Too).

When con artists named Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, sold us on the scam of neoliberalism, they promised us "new economy" jobs, plenty of them, at much higher wages than the "old economy" manufacturing jobs that were about to be offshored. It was all a big lie at least for the 99%, the proles.

The past three plus decades of neoliberalism have produced the economic and political rape of what had been our once robust and prosperous middle class. Much as I hate the metaphor, in this case we really did "drink the Kool-Aid."

Noah Smith writes in Bloomberg (!) about the "fleecing" of the Gen-X and Boomer middle class -- a class that is growing continuously smaller and poorer, thanks to "financial deregulation, tax cuts and a lax attitude toward consumer protection and antitrust."

The American middle-class was fleeced by "excessive fees paid to actively managed mutual funds, financial advisers, stockbrokers, pension fund managers and the like"; "6 percent real estate commissions"; high priced, underperforming American health care; "companies that went on to monopolize markets after spending millions convincing the government to allow their megamergers" and so on.

More importantly, the middle classes were never as rich as they believed themselves to be, because the realistic picture of the eventual worth of their homes and stock-holdings was never going to match the projections of hucksters who promised crazy returns and lasting comfort by liquidating these assets when old age and retirement arrived.

Gradually a consensus is emerging that we've been screwed over. It's hard to see how this ends.

China's "Red October"

Tom Clancey and Alex Baldwin introduced the public to breakthrough technology in submarine power in "The Hunt for Red October." Beijing now claims it has made Clancey's imaginary sub a reality.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) claims to have developed new electrically-powered pump-jet propulsor that would theoretically be much quieter than any current generation Western submarine propulsion system.

Unlike a conventional propulsor design—which is turned by a mechanical drive shaft—China’s rim-driven system is powered by an electrical motor embedded in the propulsor’s shroud.

“A rim-driven pump-jet has a ring-shaped electrical motor inside the pump-jet shroud, which turns the vane rotor inside the pump-jet cavity to create thrust,” as South China Morning Post reporter Minnie Chan described the system.

Theoretically, without a drive-shaft, a submarine should be much quieter, and thus much more difficult to detect. Additionally, the Chinese are claiming that the new propulsor could reduce cavitation, which would also significantly help to improve a submarine’s acoustical signature performance.

This is the sort of story that's guaranteed to spark jeers and derision from many who cannot imagine America ever being surpassed by any nation, China included, when it comes to bleeding edge military technology. China? Pshaw. And yet a succession of top American military commanders have been warning that China is fast closing the technology gap with the U.S. 

China knows what most Westerners don't. It's not essential that they achieve superiority in spending or technology or force deployment. Establishing superiority or dominance in just one or two technologies can be enough, especially if they play to America's weaknesses, its strategic vulnerabilities.

Yes America spends vastly more than any other nation on its military forces. But for all those trillions of dollars it gets a really lousy bang for its buck. When was the last time America's omnipotent military scored a real victory? You have to go back to its invasions of  Panama (1989) and Grenada (1983). There are a lot of people raising kids and voting today who were not born when American forces stormed the beaches of Grenada. I'll bet most of them haven't heard of the place and fewer yet could find it on a map. But since Panama, American forces haven't brought stable peace to any place they've attacked. Think Afghanistan.

History has repeatedly recorded what befalls nations that come to consider themselves invincible. That sort of hubris usually leads to unexpectedly bad outcomes. Yet it seems we can't help ourselves. Look at the gushing response so many have to 20-year old stealth technology. Even Aviation Week practically swoons over the F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters as the U.S. military feeds them horseshit by the shovel load. The reality is that no one will ever know if these warplanes are really unstoppable until they're used in anger against the adversaries that the U.S. had in mind when it ordered them - China and Russia.

It seems only prudent to accept the possibility that China could introduce game-changing technology and tactics that will alter the balance of military power, perhaps for good.